Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  The society that "won" Terrenz was the Jesuits. Only six months after his induction into the academy, he entered a Jesuit novitiate, one of very few ever entitled to boast that the Jesuits were not the most selective club he had ever joined.

  Few could have predicted just how dramatically the lives of colleagues Galileo and Terrenz would diverge. In China, Terrenz opened doors for his Jesuit colleagues with his astronomical prowess; Galileo unintentionally closed doors with his scientific genius, eventually sealing off hope of rapprochement with church bureaucrats. As the Catholic Church's mounting hostility toward Galileo soured his feelings for his once beloved Jesuits, his former pupil turned to a famed Protestant astronomer to form one of Europe's odder partnerships. And by the time the almost seventy-year-old Galileo escaped the Roman Inquisition by abjuring belief that the earth orbited the sun, the much younger Terrenz had already been dead for three years.

  That a talented mathematician and astronomer like Terrenz ended up in China had much to do with the strategic vision of Matteo Ricci. Before Terrenz ever entered the door of a Jesuit novitiate, Ricci had already begun clamoring for just such talent for the China mission:

  Nothing could be more advantageous than to send to Peking [Beijing] a father or brother who is a good astronomer. I say astronomer, because as far as geometry, horology, and astrolabes are concerned, I know them well enough and have all the books I need on these subjects. But [the Chinese] do not make so much of these things as they do of planetary phenomena, the calculation of eclipses, and especially of one who can make up a calendar. The emperor maintains, I think, more than two hundred persons at great expense to prepare the calendar each year.-.-.-. This would enhance our reputation, give us freer entry into China, and assure us greater security and liberty.8

  Despite the Jesuits' vaunted reputation for mobility and rapid response to opportunities, Ricci's appeal for an astronomer went unaddressed. He waited. No one came. He died without ever seeing his goal realized. And his successor as superior of the handful of Jesuits then working in China likely would have died waiting as well had he not resorted to more aggressive measures.

  The French Jesuit Nicolas Trigault was freed from his duties and dispatched to Rome by his Jesuit superior to plead the China team's case in person. It was a long trip, almost as long as his wish list. For years Jesuit reinforcements had trickled into China at a pace reminiscent of Lincei Academy inductions: fewer than two a year on average. In Rome, Trigault straight-facedly pressed a resource-strapped Jesuit general for two dozen or more recruits. Rather than dismissing the request outright, the general allowed Trigault to barnstorm Jesuit Europe soliciting interest.

  Ricci's request for a good astronomer had been ignored in Rome for more than a decade; all at once it was answered in spades. Galileo's protege Terrenz volunteered. So did the German mathematician Johann Adam Schall von Bell, a man destined to lend new meaning to the word polymath. As Trigault's pitch made the rounds, it became increasingly clear that Jesuit Europe might be emptied of mathematical and scientific talent if every change-ready, magis-driven volunteer was allowed to enlist. While Terrenz, Schall, and others were included in the mission team, one of the most prominent of the post-Clavius generation, Christopher Scheiner, instead received the following letter from the Jesuit general: "Your Reverence in your letter has explained your inclination towards the mission in China.-.-.-. Finally, I have decided that for the greater glory of God and for the good of the Society it is preferable for Your Reverence to stay in Europe, and energetically promote mathematical studies. Thus, you will be able to do by means of your disciples in China what you will not be able to do yourself."9

  Even without Scheiner, Trigault's haul was an enormous coup for Jesuit China: he recruited twenty-two men, enough to increase Jesuit manpower in China by 50 percent. But any selfcongratulatory glee would be short-lived. He left Europe with his twenty-two recruits; he would arrive in Asia with far fewer.

  Trigault and his recruits left Europe in 1618, five years after he had departed China. He reentered the Chinese mainland in 1621 with Johann Terrenz Schreck, Adam Schall, and two others-four of the original twenty-two, one recruit for every one and a half years of his grueling six-year roundtrip. The horrific journey had taken a crushing toll. Dutch pirates scuttled a quarter of the convoy; a contagious fever raced through another ship, claiming a couple of the Jesuits and dozens of the other passengers and crew. Other Jesuits were held back in the transit port of Goa, too ill to travel further or diverted to more pressing needs. Trigualt's recruiting triumph turned into a personal, poignant tragedy: the Jesuit dead included his brother and his cousin.

