The Chinese (Dominion)

The Chinese seemed to have no concept either of creation or of a god. Rather than a universe obedient to the laws of an omnipotent deity, they believed instead in a naturally occurring order, formed by constituent elements – fire, water, earth, metal, wood – that were forever waxing and waning in succession. Everything went in cycles.

Bound together by their bonds of mutual influence, cosmos and humanity oscillated eternally between rival poles: yin and yang. The duty of the emperor, one granted him by the heavens, was to negotiate these oscillations, and to maintain order as well as he could. Hence his need for an accurate calendar. Without one, after all, how would he know to perform the rituals that kept heaven and earth in harmony? This was a question to which Schreck, now that he had formally entered the imperial civil service, was responsible for providing an answer.

Christians traveled to China, with the hope of spreading the Gospel to an immense empire. Xu Guangqi, a mandarin, once believed that humanity was of one substance with the stars. ‘Man is born from amidst heaven and earth, which means that his origin is fundamentally the same as Heaven.’

But then Xu met Matteo Ricci and in 1603, he had been baptized and taken the name Paul. Ricci noted with satisfaction the mandarin’s attentiveness to converts of a lesser class. The most significant transformation was Xu’s understanding of the cosmos.

His eagerness to recruit the Jesuits into the Bureau of Astronomy reflected his new, and very Christian, understanding of the universe: that it had had a beginning, and would have an end; that its workings were governed by divinely authored laws; that the God who had fashioned it was a geometer.

Xu lamented that generations of mandarins had been operating in the dark, ignorant of the author of the world. Even Xu did not recognize the full scale of the threat that Christian assumptions about the universe would have on China’s traditions. He was a loyal servant of his monarch, and never doubted the role of the emperor in maintaining a cosmic harmony. He thought it would be simple to simply melt down the Jesuit’s astronomy and cast in a Chinese mold.

With the emperor’s permission, Xu ordered this to be done. But this was more difficult than he imagined.

*Nothing in China, where access to learning had always been strictly regulated by the state, could compare. If to be a Jesuit was to serve in obedience to the pope, then it was also to know that God’s purposes were revealed through the free and untrammeled study of natural philosophy.  Holy Scripture,’ Aquinas had written, ‘naturally leads men to contemplate the celestial bodies.’ To take that path was the very essence of being a Christian.    *

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Related posts:

1. Allied with God (Dominion)
2. Paul (Dominion)
3. Nero’s Sexual Morality (Dominion)
4. Luther (Dominion)