Abstract:
Siamese elites during the early Bangkok drew the line between secular and spiritual knowledges. This separation was obvious in their discourse when confronting modern science and Christianity during this most crucial period of transformation. When the missionaries brought in modern science and Christianity, modern science was grasped by Siamese elites without question, while Christianity was rejected. The missionaries unified modern science and Christianity discursively, but was countered by Siamese elites that both could not be fused in. They argued that modern science was secular knowledge, while Christianity was spiritual. The aboption of secular, thus profane, knowledge was acceptable, but the spiritual knowledge represented in Christianity could not be juxtaposed with Buddhism which was believed representing the Absolute Truth. The adoption of modern science and the negation of western spiritual knowledge turned Siam from "the old" to "the modern", which on the one hand continued its traditional interpretation of spiritual knowledge, but on the other adopted modern science of the West.