Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XIV

COSMOS

1620: L

EIDEN

A sense of themselves as a people redeemed from the chariots and horses of Pharaoh had never left the Dutch. Forty-six years on from the relief of Leiden, memories of the terrible siege were still proudly tended in the city. Of how troops sent by Charles V’s son, Philip II, the king of Spain, had almost succeeded in starving the inhabitants into submission. Of how, in desperation, the Dutch rebels had breached the dykes, to permit a relief force to sail up to the city walls. Of how a great storm had forced the besiegers to turn tail before rising floodwaters. Every year on 3 September, the anniversary of this miraculous event, a public day of atonement and thanksgiving was held. While many chose to fast, others preferred to eat meals in commemoration of how Leiden, ‘through God’s almighty rule, had been miraculously saved and set free’.¹ Herring and bread, the food distributed to its starving people by the relief force back in 1574, were popular choices; but so too was stewed rodent. Leiden, by 1620, had become a city ‘flowing with abundance of all sorts of wealth and riches’;² but this might as readily be a source of anxiety to its citizens as a reassurance. Every good thing, they knew, was a temptation. Just as it was the duty of a man to labour in his calling, so was it his responsibility to remember that all rewards came from the Almighty. Deeply read in the Bible as they were, the Dutch needed no reminding of what had befallen the children of Israel when they broke their covenant with God. The same divine anger that had sent the Spanish scattering before floods and winds might equally be a rod for their own backs. Once again, should they succumb to sin and profligacy, the people of Leiden might be reduced to gnawing on rat.

Calvinists in the city had good reason to worry. For all the prestige that they enjoyed as members of the Dutch Republic’s established church, Leiden was no Geneva. Its consistory exercised discipline only over those who willingly submitted to it. This was, perhaps, no more than 10 per cent of the population. The consequences, it appeared to the godly, were as malign as they were self-evident. Attempts had been made by professors in the university to soften the impact of Calvin’s teachings on predestination. Rival factions had clashed in the streets. So violently had tempers flared that in 1617 barricades had gone up around the city hall. Not even a purge of dissident preachers in 1619 had entirely calmed the controversy. Meanwhile, others in Leiden devoted themselves to dancing, or going to plays, or gorging themselves on enormous cheeses. Parents cuddled their children in public. Lutherans, and Anabaptists, and Jews all worshipped much as they pleased. The reluctance of magistrates to regulate these excesses had become, by 1620, a matter of voluble protest from members of the Reformed Church. The identification of the Dutch with the children of Israel was, in pulpits across Leiden, less a reassurance than a warning.

Yet even in the ambition to separate themselves from idolatry, and to create a land that might be pleasing to the Almighty, at once godly and abundant, there lurked just the hint of a reproach. ‘O Lord when all was ill with us You brought us up into a land wherein we were enriched through trade and commerce, and have dealt kindly with us.’³ What, though, of those who had not been brought dry-footed through the floodwaters, but still, beyond the limits of the republic that the Dutch had established for themselves with such effort and fortitude, suffered oppression at the hands of Pharaoh? That September, as the people of Leiden celebrated their liberation from the Spanish, and Reformed preachers pushed with ever more determination for their country to serve worthily as a new Israel, war was threatening the Protestants of the Rhineland and Bohemia. As in the days of Žižka, a Catholic emperor had mustered armies to march on Prague. His ambition: to extirpate Protestantism. The Dutch, true to their conviction that the promises made by God were promises made to the entire world, and that nothing in the whole of human existence possessed so much as a shred of authority that did not derive from his will, steeled themselves for the fight. Troops were sent across the border to buttress Protestant princes. A column of cavalry advanced up the Rhine. Outside Prague, on a mountainous ridge pockmarked by chalk pits, the army that had taken position there to defend the city from the onslaught of Antichrist included some five thousand men either funded or provided by the Dutch.

The centre did not hold. On 8 November, the Protestant forces on White Mountain were broken. Prague fell the same day. The war, though, was far from over. Quite the opposite. It was only just beginning. Like the blades of a terrible and revolving machine, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant princes continued to scythe, mangling ever more reaches of the empire, sucking into the mulch of corpses ever more foreign armies, turning and ever turning, and only stopping at last after thirty years. Christian teachings, far from blunting hatreds, seemed a whetstone. Millions perished. Wolves prowled through the ruins of burnt towns. Atrocities of an order so terrible that, as one pastor put it, ‘those who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered’,⁴ were committed on a numbing scale: men castrated; women roasted in ovens; little children led around on ropes like dogs. The Dutch, increasingly imperilled in their own fastnesses, abandoned any thought of sending armies into the slaughterhouse that lay beyond their borders. Not merely a sensible strategy, it was the godly thing to do. The prime duty of the Republic was to maintain its independence, and thereby sustain its Church, for the good of all Christendom. In Leiden, where the needs of the defence budget saw extortionate taxes levied on bread and beer, even the poorest citizens could feel that they were doing their bit. Calvinists who held firm to the fundamentals of their faith, and had the wealth to back it up, made sure to provide charity to refugees. Here, then, amid the spreading darkness of the age, was a model of Christian behaviour that might serve as an inspiration to the whole world.

