Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  Taking the door that's open

  Needless to say, no one mistook Ricci for a Chinese Confucian scholar, despite his new attire. But the symbolism of his gesture was instantly apparent. Priestly black robes may have been an immediately recognizable symbol on the streets of Rome, but black robes meant nothing in China and only reinforced the separateness of these strange visitors from the West. Ricci's newly adopted attire, on the other hand, was as well understood in China as his black cassock had been in Rome: he was presuming to present himself as a scholar possessed of ideas worthy of respect and attention.

  Ricci soon found ways to back up his claims to be a man with unique wisdom to share. China had turned increasingly inward during the closing decades of the Ming dynasty. The country's applied sciences, once far superior to European technology, had long since ebbed. China's misfortune became Ricci's great opportunity. Not knowing what artifacts of western science and culture would interest his hosts, he had lugged along from Europe a most unusual bag of tricks. His residence soon became a cross between a curiosity shop, a museum, a university, and a salon for intellectual debate. Mathematicians discussed Euclidean geometry texts that Ricci had translated into Chinese. Educated visitors examined books, prisms, clocks, and sextants. Astronomers learned how the astrolabe could aid in calculating planetary and stellar motion. A world map particularly intrigued his visitors, because

  the Chinese, who had practically no commerce with foreign peoples, were grossly ignorant of the other parts of the world. Their own cosmographic tables bore the title of universal description of the whole world [but] reduced the extent of the earth to their own fifteen provinces; and on the seas painted around they set a few small islands, adding the names of the few kingdoms of which they might have heard, all of which kingdoms taken together would scarcely equal the smallest province of the Chinese Empire.11

  Ricci had not entered China to make maps, but he jumped at another opportunity to burnish his image-and that of the West. After all, Chinese world maps not only reflected poor under standing of world geography but also implicitly conveyed their prejudice that there wasn't much worth knowing beyond Chinese borders. Ricci drafted a new world map with country names written in Chinese characters. A botched first effort demonstrated the difficulty of shaking off a European mindset and successfully acculturating. He had represented the world the way Europeans envisioned it: Europe proudly dominated the center of the map; Asia was on the right, with China pushed into the periphery. It was an affront. While his Chinese counterparts admitted some ignorance of world geography, they knew this much: China, which meant "middle kingdom" in Chinese, was the center of the world. Ricci's map was wrong.

  Aiming high from the very beginning

  The resourceful Italian quickly bounced back with the simplest of solutions. Reorienting his perspective as one might do by turning a globe, he soon came up with a new map. This effort situated China squarely in the center of the world, exactly where his hosts knew their country should be. Ricci went further, annotating his map with explanatory descriptions-though not exactly the kind of information one usually expects from a map. His annotation for the Roman states, for example, read, "The Holy Father, who is celibate, and concerns himself only with the Catholic religion, residing in Rome. All the Europeans who are in the Roman Empire revere him." 12 All the Europeans revere him? Protestant followers of the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions might have had something to say about that, but one can forgive Ricci for judging this might not be the best moment to complicate his map tutorial by introducing the embarrassing drama of the Reformation that was unfolding at that moment back in Europe.

  The mapmaker, astronomer, and author had an agenda. Opportunistic though his approach was, it was not scattershot. His ultimate goal was an audience with the Chinese emperor. He must have harbored hopes of a grand coup, of converting the emperor and using the ruler's gravitational pull to attract millions of his Chinese subjects into the Christian fold. As absurd as the idea might seem today, it would have seemed perfectly logical to Ricci. After all, he had sailed from a Europe that had been transformed in precisely the same top-down fashion. Catholic England had suddenly become Protestant England because Henry VIII had decided it would. The same pattern had played itself out across the European continent in one variation or another. To Ricci's mind, a top-down strategy might produce the same result in Asia.

