Ewha Womans University Incident

The Ewha Womans University Incident (이화여대 사건): The Second Generation as Providential Category in Unification Doctrine

이화여대 사건 · 梨花女大 事件 · The Ewha Incident, 1955

What Was the Ewha Womans University Incident?

The Ewha Womans University incident is the confrontation of 1955 in which students and faculty of Ewha Womans University in Seoul, together with others at Yonsei University, came into contact with the Divine Principle in numbers the institutions judged untenable, and were required to choose between the university and the new movement.

In Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s account, a professor sent by the university to investigate the movement was persuaded by what she heard within days; a substantial part of a dormitory of some three hundred students began attending; students were expelled and professors dismissed; and he was arrested, held at Seodaemun prison from July 4 of that year, and released without conviction.

The encyclopedia treats this as a doctrinal term rather than a chapter of institutional history, because the corpus does. Rev. Sun Myung Moon returned to it across five decades and always for the same reason: to explain what the second generation is for.

This entry argues that the incident’s doctrinal weight rests on that category and not on the persecution. The two universities mattered because they were where Christianity’s second generation was gathered, and because the first generation was held to have been compromised.

The corpus accordingly reckons the loss not as an injury done to a person but as an extension of the providential course by forty years, and it records the remedy as institutional rather than personal.

It was my intention to win over world Christianity within seven years.

— Sun Myung Moon (12/15/1985) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Seven years is the figure that recurs in the Korean preaching whenever the incident is discussed, and it is always stated as what was available rather than what was achieved. Had the universities held, he says, a worldwide foundation could have been laid within seven years, and missionaries sent out within three or four.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle supplies the framework in which such a statement is intelligible, since its doctrine of the portion of responsibility holds that a providential timetable can be prolonged by human failure without the purpose itself being abandoned.

Methodology Note

This entry reads the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong compilation, the Exposition of the Divine Principle, and the title-level index of the Korean speech archive of Rev. Sun Myung Moon covering 6,118 addresses from 1956 to 2010. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. A limitation applies and is recorded in the editorial note: almost all the primary material on this term is Korean preaching without verified English, so the entry carries four blockquotes rather than the customary six or more, and the substance is reported in prose. The entry does not attempt an institutional history of either university, a chronology of the legal proceedings, a roster of those expelled or dismissed, or any adjudication of the conduct of the individuals named. Inter-religious comparison is omitted, since the term is internal and historical.

The universities mattered because the second generation was there

The reasoning behind the approach to Ewha and Yonsei is stated in the corpus with unusual clarity, and it is not the reasoning one would expect of a young movement seeking recruits.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon holds that the Korean Christianity of the 1950s stood divided between two generations that were not in the same providential condition.

The first generation had passed through the Japanese colonial period, during which many churches and church leaders had participated in Shinto shrine worship, and in his account that participation left the first generation half caught in the fallen world. The second generation had not been present for it. They were, in the language he uses, the clean half of the same body.

From this follows a strategic principle he states as a general rule of the restoration era rather than as a decision about two schools: where formerly Satan took the valuable thing, in the era of restoration God takes the valuable thing, and the valuable thing now is the second generation.

If the first generation cannot cross the ridge, the second generation crosses it, and the first is then carried across with them.

automatically a national association of these prestigious university students will be formed

— Sun Myung Moon (02/07/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Spoken thirty-six years after the incident and about a different campaign, the sentence shows the same reasoning still operating: reach the schools that gather the second generation and the national body forms of its own accord.

What was attempted at Ewha and Yonsei in 1955 was that argument in its first and most concentrated form, since the two institutions were founded and supported by the Protestant missions and therefore held the second generation of Korean Christianity specifically.

The Korean preaching adds a detail that shows how wide the gathering was understood to be. Among those students, Moon says, were the children of the spiritually devout, the children of those who had bowed at the shrines, and the children of families with no religion at all. The second generation was not a party within Christianity. It was the whole of the coming generation, held in one place.

Ewha and Yonsei stood as Eve and Adam, and their union would have completed a foundation

The doctrinal structure the corpus assigns to the two universities is precise, and it explains why they are always named together and never separately.

Yonsei, a men’s university, stands in the position of Adam. Ewha, a women’s university, stands in the position of Eve. Between them, the relation is horizontal, the relation of a pair. Between the two of them and the first-generation Christianity that had founded and supported them, the relation is vertical, the relation of children to parents.

