Except that New England was not, as the desert around Sinai had been, a wilderness. Even in the earliest days of its settlement, there had been colonists who had no wish to live as Puritans. Here, to the godly, was a nagging source of anxiety. When, during the course of their second winter, the Pilgrims found unregenerates celebrating Christmas Day by playing cricket, they promptly confiscated their bats. As the colonies grew, so too did the determination to keep in check the sinful nature of those who did not belong to the elect. Their lack of a vote did not prevent them from being expected to help support ministers, attend church and listen to sermons in which their faults would be sternly excoriated. The urge both to educate and to discipline ran deep. Both were expressions of the same deep inner sense of certitude: that the gift that God had made to the Puritans of the New World, to be a flourishing garden and a vineyard, was far too precious to be allowed to go to weed.
‘Fruitful and fit for habitation,’ it had seemed to the Pilgrims, ‘being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men, which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.’8 That the Almighty had given them a new England to settle, to light up the entire world with the perfection of their example, did not mean that they had no duty to the Indians (as the English – following the example of the Spanish – persisted in calling the natives of America). On the seal of the expedition led by John Winthrop was an Indian dressed as Adam had been in Eden, and from his mouth there came an appeaclass="underline" ‘Come over and help us.’ The grace of God was free and capricious, and there was no reason why it might not be granted as readily to a savage as to an Englishman. The image of the Lord was in everyone, after all, and there was not a minister in New England who did not know himself commanded to love his enemies. Within decades of the first landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, there were Puritans applying themselves to the task of bringing the word of God to the local tribes with the same devoted sense of duty that they brought to all their tasks. Missionaries preached to the Indians in their own languages; they laboured on translations of the Bible. Yet if God had commanded Christians to bring his word to all of humanity, then so also, in defence of his chosen people, had he revealed himself a god of wrath. In 1622, an English soldier elected by the Pilgrims to serve as their captain had learned that a band of Massachusett warriors were planning to attack the colony, and duly launched a pre-emptive attack of his own. Many in Plymouth expressed their qualms; but the head of the Massachusett leader was put on a pole, for all that, and exhibited in the settlement’s fort. Fifteen years later, a force of colonists joined with native allies to launch another, far more devastating attack on a hostile tribe called the Pequots. Four hundred men, women and children were left dead amid the torching of their wigwams. ‘It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.’ Again, there were Puritans who expressed their disgust; and again, they were answered with God’s licensing of slaughter in defence of Israel. ‘Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents,’ they were assured. ‘We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.’9
So Charlemagne might have answered Alcuin. Settled in a new world the Puritans may have been, in flight from the degeneracy of the old, and proudly born again; but the challenges that they faced as Christians, and the ambivalences of their solutions, had no less an ancient pedigree for that.
All Things to All Men
One morning in the summer of 1629, on the opposite side of the globe to the crude clapboard houses and timber palisades of Plymouth, the sky began to darken above the largest city on earth. Astronomers in Beijing were used to keeping track of eclipses. In the Ministry of Rites, one of a cluster of government buildings that stood south of the emperor’s great complex of palaces, records were kept that reached back to the very beginnings of China. Lifa – the science of correctly calculating a calendar – had been assiduously sponsored by dynasty after dynasty. To neglect the movement of the stars was to risk calamity: for nothing ever happened in the heavens, so Chinese scholars believed, that was not interfused with the pattern of events on earth.
This was why, in China, the compilation and promulgation of calendars was a strict monopoly of state. Only by accurately keeping track of eclipses could an emperor hope to avert disaster. Over recent decades, however, the Ministry of Rites had made a succession of embarrassing mistakes. In 1592, its prediction of an eclipse had been out by an entire day. Reform had begun to seem essential. With an eclipse predicted for 23 June, the vice-president of the Ministry of Rites had insisted on a competition. Xu Guangqi, a distinguished scholar from Shanghai, had come to mistrust the entire methodology upon which astronomers in China had always relied. Another way of understanding the workings of the cosmos, developed in the barbarian lands of the furthermost West, had recently been introduced to Beijing. Xu Guangqi – who was not merely a patron but a friend to the foreign astronomers – had been angling for years to have them given official posts. Now he had his chance. Once the eclipse had come and gone, and daylight returned to Beijing, the forecast of the Chinese astronomers was compared to that of the barbarians; and it was the barbarians who proved to have won. Their reward was quick in coming. That September, they were commissioned by the emperor himself to reform the calendar. Dressed in the long sweeping robes that were the uniform of Chinese scholars, they took possession of Beijing’s observatory and set to work. Their triumph was a testimony to their learning: to their knowledge of the heavens, and of their ability to track the stars. It also bore witness to something more: to their understanding of the purposes of their god. It was not only the foreigners from the distant West who believed this; so too did Xu Guangqi. All of them, barbarian astronomers and Chinese minister alike, shared in the common baptism. All of them were loyal servants of the Catholic Church.
The news that Christians were to be found in the heart of an empire as remote, as mighty and as enigmatic as China, in a city that stood a whole three years’ travel from Europe, was naturally a cause of great rejoicing in Rome. Of reassurance too. The times had not been easy. For a century and more, the entire fabric of Christendom had seemed at risk of rotting away. Ancient kingdoms had been lost to heresy. Others had been swallowed up by the Turks. Much of Hungary – the land of Saint Stephen, of Saint Elizabeth – had come to lie under the rule of the Ottoman sultan. Embattled on many fronts, Catholics had strained every sinew to stabilise them. The risk otherwise was of becoming – like the heretics with their swarms of sects – just one among a whole multitude of churches: less Catholic than Roman. Faced with this hellish prospect, the papacy and its servants had adopted a two-pronged strategy. Within its own heartlands, there had been a renewed insistence on discipline. In 1542, an inquisition modelled on the Spanish example had been established in Rome; in 1558, it had drawn up a lengthy index of prohibited books; a year later, ten thousand volumes had been publicly burnt in Venice. Simultaneously, beyond the seas, in the new worlds opened up by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, great harvests of souls had been reaped by Catholic missionaries. The fall of Mexico to Christian arms had been followed by the subjugation of other fantastical lands: of Peru, of Brazil, and of islands named – in honour of Philip II – the Philippines. That God had ordained these conquests, and that Christians had not merely a right but a duty to prosecute them, remained, for many, a devout conviction. Idolatry, human sacrifice and all the other foul excrescences of paganism were still widely cited as justifications for Spain’s globe-spanning empire. The venerable doctrine of Aristotle – that it was to the benefit of barbarians to be ruled by ‘civilised and virtuous princes’10 – continued to be affirmed by theologians in Christian robes.