  And what of Christopher Scheiner, whose request to join the China mission had been refused by the Jesuit general? To his credit, he became a Clavius-like mentor to a next generation of "brilliant and eminent" Jesuit mathematicians and scientists; he also joined the roster of Jesuit innovators by helping invent the pantograph, a map-duplicating tool. But Scheiner also made short work of the friendship Clavius and Terrenz had forged with Galileo. Tangling with Galileo over interpretations of sunspots, comets, and other phenomena, an overmatched Scheiner and his Jesuit colleague Orazio Grassi-writing under the dashing pseudonym Lothario Sarsi-were routed by Galileo in an angry exchange of academic publications. For Galileo it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was already a controversial, suspect character to church bureaucrats; the last thing he needed was a very public, hostile food fight with two prominent, church-affiliated astronomers.

  It was the last thing the Jesuits needed as well. Once Terrenz set to work in China it was abundantly clear why Ricci had called so urgently for skilled astronomers. A large, high-profile imperial bureau struggled each year to produce a workable calendar-no great feat today but nightmarishly complex in Ming dynasty China. The Chinese calendar required not the quadrennial extra day but a full extra month approximately every twenty years. Mailing in Clavius's reformed Gregorian calendar was not an acceptable solution. Cumbersome and flawed though it was, the Chinese calendar, reckoned in an unbroken line from 2697 B.C., symbolized a rich, proud history. And it assumed great importance in a culture deeply rooted in a vision of integral harmony of heaven and earth. As Tian Zi (son of heaven), the emperor incarnated that harmony. An accurate calendar helped signify that heaven's mandate remained intact, and with every eclipse it became more obvious that the calendar was anything but accurate.

  That Terrenz had such a clear opportunity to make a high-profile impact must have made it all the more painful and nerve-wracking that his letters to his mentor Galileo requesting advice went unanswered. Terrenz in faraway China couldn't have known how thoroughly the disputes with Scheiner and Grassi had alienated Galileo. Galileo's stubborn silence ultimately pushed the Jesuit Terrenz to the near unthinkable: collaboration with a Protestant. Through a Jesuit intermediary, Terrenz wrote Johannes Kepler, the other giant of early-seventeenth-century astronomy. To Kepler's great benefit, as a Protestant he was already a heretic to Catholic Church bureaucrats. So while a harried Galileo squirmed, Kepler promoted the same heliocentric theories without the same worries about church condemnation.

  Unlike the alienated Galileo, Kepler responded promptly to Terrenz's request for help with a long document outlining calculation approaches for him to try. He closed with fond wishes for the Jesuit effort in China. Terrenz's forging of a multinational, warm-hearted, ecumenical partnership so that he could leverage one discipline (astronomy) in order to achieve a totally unrelated result (conversion of China) wasn't business as usual in seventeenth-century Europe. But it was Jesuit ingenuity at its best: an outside-the-box approach that opened the door to future progress in a way that "business as usual" solutions never could have.

  Ricci had called for scientific reinforcements in 1605. It seems somewhat of an overstatement to claim that Kepler's 1627 letter arrived just in time. Yet in a sense that's exactly what happened. The post-Ricci years had seen Jesuits marginalized if not treated with open hostility in China. The al
most three-hundred-year-old Ming dynasty was suffering prolonged death throes. Whatever forward momentum had once energized the dynasty had long since given way to unproductive internal jockeying for influence among court eunuchs and mandarins. Jesuit fortunes rose and fell as the influence of their mandarin supporters waxed and waned. Even if Terrenz had arrived in China a decade earlier he would have been blocked from any meaningful participation in scientific debate. But in the late 1620s, the Jesuits' stars aligned for the first time in years. A Christian mandarin was appointed vice president of the Board of Rites and was charged with calendar maintenance and reform. The talented Johann Terrenz Schreck had done his homework, ably coached from afar by the Protestant Kepler. And, conveniently, an eclipse was expected in the summer of 1629. Terrenz's accurate prediction of that June 21, 1629, eclipse in a contest against Chinese astronomers definitively demonstrated the superiority of Jesuit astronomical methods and won the Jesuits a mandate to reform the Chinese calendar.

