China between the Ancients and the Moderns

Abstract

Historians of seventeenth-century Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns have recently shown how, from beginning, it was not limited to questions of literary value but was tied up with changing notions of progressive history, historiography, philology, humanism, science, and reading culture.1 One line of inquiry that has been surprisingly neglected, however, is role that Asia played in this debate about European identity. Although many have observed that discovery of new lands coincided with philological re-discovery of there has been yet no comprehensive attempt to relate the fissure . . . between imitation and scholarship, rhetoric and philology, literature and set in motion by quarrel to contemporaneous opening up of worlds beyond Europe.2 Following John Elliott's lead in The Old World and New, scholars have indeed remained skeptical of real impact of other cultures on European thought through seventeenth century.3 If, however, new worlds in Asia, Africa, and America initially made little difference to Europeans because they were rapidly assimilated to tradition and written into Christian genealogical narratives about heathen antiquity, such assimilation became increasingly difficult as century wore on.4It is aim of this paper to show that quarrel between ancients and usually discussed within parameters of European tradition was as much about historical significance of other civilizations. The English quarrel between William Temple and William Wotton, in particular, was to a significant degree a quarrel about relative cultural achievements of China as an extension of debate on and modern civilizations. The paper proposes that, in a strong sense, seventeenth-century debate about China produced quarrel-i.e., that numerous published bulletins and reports on China that captured imagination of seventeenth-century Europe contributed to historiographical crisis that goes by name of quarrel between ancients and moderns.5In a seminal essay on importance of China to European understanding of history, Edwin J. Van Kley suggests that Perhaps most serious challenge to traditional scheme of world history and factor most instrumental in changing that scheme was 'discovery' of ancient Chinese history in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 World history-or universal history-as traditionally understood was derived from Bible, covered ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Western Christendom, and began with creation. Ever since Renaissance, however, this traditional understanding of world history had come under increasing challenge, as rediscovery of classical texts led to new conceptions of pagan antiquity and its relationship to sacred Christian history. The dominant intellectual response to challenge of pagan history was to accommodate new knowledge about pagans within structures of traditional history, but by seventeenth century it was becoming increasingly difficult to square information pouring in, not only about world of western antiquity but also about non-European world, with Christian doctrine.Because traditional universal was geographically limited, but chronologically universal, chief problem posed by pagan history had to do less with remapping geographical boundaries of world than redrawing its temporal limits.7 The problem was that geographical expansion often seemed to lead to chronological expansion as well. The furor caused by Isaac Lapeyrere's 1655 Praeadamitae, which posited existence of pre-adamites who peopled world before biblical Adam on basis of greater antiquity of Chaldeans, Mexicans, Peruvians, and Chinese, illustrates how conjectural prehistory based on pagan records could unsettle very basis of orthodox Christian history centered on historical and theological primacy of Jews. …