There was, though, an alternative way of interpreting Aristotle. In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aged Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God, and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to the Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’11 Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’. It was difficult for any Christians who accepted such a concept to believe themselves superior to pagans simply by virtue of being Christian. The vastness of the world, not to mention the seemingly infinite nature of the peoples who inhabited it, served missionaries both as an incentive and as an admonition. If Indians could be scorned by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers as barbarians, then there were other lands in which it was Europeans who were liable to appear the barbarians. Nowhere was this more soberingly evident than in China. Even to live on its margins was to wonder at ‘people who are so civilised and ingenious in the sciences, government and everything else that they are in no way inferior to our ways in Europe’.12 To journey along the roads and rivers of the empire, to marvel at its wealth, to gawp at the sheer scale of its cities, was – for a missionary – to feel much as Paul had done, travelling the world ruled by Rome. ‘I have become all things to all men.’13 So the apostle had defined his strategy for bringing the world to Christ. Cortés, crushing the Mexica, had felt no obligation to copy his example; but China was not to be treated as the Spanish had treated the New World. It was too ancient, too powerful, too sophisticated for that. ‘It is,’ as the first missionary to reach Beijing after crossing the oceans had put it, ‘very different from other lands.’14 If missionaries, obedient to their Saviour’s command to preach the gospel to all creation, were to travel there, they could not afford to be defined as European. The Christian message was universal, or it was nothing.
The man appointed by Xu Guangqi to reform the calendar had consecrated his entire life to this conviction. Johann Schreck was a polymath of astonishing abilities: not just an astronomer, but a physician, a mathematician, a linguist. Above all, though, he was a priest, a member of an order that, ever since its founding in 1540, had aspired to operate on a global scale. Like friars, those who joined the Society of Jesus swore themselves to poverty, chastity and obedience; but they swore as well a vow of obedience to the pope to undertake any mission that he might give them. Some Jesuits expressed their commitment to this by devoting their lives to teaching; others by risking martyrdom to redeem England from heresy; others by sailing to the ends of the earth. Their mandate, when they travelled to lands beyond Europe, was – without ever offending against Christian teaching – to absorb as many of the customs as they could. In India they were to live as Indians, in China as Chinese. The policy had been pushed to notable extremes. So successfully had the first Jesuit to reach Beijing integrated himself into the Chinese elite that, following his death there in 1610, the emperor himself had granted a plot of land for his buriaclass="underline" an honour without precedent for a foreigner. Matteo Ricci, an Italian who had arrived in China in 1582 speaking not a word of the language, had transformed himself into Li Madou, a scholar so learned in the classical texts of his adopted home that he had come to be hailed by Chinese mandarins as their peer. Although Confucius, the ancient philosopher whose teachings served as the fountainhead of Chinese morality, had plainly not been a Christian, Ricci had refused to dismiss him as merely a pagan. That he had been able to do this in good faith had owed much to two particular convictions: first, that Confucius had been illumined by the same divinely bestowed gift of reason that was evident in the writings of Aristotle; and second, that his teachings had been corrupted over the centuries by his followers. Only strip the accretions away, so Ricci had believed, and Confucians might be led to Christ. Confucian philosophy, in its fundamentals, was perfectly compatible with Christianity. This was why, sending to Rome for astronomers, Ricci had made no apology for aspiring to serve the Chinese emperor by reforming his calendar. ‘According to the disposition of Divine Providence, various ways have been employed at different times, and with different races, to interest people in the Christian faith.’15 Schreck, by travelling from his native Constance to Beijing, had committed his life to this policy.
Yet there were some among his superiors who had their doubts. A couple of months before the fateful eclipse had secured for Schreck his appointment to the Bureau of Astronomy, a senior Jesuit had arrived in Beijing to inspect its mission. Although much impressed by the calibre of the various priests he found working there, André Palmeiro had raised a quizzical eyebrow at their guiding assumption. It did not seem to him at all apparent that Confucian philosophy, beneath the skin, resembled Christianity. ‘If the priests believe that among the books of the Chinese there are some moral documents that serve to instill virtue, I respond by asking what sect there has ever been or is today that does not have some rules for correct living?’16 Leaving Beijing a week before the morning turned dark over the city, Palmeiro could reflect on various aspects of Chinese behaviour that had perturbed him: the haughtiness shown by mandarins towards the poor; their inability to grasp the distinction between church and state; their obscene number of wives. Most unsettlingly of all, though, Palmeiro could detect not the slightest trace of the worship of the One Creator God of Israel. 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.