by Peter Watson
With this in mind, he compiled The Four Books. This was his way of ensuring that Neo-Confucianism, his approach to lixue, was maintained and spread. He grouped together four books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and two chapters called The Great Learning (Daxue) and The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), excerpted from the Han compilation known as The Book of Rites. These four works, he said, should form the basis of education, together with interpretive commentaries which he provided, and the nine other Confucian classics. And indeed, this system soon dominated education. A few short years after his death, his editings of the Confucian classics were officially designated the standard for the civil service examinations and remained so until the examinations were abolished in 1905.
The return to Confucianism was more than a change in philosophy: it marked a change in sensibility, too, and one that helped to create the Song renaissance. The ornate, fantastic, otherworldly aspect of Buddhism disappeared, to be replaced by a more practical rationalism, a more purely intellectual world–contemplative and learned and suspicious of all that had gone before. It was a freedom, a freedom that resulted not just in an efflorescence of the civilised arts but, more relevant to the subject of this book, new forms of art and learning: poems set to music, a series of great encyclopaedias and anthologies, landscape painting, the garden, the first known treatise on forensic medicine, archaeology, critical history, social history and, eventually, the novel.
The Painting Academy, which had been founded as a section of the imperial university during the Five Dynasties period (a series of brief military dictatorships, 907–960, which saw incursions from the outside), was made an independent institution by the emperor Song Huizong (r. 1101–1126).61 He also improved the status of the visual artist by introducing painting as one of the examinations for entry into the civil service. The question invariably consisted of a line from the classics, which had to be illustrated in an original way. Marks were awarded for ingenuity of composition rather than for life-like reproduction of natural objects. One has always to remember that, in China, where writing was carried out with a brush, rather than a pen, literature and painting were much closer to each other than they were in, say, the West of a later age. Each activity was a different form of brushmanship. Endymion Wilkinson says that at one point calligraphy (shufa) was regarded as more important than painting.
Landscape painting began to replace animal and figure painting towards the end of the Five Dynasties period, and by the late tenth and eleventh centuries it was the dominant art form. This partly had to do with the growth of cities in Song China, where country (and particularly mountain) landscapes were a distant rarity. But their attraction for the literati, the educated jinshi, was in their evocation of the contemplative life, emphasising the clear austerity and harshness of Chinese mountains, with their snow and clouds. It was, in effect, a romantic, nostalgic and deliberate return to the Confucian ideals of simplicity, conciseness, calm.
Related to landscape painting was the wholly Chinese idea of the designed garden. The rise of gardening, Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell tell us, ran parallel to the art of landscape painting. ‘Its roots lie in Taoism, that perennial call to return to nature, in both an inner and an outer sense, but Buddhism also encouraged the trend.’62 Many Buddhist areas of instruction included parks and wealthy converts began a tradition of leaving their gardens to the faith.63 By Song times, the Chinese garden had become an attempt at a genuine work of art, an expression of man’s relation with the natural world. There were certain rules that were supposed to lie behind the design of a garden but, unlike later European gardens, say, this did not lead to conformity. There must be shan shui, or mountains and water (wild rocks and a pond), plus flowers, trees and some form of decorative architecture–bridges, a pavilion, or even just walls. The garden also formed part of the house–the ‘Well of Heaven’, the inner courtyard, was integral to daily life, which moved inside and outside without a thought. All palaces faced south.64 The objects in the garden also had a symbolic quality, as aids to meditation. Water was central. There were no lawns, flowers were never patterned–instead, individual plants were placed next to craggy rocks. And there was a complex symbolism of flowers. For example, the chrysanthemum, the flower of autumn, ‘stands for retirement and culture’; the water lily, ‘rising stainless from its bed of slime’, stands for purity and truth; the bamboo, ‘unbroken by the fiercest storm’, represents suppleness and strength but also lasting friendship and hardy age.65 ‘Asymmetrical and spontaneous, the Chinese garden is a statement of faith in Nature as well as an admission of the lowly place that mankind has in the natural order of things.’66
Like landscape painting and gardening, archaeology became an organised activity much earlier in China than elsewhere. Bronzes and jades dating from the second millennium BC were discovered during the reign of Huizong in Anyang, the chief Shang city, north of what is now the Yellow river in Hebei. This fostered a fashion in antiquities but it also stimulated an interest in the ancient inscriptions found on the objects, both for the information contained and for the styles of writing and how they changed. This led to the practice of critical archaeology and epigraphy. A treatise on ancient bells and tripods was published at this time and, in 1092, Lu Dalin released his Archaeological Plates, which attempted to classify and date a series of bronzes from the second and first millennia BC.67 Books on ancient coins also started to appear and a husband and wife team produced their Catalogue of the Inscriptions on Stone and Bronze, a record of two thousand ancient inscriptions.