  Even if Ricci didn't manage to convert the emperor, he hoped to at least win formal approval or tacit tolerance of Jesuit work in China. Despite Ricci's growing renown among leading Chinese officials, Jesuit status remained tenuous at best. Xenophobic regional governors or bureaucrats could at any time deport the Europeans. Ricci instructed his colleagues to maintain a low profile. No bell ringing in the Chinese equivalent of the town square to attract crowds for fire-and-brimstone sermons, and no showy churches. Instead, Ricci and the handful of Jesuits who joined him built unostentatious chapels on the grounds of their private residences.

  It took Ricci twenty years from his arrival in Macao to reach the imperial city of Beijing. He had been on the move constantly, patiently cultivating a network of well-placed Chinese officials, always looking to secure some powerful bureaucrat's sponsorship for an imperial introduction.

  Court officials eventually agreed to present the emperor with Ricci's gifts: statues of the Madonna and Christ, two clocks, a world map, a spinet (a harpsichord-like musical instrument), and two prisms. The gifts were accompanied by a message from Ricci introducing himself, "a religious without wife or children and therefore seeking no favor; that, having studied astronomy, geography, calculus, and mathematics,-.-.-. would be happy to be of service to the emperor." 13

  The gifts were well chosen. The emperor was especially fascinated with a clock that chimed the hours. When it malfunctioned, Ricci was summoned to the imperial palace to teach the emperor's eunuchs how to repair it. It was the closest Ricci ever came to the imperial audience he craved. Still, reaching Beijing had been an impressive achievement in its own right. A Portuguese ambassador had traveled there almost a century prior to Ricci's arrival; the ambassador had been promptly escorted back to Hong Kong in a cage and expelled from China. There is no record of any other westerner arriving in between. In his final days, Ricci reportedly told his colleagues that they were "standing before an open door."

  Ricci died three years after Goes's death in Xuzhou. No one really knows where Goes was interred. Visitors to Beijing can still find Ricci's grave; he was the first westerner granted a burial plot in the imperial precincts. The governor of Beijing commissioned a gravestone and had it inscribed with the names of Ricci's prestigious acquaintances in China-the minister of rites, the minister of finance, and various other ministerial officials and bureaucrats. His passing was marked by the gathering of the two-thousandstrong Christian community he had established and nurtured in Beijing. If any crowd commemorated Goes's passing, it was only the one hovering near his deathbed to loot his few belongings.

  Ricci's unlikely life and accomplishments raise a number of questions. How did he make the imaginative, improbable strategic leaps from teaching astronomy to translating geometry to attempting to convert China? What inspired the decision, then the flexibility and self-confidence, to cast aside priestly habit and European habits to adopt a Chinese lifestyle? These questions and others like them take us to the very essence of Jesuit leadership and form the heart of later chapters.

  Developing "brilliant and eminent men"

  Jesuit scholar Christopher Clavius, who befriended Galileo and helped develop the Gregorian calendar still in use throughout the world today, is pictured here with the "cutting edge" tools of a Renaissance astronomer and mathematician.

  THE MATHEMATICIAN AND ASTRONOMER

  Christopher Clavius sticks out like a sore thumb alongside Benedetto de Goes and Matteo Ricci. During their lifetime, only the tiniest minority of Europeans ever ventured beyond the continent. Goes and Ricci had even done this adventurous minority one bett
er. When years-long ocean voyages finally deposited grateful and fearful travelers at colonial outposts, most were more than happy to call it journey's end-all but the likes of Goes and Ricci. They kept on going, traveling routes no European had ever explored. They logged thousands of miles even after reaching Asia, leading peripatetic lifestyles that seldom left them in any one place for longer than a year or two.

  The German Clavius is a far different story. He worked in the same job as a university professor for forty-eight years, forty-six of them in the same institution-the Collegio Romano run by the Jesuits. Most sixteenth-century Europeans didn't live to age forty-eight, much less work for that many years. The thought of doing any one job for so many years conjures up certain images, most of them unflattering-and few of them consistent with the adventure-ready likes of Goes and Ricci.