This was not a perspective shared by everyone. To many in the killing fields of Germany and central Europe, it seemed that the roots of the Republic’s greatness were being fed by blood. Munitions, and iron, and the bills of exchange that funded the rival armies: all were monopolised by Dutch entrepreneurs. The great dream of the godly – that by their example they might inspire anguish-torn humanity to reach out to the joy and the regeneration that only divine grace could ever provide – was shadowed by the nightmare of a Christendom being torn to pieces. How, amid the throes of such a calamity, were the elect ever to avoid the taint of compromise and hypocrisy? How were they to shutter themselves away from the evils of the age, and yet at the same time serve as the light of the world – as a city upon a hill?

Raising taxes on beer was not the only attempt to answer these questions that Leiden had fostered. On 9 November 1620, one day after the battle of the White Mountain, a ship named the Mayflower arrived off a thin spit of land in the northern reaches of the New World. Crammed into its holds were a hundred passengers who, in the words of one of them, had made the gruelling two-month voyage across the Atlantic because ‘they knew they were pilgrims’⁵ – and of these ‘pilgrims’, half had set out from Leiden. These voyagers, though, were not Dutch, but English. Leiden had been only a way-point on a longer journey: one that had begun in an England that had come to seem to the pilgrims pestiferous with sin. First, in 1607, they had left their native land; then, sailing for the New World thirteen years later, they had turned their backs on Leiden as well. Not even the godly republic of the Dutch had been able to satisfy their yearning for purity, for a sense of harmony with the divine. The Pilgrims did not doubt the scale of the challenge they faced. They perfectly appreciated that the new England which it was their ambition to found would, if they were not on their mettle, succumb no less readily to sin than the old. Yet it offered them a breathing space: a chance to consecrate themselves as a new Israel on virgin soil. Just as an individual sinner, reaching out to God, might be blessed by the gift of his grace, so might an entire people. It was in this conviction that the Pilgrims, making landfall in America, founded a settlement which they named Plymouth, to serve the whole world as a model. When, a decade later, a second settlement was established just up the coast, on Massachusetts Bay, its leaders were equally determined to demonstrate that the dream of a godly community might be more than a dream. ‘Thus stands the cause between God and us,’ declared one of them, a lawyer and preacher named John Winthrop, on the voyage out to the New World. ‘We are entered into Covenant with him for this work.’⁶ Liberty was the freedom to submit to this covenant: to be joined in a society of the godly that was hedged about by grace.

From the beginning, however, the leaders of New England found themselves negotiating a paradox. Their gaze, for all that they had settled on the margins of what seemed to them an immense and unexplored wilderness, was fixed on the entire expanse of the globe. Were they to fail in keeping their covenant, so Winthrop warned his fellow settlers, then the scandal of it would make them a story and a byword through the world. The fate of fallen humanity rested on their shoulders. They were its last, best hope. Yet for that very reason they had to be exclusive. No one could be permitted to join their community who might threaten its status as an assembly of the elect. Too much was at stake. It being the responsibility of elected magistrates to guide a colony along its path to godliness, only those who were visibly sanctified could possibly be allowed a vote. ‘The covenant between you and us,’ Winthrop told his electorate, ‘is the oath you have taken of us, which is to this purpose, that we shall govern you and judge your causes by the rules of God’s laws and our own, according to our best skill.’⁷ The charge was a formidable one: to chastise and encourage God’s people much as the prophets of ancient Israel had done, in the absolute assurance that their understanding of scripture was correct. No effort was spared in staying true to this mission. Sometimes it might be expressed in the most literal manner possible. In 1638, when settlers founded a colony at New Haven, they modelled it directly on the plan of an encampment that God had provided to Moses. This it was to be a chosen people.

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 appeal: ‘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.

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 burial: 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.

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.

That heliocentrism ran contrary to the teachings of Aristotle was precisely part of the appeal it held for him; but there was another, even more formidable authority that could not so easily be brushed aside. In the book of Joshua, it was reported that God had commanded the sun to stand still; in the Book of Psalms, it was said of the world that ‘it cannot be moved’.²⁵ Galileo, in his own way a devout Christian, never thought to argue that the Bible was wrong. All of scripture was true. That did not mean, however, that every passage had to be read literally. In support of this opinion, Galileo could – and did – cite the authority of the church fathers: Origen, Basil, Augustine. ‘Thus, given that in many places the Scripture is not only capable but necessarily in need of interpretations different from the apparent meaning of the words, it seems to me that in disputes about natural phenomena it should be reserved to the last place.’²⁶