There was a resurgence of historical writing under the Song but here too, under Neo-Confucian influence, it involved a return to an earlier literary sensibility. This was the so-called ‘ancient style’ (gu wen), which embodied a recognition of earlier literary qualities and wasn’t ashamed to resurrect them. In doing so, however, authors such as Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) rewrote earlier histories, such as the History of the Tang (which became the New History of the Tang, 1060) but in the process turned what had been fairly routine, official (and largely anonymous) records into far more rigorous, evaluative and scientific works, of far more value than the earlier varieties. The most impressive and famous of these critical histories was that written between 1072 and 1084 by Sima Guang, the Complete Mirror of the Illustration of Government. This is a history of China from 403 BC to AD 959, but it was less the extraordinary range of the book which impressed later scholars than its use of sources: of its 354 chapters, no fewer than thirty consisted of critical notes discussing the reasons why the author drew the conclusions he did, when different sources said different things. Sima Guang went to extraordinary lengths to check the grounding for all the events he recorded, in the process putting Herodotus to shame.
The overall impact of the examination system, and the scholar-elite which it engendered, may ultimately be gauged from the fact that the Northern Song is now famed as an age of ‘consummate poetry and strong bellestric and historical prose writing, of magnificent painting and calligraphy, of matchless ceramics, and of a full complement of what the Chinese looked upon as minor arts’.68 The same is true of book production, ‘Song printings’ being the most sought-after examples. It was a time when scholarship began to acquire some of its modern rigour, when the first encyclopaedias appeared which are valuable even today. ‘The Song elite had progressed far beyond the “cabinet of curiosities” stage, still current in Europe at a much later date, and were engaged in intelligent research concerned with identification, etymology, dating and interpretation.’69 The Song was also a high point in mathematics, science, medicine and technology. Maritime technology, bridges, military apparatus–all these made great strides under the Song.70
As F. W. Mote describes Song culture, all those things done with the writing brush, from poetry to painting to calligraphy, to writing history or critical studies of the classics, from governing and even writing out medical prescriptions ‘were the proper activities for the scholars…They lived by the brush, and all
that came from their brushes belonged to high culture.’71 While this may not be a surprise, what was surprising was the fact that many other activities of mind and hand–sculpture, ceramics, lacquer-work–were regarded as the work of artisans and craftsmen, and thus did not belong to high culture. Later Chinese shared the Song hierarchy of cultural values well on into the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the Song age did see fantastic new developments right across the board: the arts, technology, the natural sciences (an astronomical clock in the eighth century), social institutions, philosophy. This approach was epitomised by the career of Shen Gua (1031–1095), whom Mote calls ‘perhaps the most interesting character in all of Chinese scientific history’.72 Shen was a widely travelled careful observer who took particular note of fossilised sea creatures in the Daihang mountains, and realised that mountains had once been sea beds. But he also made advances in astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, pharmacology and cartography. He produced the first detailed atlas of China, calculated contours to within an inch of absolute accuracy and was the first to write a meticulous account of the magnetic compass as it came to be applied to maritime navigation.73
Shen highlights the fact that, as we approach the end of this second section of the book, we can see that the great civilisations, the most important sources of ideas and inventions, at the end of what Westerners call the Middle Ages, were China, India and Islam. Asia was the dominant landmass, in terms of both political power, size of population, technological ingenuity and abstract thought. Europe was a long way from both the currents of civilisation and the great trade routes. But long-term, systemic change was under way. The thirteenth century was remarkable for many things, as we shall presently see, but as the American scholar Janet Abu-Lughod has pointed out, it was remarkable in particular for being a ‘hinge’ century. ‘In region after region there was an efflorescence of cultural and artistic achievement. Never before had so many parts of the Old World simultaneously reached cultural maturity. In China, the most glorious pottery ever produced, Song celadon-ware, was being created, and in Persia glowing turquoise-glazed bowls constituted the only serious rival. In Mamluk Egypt, craftsmen were fashioning elaborate furniture inlaid with complex arabesques of silver and gold…The great Hindu temple complexes of south India climaxed at the same time. Almost everywhere there was evidence of a surfeit of wealth being devoted to ornamentation and symbolic display…In all areas, prosperity…yielded high culture.’74
Yet, as she also points out, this was the century when, in western Europe, the great cathedral-building movement reached its apex. In other words, Europe was on the rise. Why the East faltered after the thirteenth century, and then fell steadily behind, is a question that still taxes historians of all nations. In the wake of the events at the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, it is arguably the most important historical legacy facing the world today.
