Yet natural philosophers knew better. They knew themselves, as Christians, bonded together in a single, common endeavour. The Jesuits in Beijing, certainly, did not hesitate to consult a heretic if they thought that it might aid their cause. Schreck had depended heavily on star tables sent to him by a Lutheran. Protestant and Catholic, communicating with each other halfway across the world, had together shared their hopes that the Chinese might be brought to Christ. There was no better way to appreciate, perhaps, just how truly distinctive the Christian understanding of natural philosophy was, just how deeply rooted in the soil of Christendom, than to be a Jesuit in China. In 1634, the presentation to the Chinese emperor of a telescope had provided Galileo with an unexpectedly global seal of approval; but in Beijing there had been no great wave of excitement, no rush by princes and scholars to stare at craters on the moon, such as there had been in Rome. ‘It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China.’34 So Yang Guangxian, a scholar resentful of the Jesuits’ stranglehold on the Bureau of Astronomy, complained in the wake of Schreck’s death. Correctly, he had identified the degree to which their ability to make sense of the heavens was rooted in assumptions that were exclusive to Christians. The obsession of the Jesuits with fathoming laws that might govern the cosmos, Wang charged, had led them to neglect what Confucian scholarship had always known to be the proper object of astronomy: divination. Briefly, he succeeded in having them removed from their posts. For six months, they were kept in prison, shackled to wooden stakes. Only the fortuitous intervention of an earthquake prevented their execution. Yet within four years the Jesuits were back in office. Yang’s attempts to forecast eclipses had proven an embarrassing failure. There were no other Chinese astronomers capable of improving on his efforts. The understanding of the cosmos that underpinned the Jesuits’ ability to draw up accurate calendars did not, it seemed, come easily to scholars from a radically different tradition. The Christian inheritance of natural philosophy had revealed itself to be nothing if not Christian through and through.
Amid the slaughter of the age, the communication of scholars across the lines that separated Protestant and Catholic was a reminder that, despite all their mutual hatreds, they still had much in common. 1650, the date that both Columbus and Luther had believed would herald the end of days, instead saw Germany, after thirty years of war, restored to peace. The world had not come to an end. The Turk had been kept at bay; Christianity still endured. Certainly, much had been lost. The venerable ideal of a shared unity in Christ – one to which so many over the centuries had committed themselves, even at the cost of their lives – had been irreparably shattered. There could be no soldering the fragments of Christendom back together, no reversing the process of its disintegration. For all that, the dust left by its shattered masonry still hung thick in the air; and if it was in what people had begun to call Europe that it was inhaled most deeply, then there were others too, whether in lonely settlements on the North Atlantic coast, or in Mexico, or in the lands of the distant Pacific, who breathed in its particles too. Galileo, looking to the future, had imagined his successors set on a course that was impossible for him to contemplate. ‘There will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science, into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper.’ It was not only sciences, though, that waited. There were many gateways, many roads.
The only constant was that they all had their origins in Christendom.
MODERNITAS
XV
SPIRIT
1649: S
T
G
EORGE
’
S
H
ILL
On 26 May, the day that the Lord General with his train of officers came riding to St George’s Hill, there were twelve people working on the heath. They were variously digging, and planting, and spreading manure. The venture was a bold one. The land had been crown property since ancient times. The law of trespass strictly forbade any sowing on it. Times, though, were hard, and there were some locals, faced with destitution, who had come to despise the very notion of private property. Leading them was a smallholder named Gerrard Winstanley, a former cloth-merchant who had moved out of London into the Surrey countryside after going bankrupt in 1643. The entire earth, he declared, was ‘a common Treasury for all, both Rich and Poor’.1 On 1 April 1649, obedient to a direct command of the Holy Spirit, he had taken his spade and gone to the nearby St George’s Hill, and there broken the ground. Various other men and women had joined him. Now, almost two months on, and despite all the hostility they had provoked among neighbouring landowners, the ‘Diggers’ were still busy among their corn, their carrots and their beans. ‘For in this work of restoration,’ so Winstanley defiantly insisted, ‘there will be no beggar in Israel.’2
The approach of soldiers on horseback would normally have filled any trespassers on crown lands with terror. The times, though, were not normal. Four months earlier, on a bitterly cold winter day, the king of England had been beheaded outside his own palace of Whitehall. The charge had been high treason. Shortly afterwards the monarchy itself had been abolished. To royalists – of whom there remained many in England – the execution of Charles I, God’s anointed, had been not just a crime, but a blasphemy. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Yet that, for supporters of the new English commonwealth, was precisely the point. The causes that had brought the king into armed conflict with his parliament were many, and the road that had led him to the scaffold long and winding; but none of those who had sat in judgement on him ever doubted that God’s finger was manifest in the redrawing of England. Winstanley agreed. Monarchy, he declared, was a usurpation of the power of God. So too was the rule of every lord. Like the followers of Pelagius who, long before, had mocked any notion that wealth might not be tyranny, Winstanley took literally the warnings of scripture, which ‘threaten misery to rich men, bidding them Howl and weep’.3 The return of Christ, which he believed imminent, would not be from the heavens, but in the flesh of men and women. All were to share equally in the treasury of the earth. The evils of Adam’s fall were destined to be reversed. If Winstanley, in preparing for this happy eventuality, was perfectly content to sanction the whipping of those who refused to pull their weight, and even – in extreme cases – their enslavement, then that was due reflection of his utter confidence in his cause. To dig on St George’s Hill was to regain paradise.