  He worked in the same job as a university professor for forty-eight years, forty-six of them in the same institution.

  But images of a stuffy, tired professor recycling yellowing lecture notes year after year are badly misplaced in Clavius's case. A drastically different image captures his life more effectively: that of a man marveling before a solar eclipse. It is said that Clavius witnessed an eclipse in 1560 as a twenty-three-year-old Jesuit trainee and resolved on his life's work that afternoon. He relentlessly pursued his passion for astronomy throughout his remaining years, bequeathing that passion to men such as Ricci. Indeed, one of Ricci's Jesuit successors accurately predicted a solar eclipse that darkened Beijing skies one afternoon in 1629, a coup that won the Jesuits an unprecedented appointment within the imperial observatory.

  Training recruits for a changing world

  Clavius couldn't possibly have known that astronomy might someday hold the key to Jesuit success in China. He had started his teaching career in a young Jesuit company that was enjoying phenomenal growth while still shaping its practices and strategies. With approximately a hundred colleges open globally, Jesuits were well on their way to building the world's largest privately organized school system. In the forty years since its founding, the Jesuit company itself had boomed from ten members to five thousand.

  Senior Jesuits gathered in Rome to hash out a strategic direction for their rapidly growing company. The mathematician Clavius ventured his own vision of the company they needed to build. Jesuits should become experts not only in theology and philosophy, the disciplines everyone expected priests to master, but also in languages, mathematics, and the sciences. The world was changing, and Jesuits needed to stay at the forefront by shining even in these minor but emerging disciplines. Clavius advocated master classes to position Jesuit trainees at the cutting edge of European scholarship. He argued that he and his colleagues needed to mold their recruits into

  brilliant and most eminent men, who, when they are distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems, to the great honour of the Society [of Jesus], will be a source of great fear to all enemies, and an incredible incitement to make the youth flock to us from all parts of the world.14

  Though his colleagues might have rolled their eyes at his bombastic rhetoric and tsked his lack of priestly modesty, most of them likely agreed. And those who didn't would have thought twice about tangling with Clavius's heavyweight intellect.

  more or than forty years, Clavius applied his passion and vision to molding recruits into "brilliant and eminent men" at the Jesuits' Collegio Romano, teaching the teachers, as it were. The college gathered many of the Jesuits' most promising trainees from across Europe; Clavius plucked the best and brightest of these for master classes in mathematics and astronomy. Matteo Ricci was likely one of the chosen. When Ricci was studying astronomy under Clavius, he had no idea that he was destined to work in China; nor did anyone in Europe have the faintest inkling of the sorry state of Chinese applied sciences until Ricci traveled there.

  Clavius advocated master classes to position Jesuit trainees at the cutting edge of European scholarship.

  Ricci wasn't studying astronomy as part of some elaborate plan to convert China, for Clavius's vision was at once simpler and even more extravagant than a quixotic plan to convert an Asian empire. Ricci, Clavius, and their Jesuit managers didn't stop to worry about what use higher math and astronomy would be to future priests. Like all teachers, Clavius believed that intellectual challenge in and of itself was turning his talented recruits into better people. As important as the facts learned was what was won through the very process of learning: discipline and dedication and willingness to see challenging problems through to their end; the wonder, curiosity, and creativity engendered by looking at the world through a different lens; and the confidence born of solving a problem that once seemed insoluble. Talented, well-trained recruits such as Ricci, once molded into "brilliant and eminent men," would find ways to make their own luck in the world.

  Discarding long-cherished beliefs for newly revealed truths

  Clavius not only molded these brilliant and eminent men, he was one. When a young Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei first visited Rome in 1587, he made pilgrimage to seek the blessing of Clavius, one of Europe's leading mathematicians. Clavius was impressed enough to give Galileo the boost every young academic craves; a good word from the well-respected Jesuit helped Galileo secure his first teaching post. Clavius had offered support even though he and Galileo came from different worlds-different universes, to be precise. Clavius's astronomy texts quite naturally defended the Catholic Church-approved Ptolemaic system, which had the sun, moon, stars, and planets revolving around an Earth that God had honored by fixing it at the center of the universe.