PART THREE
THE GREAT HINGE OF HISTORY
European Acceleration
15
The Idea of Europe
To Chapter 15 Notes and References
In the tenth century AD, the famous Arab geographer Mas‘udi had this to say about the peoples of ‘Urufa’, as Muslims then called Europe: ‘The warm humour is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy…The farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.’1 His slightly later colleague, Sa‘id ibn Ahmad, qadi of the Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, wasn’t much more impressed either. According to Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar, in 1068, two years after the battle of Hastings, Ibn Ahmad wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations. He found that there had been eight nations that had contributed most to knowledge–including the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and, of course, the Arabs. On the other hand he found that the north Europeans ‘have not cultivated the sciences [and] are more like beasts than like men…they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence…’2 Even as late as the thirteenth century, the Oxford scholar Roger Bacon had his eyes fixed firmly on the East. He petitioned the pope, Clement IV, to mount a grand project–an encyclopaedia of new knowledge in the natural sciences. He had in mind the great number of translations then being made from the Arabic, and he recommended the study of Oriental languages, and of Islam.
By the time of his near-namesake, Francis Bacon, however, the world was very different. A massive change had come over Europe, some time between AD 1000 and AD 1500, and the continent had drawn decisively ahead. Francis Bacon believed there was little to be learned from outside Europe.
What had happened? Why had ‘the West’ drawn ahead? What features of this ‘frigid’, ‘gross’ and ‘apathetic’ people, as Ibn Ahmad also called Europeans, were turned round, to create the conditions we see about us today, where the West undisputably leads the world in terms of wealth, technological advance, and religious and political freedoms? In the realm of ideas–the central concern of this book–the change that came over Europe, sometime between the year AD 1000 and, say, 1500, when the discovery of America had been achieved (by west Europeans), is probably the most fascinating question of all, eclipsing all others in importance and giving shape to the latest epoch of history. It is all the more important, in view of the fact that, even today, there is no real answer. There are plenty of theories, but they are all more or less conjectural.
It is in fact surprising that more inquiry has not been devoted to this subject, but from such scholarship as exists, the answers divide into six. They all agree that there was a fundamental change in Europe between 1000 and 1500, and that that is when the ‘West’ first began. But this is as far as the agreement goes. The case for any one decisive factor has yet to be proved.
This chapter, which is in some ways a hinge of the book, will be somewhat different from the others. Whereas the other chapters describe ideas as they occurred, and attempt to assess their importance and place in chronology, this chapter stands back and looks at the possible context of ideas, trying to arrive at some sort of answer to the question as to why, for the remainder of history, the great preponderance of influential ideas arose in Europe, and western Europe at that. In doing so, we shall anticipate some of the developments covered in more detail in later chapters but the immediate aim here is to show why Europe became the home for so many of the ideas that have dominated our lives for the past thousand years.
An attempt at a geographical answer was made by the French historian, of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel. In two books, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and Civilisation and Capitalism, in particular volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, he sought to explain why Europe took on the character that it did. He thought, for example, that there was a broad relationship between foodstuffs and the civilisations of the world. Rice, he found, ‘brought high populations and [therefore] strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’, in Asia. On the other hand, ‘maize is a crop that demands little effort’, which allowed the native Americans much free time to construct the huge pyramids for which these civilisations have become famous. He thought that a crucial factor in Europe’s success was its relatively small size, the efficiency of grain, and the climate. The fact that so much of life was indoors, he said, fostered the development of furniture, which brought about the development of tools; the poorer weather meant that fewer days could be worked, but mouths still had to be fed, making labour in Europe relatively expensive. This led to a greater need for labour-saving devices, which, on top of the development of tools, contributed first to the scientific revolution, and later to the industrial revolution.3
In his book on the Mediterranean, Braudel tried to be a little more specific, and attempted to identify those features of the sea which contributed to Europe’s rise. He noted, for instance, that the sea is old geologically, and deep, with little in the way of coastal shelves. This ‘
tiredness’ of the water and the lack of shallow seas made the Mediterranean relatively poor in fish, prompting long-distance trade. The proximity of mountains to the coastlines, in particular the Alps, meant that people from the upland villages migrated to the coasts, bringing a different technology with them. Migration was a major factor in the spread of ideas and this was facilitated in the Mediterranean (a) because the sea was east–west, in line with the prevailing winds, making sailing much easier; (b) because the islands and general configuration of the Mediterranean divided it up into much smaller areas–the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Ionian Sea, the gulf of Sirte–which made navigation and sailing even easier; (c) because the sea was ringed with a number of peninsulas (the Iberian, the Italian, the Greek), the geographical coherence of which promoted strong feelings of nationalism, which in turn fuelled international competition; (d) because the central Alps provided the source for three rivers–the Rhine, the Danube and the Rhône/Saône–which supported transport into the very heart of Europe. The relatively small size of the continent, plus the fact that the three great rivers penetrated so deeply, encouraged the development of roads, to fill in the final phase of the transportation network. The roads, like the navigable seas and the great rivers, meant that the heartland of Europe was opened up as no heartland had been opened up before, with the result that immigrants–with their fresh ways and different ideas–were a more common sight in Europe than elsewhere.