Galileo was saying nothing new. His argument was one that had been serving as a licence for the study of natural philosophy since the time of Abelard. Nevertheless, in circles neurotically alert to the sulphur-stench of Lutheranism, it was enough to get nostrils flaring. The Inquisition, while it was perfectly content for Galileo to report what he might observe through his telescope, had no intention of permitting him to interpret scripture simply as he pleased. Nevertheless, anxious not to make fools of themselves, the Roman inquisitors had taken pains to investigate what the case for Copernicus’ hypothesis might actually be – and specifically whether it appeared to be contradicted by natural philosophy as well as by scripture. Eminent astronomers had been consulted; the temperature of expert opinion on the matter scrupulously taken. On 24 February 1616, a panel of eleven theologians had delivered their considered judgement: that certain proofs for heliocentrism did not exist, and that it should therefore be condemned as ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy’.²⁷ Then, a few days later, a second shot had been fired across Galileo’s bows. Roberto Bellarmino, a cardinal battle-hardened in the fight against heresy, and the Jesuits’ most distinguished theologian, had invited him for a friendly chat. Any continued promotion of heliocentrism as established fact rather than merely as a hypothesis, Bellarmino had politely explained, would be met with a signal lack of enthusiasm by the Inquisition. The astronomer, recognising the glint of steel behind his host’s smile, had bowed to the inevitable. ‘The same Galileo,’ it was recorded by Bellarmino’s secretary, ‘acquiesced in this injunction and promised to obey.’²⁸

A demand for empirical evidence had gone head to head with wild supposition – and the demand for empirical evidence had won. That, at any rate, was how it appeared to the Inquisition. Speculation that the earth revolved around the sun continued to be perfectly licit; nor – despite the urging of the committee established to investigate it – was heliocentrism itself condemned as heretical. Only provide proof, Bellarmino had assured Galileo, and the Church would reconsider its opinion. ‘But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me.’²⁹ This, to Galileo’s frustration, was a challenge he found himself unable to meet.

As the years slipped by, so his impatience only mounted. Painfully aware that Protestant astronomers were busy making the case for heliocentrism without risk or censorship, he longed to redeem the papacy from an error that he dreaded was making it a laughing stock. The argument was one that Galileo, following the papal election of 1623, had been able to press directly on the pope himself. Urban VIII, convinced that there would be no harm in his friend revisiting the issue of heliocentrism, provided only that he made sure to label it a hypothesis, was persuaded to give him the nod. For six years Galileo worked on his masterpiece: a fictional dialogue between an Aristotelian and a Copernican. Obedient to Urban’s instructions, he made sure to balance his book’s transparent enthusiasm for helio-centrism by citing the pope himself, who had sternly warned what folly it would be for any natural philosopher ‘to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own’.³⁰ This statement, though, in the Dialogue, was put into the mouth of the Aristotelian: a man of such transparent stupidity that Galileo had named him Simplicio. The pope, alerted to what his friend had written, was persuaded by advisors hostile to Galileo that all his generosity was being flung back in his face.³¹ Conscious as only an Italian nobleman could be of his own personal dignity, Urban felt himself called upon as well to defend the authority of the Universal Church. Galileo, summoned to Rome by the Inquisition, was put on trial. On 22 June 1633, he was condemned for having defended as ‘probable’ the hypothesis that ‘the Earth moves and is not the centre of the world’.³² Dressed in the white robe of a penitent, and kneeling arthritically before his judges, he abjured in a shaking voice all his heresies. His book was placed on the index of books that it was forbidden Catholics to read. Galileo himself was sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition. Spared their dungeons by Urban, the most celebrated natural philosopher in the world spent the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest.

The entire debacle had been a concatenation of misunderstandings, rivalries and wounded egos – but the scandal of it, all the same, reverberated across Christendom. The stakes appeared to many ferociously high. It had never been the rival claims of scripture and natural philosophy that were at issue: for, as Cardinal Bellarmino had pointed out back in 1616, both served to confirm that definite backing for Copernicus did not exist. Nor even, in the final reckoning, was it an argument about whether the sun moved: for a much more seismic issue was at stake. Galileo had been put on trial as Catholic fortunes, amid the killing fields of Germany, appeared in desperate straits. A succession of dramatic victories won by the Lutheran king of Sweden in defence of his fellow heretics had brought him almost as far south as the Alps. Even though the Swedish king himself had been killed in battle in 1632, Catholic fortunes still hung very much in the balance. Urban, snarled in a complex web of alliances and rivalries, was in no mood to cede an inch of his authority to a supercilious and egocentric natural philosopher. This in turn ensured that Protestants – whose dread of where the course of war in Germany might lead was no less than Catholics’ – would attribute to the pope the blackest motives. Rather than a desperate attempt by the papacy to shore up its authority, they saw instead in the condemnation of Galileo an illustration of everything that they most detested and feared about the Roman Church. In 1638, when John Milton, a young English Puritan, visited Italy, he made a point of visiting Florence. ‘There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.’³³ This, in the years to come, was how Protestants would consistently portray their Catholic opponents: as fanatics too bigoted to permit the study of the heavens. Galileo, meanwhile, they hailed as one of their own. A martyr to superstition, he was also a titan: one who, in the noblest tradition of Luther, had dispelled with the brilliance of his discoveries the murk of popery and Aristotle.

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.