Why China did not have a Renaissance – and why that matters

An interdisciplinary Dialogue

Thomas Maissen, Barbara Mittler

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110574036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

Concepts of historical progress or decline and the idea of a cycle of historical movement have existed in many civilizations. In spite of claims that they be transnational or even universal, periodization schemes invariably reveal specific social and cultural predispositions.
Our dialogue, which brings together a Sinologist and a scholar of early modern History in Europe, considers periodization as a historical phenomenon, studying the case of the "Renaissance." Understood in the tradition of J. Burckhardt, who referred back to ideas voiced by the humanists of the 14th and 15th centuries, and focusing on the particularities of humanist dialogue which informed the making of the "Renaissance" in Italy, our discussion highlights elements that distinguish it from other movements that have proclaimed themselves as "r/Renaissances, " studying, in particular, the Chinese Renaissance in the early 20th century.
While disagreeing on several fundamental issues, we suggest that interdisciplinary and interregional dialogue is a format useful to addressing some of the more far-reaching questions in global history, e.g. whether and when a periodization scheme such as "Renaissance" can fruitfully be applied to describe non-European experiences.

Part IPeriodization

Thomas Maissen

Europe: Secularizing teleological models

Structuring the past is an important element of any historical narrative and to some extent an anthropological phenomenon, since we distinguish what we have experienced ourselves from what has happened before we were born. As a cultural practice, history is not least the aggregation and structured transmission of such individual narratives. In the beginning, this can happen orally, but in the long run, only written texts guarantee a continuous transmission of histories. When the number and variety of historical narrations grows, one feels an increasing need to combine them and bring them into a chronological and thematic order. For political entities, a founding moment can be the point of reference, such as the Roman dating since the origins of the city (ab urbe condita), or the reference to the rulers, again in the Roman case by dating according to the acting counsels of a particular year (Pompeio et Crasso consulibus) or to the reign period of an emperor (as was also the case in China). Using dynasties of emperors or kings to demarcate a longer period of time in hereditary monarchies is a consistent way of imposing order. As dynastic change usually implies struggles for succession and political turmoil, these moments often also become memorable ruptures in historical time frames.

The religious realm offers alternative reference points that can be combined with political dates. Again, the moment of creation, in this case of the world (Annus mundi), is one possible point of reference, as in the Jewish calendar (6/7 October 3761 BCE) or in the Byzantine calendar (1 September, 5509 BCE). The deeds of the eminent intermediaries (Jesus, Mohammed) have become the key elements of other monotheist chronologies. It was relatively late, however, that the birth of Christ (Annus Domini) became the decisive point of reference in the Christian Occident, thanks to erudites such as Dionysus Exiguus (ca. 470–ca. 544) and the Venerable Bede (672/673–735). Since the Bible (Luke 2: 1) itself dated the birth of Christ to the times of “Caesar Augustus,” salvific history was indissolubly linked to Roman history, which, in the Middle Ages, was congruous with “world history” because very little was known about the past of other areas of the globe.

Dating events in the past and referring them to each other is one important task of historiography. Periodization is a different challenge and reveals theological, philosophical or methodological predispositions about the development of humankind during historical change.116 In models of descendency, humankind loses its original perfection and ends in decadence; examples are the fall of man after the original sin and the expulsion from paradise in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the pagan theory of ages as presented by Hesiod (eighth–seventh century BCE) or Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE), where an original Golden Age gave place to an age of silver, ore and iron. On the other hand, theories of ascendency maintain that the history of humankind aims at perfection and a better end, which can be salvation in a religious sense, such as the Christian paradise after the Last Judgment. Christian theology thus contains both a rationale of descendency and ascendency, with the same pre- and post-historical goal: paradise. The past is therefore integrated into an overarching interpretive scheme that includes the future as well. But paradise is beyond this world. This, in the traditional Christian perspective of the Middle Ages, devalued secular history. The only truly important events for humankind were those that led to salvation as described and announced in the Bible: from the creation of the universe and the fall of man to the revelation of Christ, the Redeemer, and eventually, the Last Judgment. This Christian understanding of time was thus linear and teleological, distinguishing essentially between the time “before the law” (the Decalogue of Moses), “under the law” (the Old Testament), and the time “under grace” after the coming of the Christ, as narrated in the New Testament. What happened on earth was but an inevitable muddling through a vale of tears – that is, a retribution for the human fall through original sin. The telos, the goal and purpose of humankind, would only be fulfilled beyond human histories and beyond this world in the eternal Heaven.

In the linear narrative of salvific history, the era of humankind on earth was characterized by an unstructured collection of facts, deeds, and events that historians transmitted for centuries as “histories.” These “histories” played a pedagogical role and were used to teach morals, but they did not really contribute to an understanding of humanity’s final destination, which depended on God’s will alone. The Christian attempts to create subdivisions of earthly time into several ages (aetates) included events past and present only as the building stones for this metaphysical truth as it was revealed in the Bible. The most influential interpretations reacted to the pagan accusation that the emperor’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century CE was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which was manifest in the temporary conquest of Rome by the Vandals in the year 410.

