The human master of the ceremonies who makes the World go round is the monarch of the Sinic universal state; and, in virtue of the superhuman scope of his function, the Emperor was officially styled the Son of Heaven; yet this Heaven who, in the Sinic Society, was the adoptive father of the magician-in-chief, was as pale as the sky on a frosty winter day in Northern China.
“Création savante de la mythologie politique, le Souverain d’En-haut n’a qu’une existence littéraire. Ce patron dynastique, chanté par les poètes de la cour royale, n’a jamais dû jouir d’un grand crédit auprès des ‘petites gens’, ainsi que semble le prouver l’échec [failure] de la propagande théocratique de Mö tseu [Mo-tse] [bracket in original; he lived early in the Warring States period, c 470-c 391 BC]. Confuciens ou Taoïstes ne lui accordent aucune considération. Pour eux, les seuls êtres sacrés, ce sont les Saints ou les Sages.”
[Footnote: Granet, op. cit., p. 587. [Cited previously as “Marcel Granet in his La Pensée Chinoise (Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre.”).] It will be seen that the Sinic philosophers were of one mind with their Indic confrères in assigning a higher rank in the hierarchy of Existence to a disciplined human being than to a volatile divinity. (For the Buddhist sages’ attitude towards the gods of the Vedic Pantheon see [page references for the same volume of the Study].)]
Indeed, this celestial stalking-horse of the human manipulator of the Sinic Universe had so faint a personality that, in the affiliated Far Eastern Society at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Christian Era, the Jesuit missionaries in China raised a storm [within the Church] when – in their eagerness to translate the doctrines of Christianity into terms that would be familiar and agreeable to their prospective converts – they employed the Chinese word for Heaven, T’ien, to render their Latin word Deus. In A.D. 1693 the Papal Vicar-General of the Chinese province of Fukien, Bishop Maigrot, issued an edict prescribing that Deus must henceforth be rendered in Chinese no longer by the single word T’ien (Heaven) but by the phrase T’ien Chu (the Lord of Heaven); in 1704 Bishop Maigrot’s edict was confirmed by a decree of Pope Clement XI; and the prospects of Catholicism in China were compromised – as it proved, beyond rehabilitation – when, in December 1706, Bishop Maigrot was summoned into the Emperor K’ang Hsi’s presence and was dismissed into banishment for his outrageous presumption in venturing to dispute with the Son of Heaven himself on the meaning of the Chinese word T’ien, although he was convicted by the Emperor, in a personal colloquy, of being quite unversed in the Sinic philosophy and even ignorant of the Chinese language.
This unhappy controversy might never have arisen if, in the Sinic World some two thousand years before the day of the Manchu Emperor K’ang Hsi and the French Bishop Maigrot, an enrichment of the Sinic conception of the magical order of the Universe [with the Emperor himself for the Universe’s hub] had not brought with it a proportionate impoverishment of the Sinic conception of the Godhead. For the T’ien whose personality was so faint that a Papal Vicar-General was unwilling to recognize in him a counterpart of the Christian Deus (notwithstanding the willingness of the Son of Heaven to wield his immense authority under an alleged mandate from this nebulous power) was an abstraction from an earlier Shangti (“Supreme Ancestor”) whose claim to have been a personal god would appear to be less open to doubt.
Even Shangdi was never represented with images or idols. Wikipedia: “During the Shang Dynasty (17th–11th centuries BCE) the Chinese called god Shangdi (上帝 ‘lord on high’) or Di (‘lord’), and during the Zhōu Dynasty (11th–3rd centuries BCE) Tian (‘heaven’).” The idea of the Mandate of Heaven appeared early in the Zhōu era. Tian neither neatly followed nor neatly replaced Shangdi. They are sometimes synonymous.
“A trend of ‘depersonalization’ of Shangdi began to appear, or at least grow, after the Warring States (戰國) period [ie from the time to which Toynbee is referring here] with the ascension of Daoism. Oddly, later Daoism appears to restore personality traits to Heaven, around 900 AD.”
Looking heavenwards: a Beauvais tapestry showing Jesuit astronomers with the Kangxi Emperor
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
April 4 2010 at 6:27 pm
Would Maigrot really have allowed the use of the unadulterated term Tian if it had been less impersonal? He could have insisted on its modification on the ground that it was too purely pagan. Perhaps, left to himself, he would not have approved the use of any existing Chinese term – but he may not have had the courage to go that far, since the Jesuits had been successful elsewhere with such compromises.
April 4 2010 at 10:08 pm
Catholics did embrace astronomy and here, as on other matters, Jesuits are in the vanguard.