Set out this way, the configuration is a four-position foundation at national scale. Parents and children joined vertically, the pair joined horizontally, and a centre in God.

Rev. Moon states the consequence in the language of the Cain and Abel doctrine: if the first and second generations become completely one, Cain submits of necessity, because the whole configuration then stands inside heaven’s protection rather than Satan’s.

Beyond the universities lay the state. In his account, the presidency of Syngman Rhee could have been joined to this foundation through the connections that already ran between the university’s leadership and the presidential residence, so that a national standard would have been established on which the position of parents could stand. Behind the state, in turn, stood the missionaries and the United States. The chain he describes runs from a dormitory to a nation and from a nation to a world, and it is the compactness of the chain that makes the moment weigh so heavily in the corpus.

He also states plainly what he takes the refusal to have repeated. Christianity’s rejection of the movement at that moment is set as the counterpart of Judaism’s rejection of Jesus: the prepared body refusing the thing it had been prepared for, with the same result of expulsion into the wilderness and the same transfer of the course onto a longer path.

The corpus reckons the loss in years rather than in injuries

What most distinguishes this material from an ordinary account of persecution is its arithmetic. Moon consistently converts the incident into time.

The figures recur with little variation. Seven years would have been enough to lay a worldwide foundation. Three or four years would have sufficed to send missionaries out. Six months more at Ewha, on his account, and the university would have turned entirely; the emergency measure of forcing a choice between the school and the movement is described as a decision taken because there was no other way to stop it. And against these short intervals he sets the long one: a forty-year course from 1952 to 1992, undertaken to indemnify what was lost, with a second campaign built on Japan, Germany, and the United States after the first was refused.

The Unification Church restored through indemnity the failure of Christianity

— Sun Myung Moon (10/04/1985) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The sentence is the general form of which the Ewha incident is the particular case. An office left undischarged does not lapse; the work falls to whoever will pay for it, and the payment here is counted in decades of labour on other continents.

The personal register is present too, and the entry does not pretend otherwise. The corpus records the arrest, the interrogation, the attempt to construct a charge, the eventual release without conviction, and the fact that the acquittal received a fraction of the coverage the accusation had. It records that he bore the reputation in silence for decades.

think about your teacher who endures without vindicating himself in the face of slander

— Sun Myung Moon (12/30/1975) Cheon Seong Gyeong

But the register in which he asks members to hold the memory is not grievance. It is debt: what was lost is to be recovered, and the recovery is the members' work rather than his vindication.

A word is owed here about the tone of the Korean material, because a reader consulting the compiled addresses will meet it immediately. When Rev. Moon recounts this episode, he speaks about the individuals involved with considerable harshness, in language this entry does not reproduce.

The encyclopedia judges that the doctrine is carried by the structural account and not by the invective, and that reproducing personal abuse of named persons, most of them long dead and none able to answer, would serve no doctrinal purpose. Readers who wish to consult the passages will find them in the compilations.

The indemnity was paid institutionally, forty years later

The most instructive part of this material is not the loss but what the corpus records as the settlement, because the settlement is designed to match the shape of the failure.

The first element is a university. Sun Moon University was founded, in Moon’s own account of it, precisely so that what Ewha and Yonsei did not do could be done, and he speaks of it as intended to surpass them.

The archive carries ten title-level addresses naming the institution, from an eighth-anniversary address in October 1994 through an instruction in March 1997 to make it a world-class university (Moon 1994, vol. 263; Moon 1997, vol. 282).

In a prayer recorded in the Korean material, he states the design explicitly: the president and vice-president of the new university were appointed from among Ewha graduates, and they were appointed for this purpose, so that women representing the institution that had refused could carry the thing it had refused.

The second element is a return to the two campuses in person. Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon lectured at Ewha and at Yonsei, and Rev. Sun Myung Moon describes those lectures in a single phrase that gathers the whole doctrine: Eve restoring it. The pair that should have been joined in 1955 is addressed thirty-five years later by the woman standing in Eve’s position, and the address is given at both universities rather than one.

The third element is toward the students themselves. Rev. Moon records that those expelled were taken in by another women’s university in Seoul, completed their degrees and in some cases went on to doctorates, and that honorary doctorates were later conferred within the movement so that its own people would stand at the level such rooms require.

