Palmeiro, although contemptuous of Confucian philosophy, had not forbidden the Jesuits from taking up office in Beijing. He could accept that, in an immense empire like China, any chance to bring its ruler to Christ was too precious to be wasted. He could accept as well that there were grounds for hope. Xu Guangqi was a model of what might be achieved. Once, like any mandarin, he had 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.’17 But then Xu had met Matteo Ricci. In 1603, he had been baptised, and taken the name Paul. Ricci, noting the effects on his friend of his conversion, had observed with satisfaction the mandarin’s attentiveness to converts of a lesser class. It was Xu’s understanding of the cosmos, however, that had been most significantly transformed. 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. Generations of mandarins, Xu lamented, had been operating in the dark. ‘We have been ignorant of the Author of the world. We have interested ourselves in this and in that, thus naturally losing from view the First Source. Alas! How many losses and how many deceptions!’18
Even Xu, though, had failed to recognise the full scale of the threat that Christian assumptions about the universe represented to China’s traditions. A loyal servant of his monarch, he never doubted the role of the emperor in maintaining a cosmic harmony. No less than his unbaptised peers, Xu believed that it would be a simple matter to melt down the Jesuits’ astronomy and cast it in a Chinese mould. The only necessity for achieving this was to translate the barbarians’ books and source their most up-to-date instruments for tracking the stars. This, once the emperor had granted his permission, was precisely what Xu ordered to be done. Yet the task of transforming Beijing into a centre for cutting-edge European astronomy was more challenging than he cared to imagine. Mandarins were not alone in having been shaped by a highly distinctive tradition of scholarship. Schreck’s understanding of how and why the stars revolved on their course derived from one as well. Padua, the university he had attended before becoming a Jesuit, was the oldest in Italy after Bologna. Many generations of students before him had taken courses such as he had done, in medicine and mathematics, and in universities across the whole of Christendom. The autonomy of such institutions, guaranteed as early as 1215 by papal statute, had endured through war and reformation. 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 untrammelled study of natural philosophy.
‘Holy Scripture,’ Aquinas had written, ‘naturally leads men to contemplate the celestial bodies.’19
To take that path was the very essence of being a Christian.
The Starry Messenger
Exploring the unknown might sometimes entail taking a risk. Schreck, a man as fascinated by the workings of the human body as of the cosmos, did not confine himself to tracking stars; and on 11 May 1630, investigating a herb that was reported to induce sweating, he tested it out on himself. A few hours later he was dead. The loss of such a brilliant astronomer, less than a year after his appointment to reform the Chinese calendar, was a grievous one; but not, as it turned out, fatal to the Jesuits’ mission. Schreck had prepared well for it. Two of his younger colleagues, sent to China precisely because of their command of natural philosophy, proved equal to the challenge of replacing him. This was due in part to their own talents, and in part to the close links that Schreck had succeeded in establishing with the most brilliant figures in his field. Fabulously distant from Europe though they were, the Jesuits in Beijing were not working in isolation. Thanks to Schreck’s efforts, they had the most advanced equipment in the world for observing the heavens. They also had the use of the most up-to-date star tables. The Jesuits never doubted what they were living through: a revolution in the study of the cosmos without precedent in history.
Schreck, a couple of years before his death, had sought to explain it to his Chinese readers. ‘In these late years,’ he wrote, ‘a celebrated mathematician of the kingdoms of the West has constructed a lens which permits one to see afar.’20 Schreck had known the ‘celebrated mathematician’ well. On 14 April 1611, the two men had met at a dinner party held on a hill above the Vatican. A previously obscure professor at the university of Padua, where he had been one of Schreck’s teachers, Galileo Galilei had become famous overnight. His ‘lens’ – an improvement on an original Dutch prototype – had enabled him to make sense of the heavens as never before. He had observed that the surface of the moon was alternately cratered and mountainous; that the Milky Way consisted of an inordinate number of stars; that Jupiter had four moons. These claims, published in a jauntily self-aggrandising pamphlet, had created a sensation. The dinner party at which Schreck had joined Galileo, and at which it had been agreed by the guests that his lens should be christened a ‘telescope’, had been held in his honour by a prince, no less. Yet if his discoveries were widely toasted, they had also provoked alarm. The blow dealt to Aristotle’s model of the universe, which for centuries had exercised a domineering authority over Christian cosmology, appeared mortal. How was the appearance of a moon pitted with craters to be reconciled with the philosopher’s understanding of it as unchanging, imperishable, incorruptible?