  The emperor's confidant

  This rendering of Jesuit astronomer and cannon manufacturer Johann Adam Schall von Bell was published the year after his death by his Jesuit colleague Athanasius Kircher. Schall's garment is emblazoned with the golden crane, a sign reserved for those who had attained the status of first-rank mandarin at China's imperial court. Schall was the first, and likely the only, westerner to be so honored.

  It came just in time. Terrenz died within a year of the 1629 eclipse. So did Kepler. Galileo might well have joined them three years later-and not by natural means-had he not knelt before Vatican inquisitors to forswear belief in heliocentricity.

  Schall, the calendar reformer

  It had taken seventeen years from Ricci's first letter requesting a qualified Jesuit astronomer for Terrenz to reach China. Trigault's European recruiting trip secured not only the talent needed to achieve a great Jesuit breakthrough but also the backup to fill the breach created by Terrenz's untimely death. His shipmate, Johann Adam Schall von Bell, immediately assumed the vacated role on the calendar-reform commission.

  Over the next thirty-five years, Schall propelled the Jesuits to the peak of their prominence in China. Xavier never reached the Chinese mainland. Ricci never made it past the emperor's outer courtyard. Schall was to entertain the emperor as a regular houseguest.

  Schall, the cannon maker

  Not long after Schall assumed the role of calendar reformer, he was diverted to a more pressing operation-a more far-fetched opportunity than he, Xavier, or even the imaginative Ricci could ever have anticipated: manufacturing cannons to defend a dynasty. Imperial bureaucrats had decades earlier seen the weapon demonstrated by the Dutch and had accordingly dubbed it Hung-I p'ao (cannon of the red-haired barbarians). But arrogance had prevented them from adopting the technology and mounting an armaments program until threatening Manchu armies made the need for cannons as obvious as the need for calendar reform. And as cannon manufacture was a European craft, it struck his Chinese hosts that the same Schall who fashioned western astronomical equipment could construct western cannons as well. Schall's protestations about what did and didn't constitute a priestly occupation were undermined, ironically, by the very strategy that had fueled the Jesuits' ascent in the first place. It might have been clear to Jesuits that astronomy fit their broad vision of helping souls while manufacturing cannons didn't; Schall's hosts didn't appreciate the distinction.

  Oddly enough, and probably unknown to his royal Chinese employers, it wasn't Schall's first experience with cannons-or with red-haired barbarians, for that matter. In 1622, his Chinese language studies in Macao had been rudely interrupted by a Dutch fleet scattering the island's small Portuguese garrison to put ashore a landing party and secure the island. With Portuguese military resistance all but nonexistent, Jesuit scholars postponed class to save the day. Manning a few old cannons deployed long ago on the grounds now occupied by their college, the Jesuit "soldiers," Schall included, managed not only to fire a cannon but by sheer luck to hit something-an enemy target, no less. In the ensuing confusion the Portuguese rallied to drive the Dutch back to their boats. The implications of the victory were all out of proportion to the size of the skirmish. Had the Dutch-who were also Calvinist-taken and held Macao, they would certainly have ended Jesuit efforts in China. Moreover, while Chinese authorities had long refused Portuguese requests to fortify a trading post so close to their mainland, the Portuguese scuffle with the Dutch changed Chinese thinking. Indeed, even as the Dutch and British slowly squeezed Portuguese power from the Pacific, the fortified Macao remained safely in Portuguese hands until its negotiated return to China nearly four hundred years later. And it was all thanks to the Jesuits (sort of).