Late in life he says that those expelled over the incident should be gathered again, that the church bears responsibility for having let them drift, and that the history must be put in order, since a history left untidied catches on itself like a bundle that will not unroll.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis was that the incident’s doctrinal weight rests on the category of the second generation rather than on persecution. Four lines of evidence converge.

The reason given for approaching the universities is generational and is stated as a general rule of the restoration era, not as a decision about two schools. The structure assigned to Ewha and Yonsei is a four-position foundation, which requires the pair and the parent generation together and would be unintelligible as a recruitment target. The loss is reckoned arithmetically, in years of extension rather than in wrongs suffered. And the settlement is institutional, matching a university with a university and a refused pair with a return to both campuses.

The strongest objection reads the material the other way.

On this account, the Ewha incident is the movement’s founding persecution narrative, the episode that fixed its identity as a body rejected by church and state, and its function is to supply the parallel with Jesus rejected by Judaism that the whole self-understanding rests on. The objection has real support. Moon draws that parallel himself and draws it often.

The corpus preserves the arrest, the prison, and the false charges in detail. The July 4 anniversary is observed and read at hoon dok sessions decades later, as the address of July 4, 2005 records (Moon 2005, vol. 499). And the personal bitterness in the Korean material is unmistakable.

The objection is serious and it preserves something this reading must not lose. The suffering was real and the corpus does not minimise it.

But two features of the evidence favour the generational reading where the two diverge.

The first is that the settlement addresses the opening rather than the injury. A persecution narrative is settled by vindication: by the record being corrected, by the accusers being answered, by the movement being recognised.

What the corpus records instead is the founding of a university, the appointment of Ewha graduates to lead it, lectures delivered at both campuses, and an instruction to gather the expelled students and put the record in order. Every one of these repairs the configuration that failed. None of them is an answer to a slander.

The second is that the second-generation reasoning outlives the episode by decades and operates where no persecution is in view. The same argument that sent him to Ewha in 1955 sends him to the prestigious universities in 1991 and underwrites the whole later providence centred on the second generation. A principle that keeps working thirty-six years later in an unrelated campaign is a principle, not a wound.

What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not entail that the persecution was incidental, since the corpus treats the imprisonment as a real indemnity condition and not as a misunderstanding. It does not entail any judgment about the conduct of the individuals named in the addresses, which this encyclopedia reports as Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s account and does not adjudicate. It does not entail a claim about the two universities as institutions today, which lies outside the scope of a doctrinal entry. And it does not entail that the forty-year figure is a precise measure rather than the providential reckoning the corpus offers it as.

What it does entail is a rule for reading the term. When the corpus returns to Ewha, it is not asking to be believed about 1955. It is explaining why the second generation is where the providence goes when the first will not move.

Key Takeaway

• The Ewha Womans University incident of 1955 is the confrontation in which students and faculty at Ewha and Yonsei were required to choose between their universities and the new movement.
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon was arrested on July 4 of that year and held at Seodaemun prison, and the corpus records that he was released without conviction.
• The universities were approached because Korean Christianity’s second generation was gathered there, the first generation being held to have been compromised by shrine worship under Japanese rule.
• Yonsei stands in the position of Adam and Ewha in the position of Eve, with first-generation Christianity as the parent generation, so that their union would have completed a four-position foundation at national scale.
• The corpus reckons the loss in time rather than in injury, stating that seven years would have sufficed and that a forty-year course from 1952 to 1992 was undertaken instead.
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon set the refusal as the counterpart of Judaism’s rejection of Jesus, with the same expulsion into the wilderness.
• Sun Moon University was founded to do what the two universities did not, with its president and vice-president appointed from among Ewha graduates for that reason.
• Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon later lectured at both Ewha and Yonsei, which Rev. Sun Myung Moon described as Eve restoring what was lost.
• Across the 6,118-sermon Korean archive, no sermon title names Ewha or Yonsei, while ten name Sun Moon University.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1989. “한국뿌리찾기연합회의 갈 길.” Sermon, June 24, 1989. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 191, sermon 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1994. “선문대 개교 8주년 말씀.” Sermon, October 27, 1994. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 263, sermon 6.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1997. “선문대를 세계적 대학으로 만들라.” Sermon, March 11, 1997. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 282, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2002. “선문대는 우리 학교다.” Sermon, February 23, 2002. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 370, sermon 8.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2005. “지금은 하늘의 주권·백성·땅을 찾아야 할 때.” Sermon, July 4, 2005. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 499, sermon 9.