Galileo, a man as impatient for fame as he was derisive of anyone who presumed to obstruct him from obtaining it, failed to see this as an issue. His contempt for Aristotle, whom he ranked alongside all the most miserable things in life – ‘plague, urinals, debt’21 – was matched only by his impatience with the philosopher’s admirers: ‘the potbellied theologians who locate the limits of of human genius in his writings’.22 Galileo, though, was no Luther. His instincts were those of a social climber, not a rebel. His craving was for the celebrity that he knew would be his if he could only persuade the leaders of the Catholic Church – the Jesuit superiors, the cardinals, the pope – to replace Aristotle as an authority on the workings of the cosmos with himself. That was why, in the spring of 1611, he had travelled to Rome and hawked around his telescope. His efforts to make a name for himself among the city’s movers and shakers had reaped spectacular success. Aristotle’s cosmology had effectively been toppled. Schreck was only one among crowds of fans. Other Jesuits too – among them some of the most eminent mathematicians in Christendom – had corroborated Galileo’s claims. A cardinal, Maffeo Barberini, had gone so far as to praise him in verse. Other, even more decisive marks of favour had followed twelve years later, in 1623, when Barberini was elected to the throne of Saint Peter. Now, as Urban VIII, he could grant his friend honours that were only a pope’s to grant: private audiences, pensions, medals. Galileo, naturally enough, basked in the attention. But still he wanted more.
Schreck, praising the great astronomer to the Chinese, had celebrated him for one discovery in particular. Galileo’s telescope had enabled him to keep close track of the planet Venus. ‘Sometimes it is obscure, sometimes it is completely illuminated, sometimes it is illuminated either in the superior quarter or in the inferior quarter.’ Just in case the implication of this was not clear, Schreck had made sure to spell it out. ‘This proves that Venus is a satellite of the sun and travels around it.’23 Here, as the Jesuits readily accepted, was yet another body blow to the model of the cosmos that the Church had inherited from Aristotle. The possibility that planets might revolve around the sun rather than the earth was not one that the philosopher had ever countenanced. How, then, was it to be explained? The model favoured by Schreck, one that had been in existence for some forty years, placed the planets in orbit around the sun, and the sun and moon in orbit around the earth. Complex though this was, it appeared to a majority of astronomers the one that best corresponded to the available evidence. There were some, however, who preferred an altogether more radical possibility. Among them was a Czech Jesuit, Wenceslas Kirwitzer, who had met Galileo in Rome, and then sailed with Schreck to China, where he had died in 1626. Prior to his departure, he had written a short pamphlet, arguing for heliocentrism: the hypothesis that the earth, just like Venus and the other planets, revolved around the sun.24 The thesis was not Kirwitzer’s own. The first book to propose it had been published back in 1543. Its author, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, had in turn drawn on the work of earlier scholars at Paris and Oxford, natural philosophers who had argued variously for the possibility that the earth might rotate on its axis, that the cosmos might be governed by laws of motion, even that space might be infinite. Daring though Copernicus’ hypothesis seemed, then, it stood recognisably in a line of descent from a long and venerable tradition of Christian scholarship. Kirwitzer was not the only astronomer to have been persuaded by it. So too had a number of others; and of these the most high profile, the most prolific, the most pugnacious, was Galileo.