The Martyrdom of Paul Yun: Western Religion and Eastern Ritual in Eighteenth Century Korea
by Donald L. Baker
On December 8,1791, in front of the P’ungnam Gate in Chonju, the capital of Cholla Province, Paul Yun was beheaded for his destruction of his family’s ancestral tablets. King Chongjo had ordered the execution of this Catholic member of Korea’s yangban elite because of his obedience to a command from a European bishop in Peking to defy Korean law and custom requiring the use of ancestral tablets in Confucian mourning ritual. Paul Yun thus entered history as one of Korea’s earliest Christian martyrs, three years before the first Catholic priest arrived on the peninsula to preach the Gospel to the Korean people.
The story of Paul Yun, how he and his friends and relatives were converted to Catholicism and how their new faith led them into conflict with their Confucian government and society, can tell us much about the nature of Korean values and beliefs two centuries ago. An examination of this clash between Western religion and Eastern ritual may offer us some insight into fundamental differences between Confucian and Christian approaches to truth, morality, and the nature of man and society.
Paul Yun died because of his belief that men have a higher loyalty than that owed to their society and government. His conviction that men sometimes have to be willing to sacrifice even their lives if their integrity and conscience so demand makes the story of his execution more than just an interesting historical anecdote about a clash between Catholic doctrine and Confucian ceremony two hundred years ago. While the specific issue of ancestral tablets for which Paul Yun gave up his life in 1791 may no longer be relevant today,conflicts between the dictates of conscience and the demands of society still arise. A look at the dilemma faced by Paul Yun in 1791 can help us reflect on our moral priorities in 1980.
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