Wikipedia, article on Galileo affair:
“Jesuit astronomers, experts both in Church teachings, science, and in natural philosophy, were at first skeptical and hostile to the new ideas. However, within a year or two the availability of good telescopes enabled them to repeat the observations. In 1611 Galileo visited the Collegium Romanum in Rome, where the Jesuit astronomers by that time had repeated his observations. Christoph Grienberger, one of the Jesuit scholars on the faculty, sympathized with Galileo’s theories, but was asked to defend the Aristotelian viewpoint by Claudio Acquaviva, the Superior General of the Jesuits. Not all of Galileo’s claims were completely accepted: Christopher Clavius [of the College], the most distinguished astronomer of his age, never was reconciled to the idea of mountains on the Moon, and outside the Collegium many still disputed the reality of the observations. [...]
Galileo became involved in a dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots with Christoph Scheiner, a prominent Jesuit [a German who visited Rome]. This became a bitter lifelong feud. Neither of them, however, was the first to recognise sunspots – the Chinese had already been familiar with them for centuries.”
April 4 2010 at 10:26 pm
No heavenly host or other Christmas decoration.
April 5 2010 at 12:43 am
Nothing but the obvious to do with the post. Yeats:
“Suddenly I saw the cold and rook delighting Heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild, that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?”
June 3 2010 at 8:45 pm
[...] The Jesuits in China June 3, 2010 The [Confucianising] Jesuit missionaries in China had to contend with two adverse forces: the jealousy of their Franciscan and Dominican rivals in the China mission-field and the ignorance of the Vatican and its representatives. It was the combined operation of these two forces that eventually brought the Jesuits’ work in China to naught. And this may perhaps explain why it was that the Jesuits failed in an enterprise in which the Early Fathers succeeded; for, although the rivalry between Jesuits and Friars in China has numerous parallels in the internal struggles within the bosom of the Early Christian Church in the Roman Empire, there is no parallel in this other chapter of Christian history to the obstacle which was placed in the Jesuits’ path in China by the Vatican’s ignorance of Far Eastern conditions. In order to translate this obstacle into Early Christian terms we should have to draw an imaginary picture of Origen and Clement doing their work at Alexandria under the authority of a supreme ecclesiastical Power whose seat was geographically remote from the Hellenic World, in some Syriac fastness into which the radiation of Hellenism had never penetrated. Supposing that our [Hellenising] Alexandrian Christian philosophers had been bound to render an account of their stewardship to a Holy Father whose see lay in the Yaman or in Hyrcania [Iran, Turkmenistan], we may conjecture that they would have been peremptorily called to order. Even as it was, Origen did not altogether escape the stigma of heresy, though the ecclesiastical judges before whose bar his theology had to appear had all been born and brought up in Origen’s own Hellenic environment and were therefore able to appreciate, in the light of their personal experience, the full strength of the case for a Christian policy of Hellenization. On this showing, it is not to be wondered at that the Jesuits’ policy of Confucianization should have shocked the Vatican, which had no understanding of, or taste for, the Confucian culture to which Ricci and his successors had been making their concessions. Some of these concessions could not fail to be startling to Latin minds which had not been compelled – by the challenge of a missionary’s life and work – to grapple with the problem of distinguishing between the sacrosanct essence of Christianity and its temporary Syriac and Hellenic and Western accidents. The Vatican’s ignorance and lack of imagination were, in fact, pardonable and perhaps even inevitable; but these venial faults of head and heart were none the less disastrous for the prospects of Catholicism in China, since they had the effect of deeply offending Chinese susceptibilities which the Jesuit missionaries had been scrupulously careful to spare. As a matter of fact the irreparable damage was not done by the Papal Legate [ambassador] de Tournon – a young and inexperienced Savoyard who was sent out to the Far East without any expert knowledge. The mortal offence was given by the Papal Vicar-General [deputy; should that be Vicar Apostolic?] in Fukien, Bishop Maigrot, who ought to have known better, since, as a resident in the Far East, he had as good an opportunity as the Jesuit missionaries of grasping the local situation and seeing how it appeared in Confucian eyes. The crisis was precipitated by Bishop Maigrot’s edict of A.D. 1693, and it was brought to a head by his audience with the Emperor on the 12th December, 1706, when the local representative of the head of the Western Catholic Church was publicly convicted, by the head of the Far Eastern universal state, of an utter ignorance of the Confucian philosophy. This was an exposure which the Jesuit propaganda in China could not retrieve and did not survive. Cold heaven [...]