  The incident apparently provided Schall with all the training he ever needed in cannon technology. He not only supervised the manufacture of nearly five hundred cannons, but in a fit of unpriestly zeal he also drafted a defensive plan for the imperial capital and published a Chinese-language treatise on the manufacture and use of guns and mines. Unfortunately for the emperor, Schall's cannon and military strategy were never even tested. Time had come for rats to desert a sinking Ming regime. While some troops fled, others defected to the traitorous bandit rebel Li Tzu-ch'eng. The last Ming emperor committed suicide outside the imperial precincts while Li proclaimed himself emperor. The pretender's reign was short-lived. Manchu armies, bolstered by yet more disaffected Ming troops, routed Li within weeks to claim an imperial city that had been reduced to flames. The six-year-old emperor Shun-chih was enthroned to inaugurate the Qing dynasty in 1644.

  And Adam Schall was left to ponder the prospect of presenting himself to the conquering Manchu not as a humble employee of the Calendar Bureau but as artillery manufacturer in chief for the defeated regime.

  Schall, the "Master of Universal Mysteries"

  But the Qing didn't launch their dynasty with retribution or a ruthless purge of state enemies real and imagined. While Manchu armies fanned out to assert authority over China's sprawling provinces, order was restored in the capital and the imperial bureaucracy was reinvigorated. By most measures it was change for the better after years of moribund Ming rule, even if ethnic Chinese privately resented the edict to adopt the favored Manchu fashion of shaved head and pigtail. Adam Schall adopted the new hairstyle like everyone else. And in a strange twist, he found himself not censured for his military role in Ming dynasty China but promoted to head of the Bureau of Astronomy. While Schall and his Jesuit colleagues had long masterminded the bureau's efforts, official oversight and its attendant mandarin status had always been reserved for a Chinese. But the Manchu, perhaps because they were outsiders themselves, suffered no such prejudice.

  So after a momentary albeit anxious blip during the dynastic transition, Schall was once again a rising star. Honorifics piled up as he ascended through the nine grades of the mandarin hierarchy. By the time he joined the select inner circle of firstdivision/first-rank mandarins, he boasted titles ranging from the impressively esoteric "Master of Universal Mysteries" to the simpler but weightier "Imperial Chamberlain." His influence in the empire was unequaled by that of any European before or after him. Imagine the dismay of the Protestant Dutch ambassador ushered into the Chinese Council of State only to find the chief minister accompanied by "a Jesuit, with a long white beard, his head shaved and dressed in Tartar fashion. He is from Cologne on the Rhine, is named Adam Schall, and has been forty-six years in Peking [Beijing], enjoying great esteem with the Emperor of China."10 Presumably, the Dutch ambassador was spared Schall's fond recollection of last seeing the Dutch in Macao from the friendly end of a cannon barrel.

  Schall, the emperor's mafa

  Ricci's strategic gamble of using astronomy and western technology to win status was vindicated as Terrenz and Schall wedged themselves into courtly positions of influence thanks to their knowledge and expertise. But neither Ricci nor Schall himself could possibly have predicted that Schall's most influential position would not be director of the Astron
omy Bureau or "Imperial Chamberlain" but mafa. Schall rose through the Chinese hierarchy by prodigious intellectual horsepower and sheer resourcefulness, but when all was said and done it was as a trusted mafa, "grandpa," that he was most valued. The emperor Shun-chih was a little boy when Schall first met him, orphaned at an early age and installed by powerful, self-interested regents in a role he could not have understood in unfamiliar surroundings far from his homeland. It was no surprise that such a child would seek a surrogate mafa. Who knows why he chose Schall-though as a Jesuit Schall was at least better prepared to play the grandfatherly confidant than to manufacture cannons. Their unique relationship continued even after the emperor shucked his regents to assert some independent authority.

  Schall, the architect

  Schall's colleagues basked in his glow. "Would that we had a hundred Adams," one wrote, "for despite his distance he is so real a help to us that we need only to say that we are his companions and brothers and no one dares venture a word against us." 11 The Jesuits had always maintained a low profile in China to avoid provoking xenophobic outbursts. Their converts worshiped in inconspicuous chapels sheltered within the walls of Jesuit residences. But Schall's growing renown emboldened them. They decided to construct a hundred-foot-high baroquestyle church in the capital, Beijing's first major example of western architecture. With no one more qualified available, Schall the astronomer, mathematician, cannon maker, calendar reformer, and defense strategist became church architect and contractor.