Abstract
My dissertation focuses on the violence associated with two Korean Catholics from the late Chosŏn dynasty. My first subject, Alexius Hwang Sayŏng, wrote a letter during the anti-Catholic suppression of 1801 to the bishop of Beijing proposing that a Western armada invade Korea to force the Chosŏn state to tolerate Catholicism, only to be arrested and executed for treason. In 1909, my second subject, Thomas An Chunggŭn, assassinated Itō Hirobumi, the first resident-general of Korea, in hopes that his death would lead to the restoration of Korean independence. Through the study of their writings, interrogation reports, court records, public pronouncements, newspapers, missionary letters and journals, I reveal the different types of violence they sought to justify, suffered, and were reacting to.

While Hwang and Neo-Confucian officials both believed that violence could be legitimately deployed in order to actualize the worldviews mandated by their respective religions, the centrality of religion had largely been eclipsed by the secular ideologies of nationalism, Social-Darwinism, and Pan-Asianism, by An‟s time. This situation led to a struggle within and between An and foreign missionaries over the proper relationship between nation, state, and religion, and eventually to An‟s decision to kill Itō for both religious and secular reasons, even as the Catholic Church forbade violent resistance to Japan‟s colonial project.

Through a comparison of the violence associated with Hwang and An, I show that religion can both encourage and discourage violence at the same time, and that its influence can be shaped, magnified, or diminished by secular worldviews, proving the difficulty in simply labeling violence as “religious” or “secular,” and the essentially ambiguous nature of violence. I therefore propose that, in contravention to scholars who argue that religion is somehow more violent than secular ideologies, it is not so much whether a type of violence can be labeled as secular or religious, but the contents of that worldview, its relationship with other worldviews within an individual, and the historical context in which it is actualized, that is more important in determining its propensity for violence.

Local access dig.pdf. [Rausch-Ambiguity of violence.pdf]

Part I : The road to persecution -- Korea at the end of the eighteenth century -- Confucian criticisms of Catholicism -- The birth of the Korean Catholic Church -- A decade of hopes and fears -- Nationalism and evaluations of Hwang Sayŏng and his Silk Letter -- Part II : In their own words -- A Conversation on Catholicism by Sunam Ahn Chŏngbok -- The Silk letter of Hwang Sayŏng.

Korea's first significant encounter with the West occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century when a Korean Catholic community emerged on the peninsula. Decades of persecution followed, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Korean Catholics. Don Baker provides an invaluable analysis of late-Choson (1392-1897) thought, politics, and society to help readers understand the response of Confucians to Catholicism and of Korean Catholics to years of violent harassment. His analysis is informed by two remarkable documents expertly translated with the assistance of Franklin Rausch and annotated here for the first time: an anti-Catholic essay written in the 1780s by Confucian scholar Ahn Chongbok (1712-1791) and a firsthand account of the 1801 anti-Catholic persecution by one of its last victims, the religious leader Hwang Sayong (1775-1801). Confucian assumptions about Catholicism are revealed in Ahn's essay, Conversation on Catholicism. The work is based on the scholar's exchanges with his son-in-law, who joined the small group of Catholics in the 1780s. Ahn argues that Catholicism is immoral because it puts more importance on the salvation of one's soul than on what is best for one's family or community. Conspicuously absent from his Conversation is the reason behind the conversions of his son-in-law and a few other young Confucian intellectuals. Baker examines numerous Confucian texts of the time to argue that, in the late eighteenth century, Korean Confucians were tormented by a growing concern over human moral frailty. Some among them came to view Catholicism as a way to overcome their moral weakness, become virtuous, and, in the process, gain eternal life. These anxieties are echoed in Hwang's Silk Letter, in which he details for the bishop in Beijing his persecution and the decade preceding it. He explains why Koreans joined (and some abandoned) the Catholic faith and their devotion to the new religion in the face of torture and execution. Together the two texts reveal much about not only Korean beliefs and values of two centuries ago, but also how Koreans viewed their country and their king as well as China and its culture. -- From book jacket.

See Table of Contents.

Han'guk Ch'ŏnju kyohoesa 韓國 天主 敎會史 [한국 천주 교회사] /  Syarŭrŭ Dalle wŏnjŏ ; An Ŭng-nyŏl, Ch'oe Sŏg-u yŏkchu 샤르르 달레 原著 ; 安 應烈, 崔 奭祐 譯注.

Translation of: Histoire de l'église de Corée / per Ch. Dallet.
Includes original t.p. and bibliographical references.

Charles Dallet = 샤를 달레 = Syarŭl Talle) ft. flap (1829-1878; French missionary) . He stayed for a time at Laval University in Quebec. It was there that he classified manuscripts regarding the Catholic Church in Korea—largely the work of the martyred bishop Antoine Daveluy—which provided the material for his Histoire de l'Église de Corée (1874, two volumes). In 1877, Dallet went back to India, this time passing Russia, Manchuria, China and Japan. From Japan he stopped at Cochin China. While in Tongkin, he died of dysentery on 25 April 1878.

History of the Korean Church : preceded by an introduction on Korean history, institutions, language, mores, and customs, with a map and plates / by Charles Dallet ; translated by Gari Ledyard

Translated from Histoire de l'eglise de Corée. Paris : V. Palmé, 1874. (translation copyright 1989, 2000)

Includes bibliographical references.

v.1. Book 1. From the first martyrdoms until the arrival of Father Jacques Zhou, a Chinese priest sent by the bishop of Peking 1784-1794 ; Book 2. From the arrival of Father Zhou in Korea to his glorious martyrdom 1794-1801 -- v. 2. Book 3. From the martyrdom of Father Zhou to the end of the persecution 1801-1802.

Local access dig.pdf. [Dallet-Ledyard-History Korean Church.pdf]  

P'ungsuwŏnesŏ on p'yŏnji :  Chŏng Gyu-ha Augusŭt'ino shinbu풍수원에서 온 편지 : 정규하 아우구스티노 신부 서한집 / ǂc 지은이: 정규하 ; 옮긴이: 김상균.