  But Galileo was slowly drifting away from this astronomical system that Clavius and every other loyal cleric accepted without question. By the early 1600s, Galileo had fashioned Europe's first modern telescope. Crude though the instrument was, it was powerful enough to reveal that Venus was exhibiting phases much like those of the moon. It was a universe-shattering observation. It suggested that Venus revolved around the sun, not the Earth. If not, how else to explain Venus's phases-that Venus revolved around the sun, while the sun and other planets revolved around the Earth in some bewilderingly complex solar system? It seemed that an increasingly suspect theory of an Earth-centered universe could be maintained only by twisting the planetary orbits into ever more complicated knots.

  Though Galileo tiptoed carefully, he was wandering into a minefield that would ultimately prove impossible to cross. Church bureaucrats had too much invested in the idea of an Earth-centered universe to retreat from the theory. No matter what Galileo saw through his telescope, how plainly he saw it, or how naturally his observations supported the conclusion of a sun-centered system, the institutional church would have none of it.

  Christopher Clavius was more than seventy when Galileo published these findings with their carefully hedged but unmistakable challenge to Earth-centered theories. One could not have blamed Clavius had he rested on his laurels at this point. Galileo's ideas implicitly challenged Clavius's lifework, so the upstart Galileo couldn't count on much support for his revolutionary, dangerous ideas. It wouldn't have taken much effort for the well-regarded Clavius to swat away the young upstart.

  Instead, the old man led one last master class of Jesuit astronomy students to the roof of the Collegio Romano. The Jesuits had by now obtained their own telescopes, newer and more powerful than the ones Clavius had used in his earlier astronomical work. Clavius and his students attempted to duplicate the observations Galileo claimed to have made. Soon after, Clavius published the final edition of his own astronomy text. Many astronomers were undoubtedly surprised-and many church officials outraged-to read these words in Clavius's text: "Consult the reliable little book by Galileo Galilei, printed at Venice in 1610 and called Sidereus Nuncius."15

  Clavius endorsed all of Galileo's findings and calculations. His verdict of "reliable" bought Galileo time by holding his critics at bay. But Clavius went further, about as far as he possibly could have ventured. As a loyal chur
chman, speaking out in favor of Copernican heliocentric theory would have been unthinkableheretical, in fact. But Clavius understood that the Ptolemaic system he had spent a lifetime defending was destined for the dustbin. Primitive though his and Galileo's telescopes might have been, they had revealed enough to wreck classic Ptolemaic theory. Maybe there was some theory short of the unthinkable suncentered theory to explain the universe, but knee-jerk Ptolemaism was no longer tenable. Noting Galileo's observations, Clavius continued: "Since things are thus, astronomers ought to consider how the celestial orbs may be arranged in order to save these phenomena."16 In other words, the facts were what they were; scientists needed to accept the facts and set about finding a credible theory to explain them.

  Clavius died soon after he published these statements. Galileo continued at his peril to propound controversial views. Twenty-odd years later he was on his knees before Vatican inquisitors, abjuring belief in a heliocentric universe and swearing that the Earth didn't move in order to ward off excommunication and perhaps even premature (and unnatural) death.

  Clavius endorsed all of Galileo's findings and calculations. Clavius understood that the Ptolemaic system he had spent a lifetime defending was destined for the dustbin.

  What role would Clavius have played in Galileo's drama had he lived? Indisputably the leading astronomer-priest of his era, Clavius certainly would have become embroiled in the controversy. It's difficult to imagine a church official defending Galileo, given the church's own unflinchingly militant stance. And yet, Clavius's own text is elegant, simple testimony to his intellectual integrity and seemingly unwavering commitment to the truth. How he would have reconciled his dilemma remains a curious but unanswerable question.