In his Historiae adversum Paganos (Histories against the Pagans), Orosius (ca. 375–ca. 418) interpreted historical facts in order to demonstrate that the world had improved and human misery had decreased since the appearance of Christ. This teleological narrative stemmed from his teacher Augustine, the most important church father. In an analogy to the history of creation, Augustine divided world history into six ages of decline, which would be followed by a seventh age of eternal life in the City of God, thus combining descendency and ascendency with the revealed Truth of the Bible. For Augustine, humankind was living in the sixth age and thus awaiting the Last Judgment, the telos of earthly life and the moment when there would be a definitive separation between those damned members of the Earthly City and those redeemed in the City of God.

A different, yet also influential mode of structuring the past maintained that there was no general and complete change over time, but a constant return of similar patterns. This concept was already a potential in Hesiod and Ovid or his contemporary Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE) who dreamed, after a long decline of humanity, of the return of a Golden Age. Other classical authors, such as Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) and Polybius (ca. 200 BCE–ca. 118 BCE), conceived of a cyclical succession of political constitutions: the anakyklosis or metabole politeion (the cycle or change of constitutions). A virtuous monarch would build a strong and just kingdom, but his reign would inevitably give way to that of less virtuous heirs who would be spoilt by an easy and luxurious life. Thus, monarchy slowly degenerated into selfish tyranny to be replaced, when it had become insupportable, by aristocracy, the collective government of the best, wise and virtuous men, that itself would degenerate because of an easy life in a stable constitution, ending in oligarchy, the rule of only a few, without respect for the commonwealth and the common good. This unbearable government would eventually be toppled by a democracy (politeia, in Aristotle’s terms), the rule of many virtuous citizens willing to sacrifice their life and wealth for the common good. In due course, their successors would yield to temptations and vice again and end in a government of the selfish multitude, ochlocracy. Then the cycle begins again, with misrule giving rise to a new strong man, a virtuous king who would build a just monarchy again.

This cyclical model established in Greece became popular again during the Renaissance with authors such as Machiavelli (1469–1527). At first glance, there are similarities with the Chinese interpretation of dynastic cycles, which pass from the moment when their founder has gained the Mandate of Heaven to a period of decline under his successors. But these were existing monarchical dynasties, while the particularity of the Greek cyclical theory lies precisely in the fact that it moves through the six different types of constitutions. The European monarchies of the Middle Ages, then, resolved their legitimation problems through dynastic change and rupture in ways that were different from China. They insisted either on legitimacy through election (by the estates or the electors, as in the Holy Roman Empire in Germany) or through familial continuity. Genealogists could be quite creative in proving the latter. The Frankish and French pointed at more or less alleged kinship between Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian kings to legitimize new ruling dynasties. For the elective monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire, what mattered most was to underline the continuity with the legitimizing institutions of (late) Antiquity. In order to emphasize the links to classical Rome and its first emperor, Augustus, the new or renewed empire kept the word “Roman” in its name, even when, from 800 CE onwards, the rulers were Franks and later on Germans.

With this focus on uninterrupted Roman traditions, the concept of transfer (translatio in Latin) was paramount to medieval authors: on the one hand, the translatio studii for the continuity of erudition and scholarship that was handed over from one nation to another and eventually became institutionalized in the Sorbonne University in Paris; and on the other hand, the translatio imperii that asserted the continuity between the Roman emperors of Antiquity and the German emperors in the medieval Holy Roman Empire. To metaphysically explain the translatio imperii, medieval authors referred to a dream by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, which is related by the biblical prophet Daniel (chap. 2: 31–44) and interpreted it in ways of descendency. In his dream, Nebuchadnezzar sees a composite statue made of four metals. Its head of gold, in Daniel’s interpretation, stands for Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom (Babylonia). This would be followed by the rise of another, inferior kingdom, represented by the silver chest, and later on by a third kingdom, symbolized by the belly of bronze, and a fourth, in the legs strong as iron. This will be the last kingdom on earth and when it is smashed, so the interpreters of Daniel predicted, the God of Heaven will set up his own kingdom there, one that will never be destroyed. In Christian interpretations since late Antiquity, the three latter empires were usually identified with Persia, Alexander’s Greece, and the Roman Empire, which had obtained the decisive function in salvific history because Jesus was born under its first emperor, Augustus.

And so, continuity was established from that same Augustus to Charlemagne and on to the Habsburg rulers, such as Charles V in the sixteenth century. The “Holy Roman Empire” continued to exist for centuries – indeed, it still bore that name when, in 1806, Napoleon finally put an end to it.117 However, the legitimizing title could not hide the fact that, at least from the eleventh century onwards, Rome, the city of the popes, and the southern half of Italy were out of reach of direct rule by those emperors whose influence was gradually reduced to (parts) of Germany. The translatio imperii was an ahistorical interpretation of universal history as salvific history, one that subordinated contradicting historical evidence and did not care about those areas of the world not mentioned in the Bible. The notion of political continuity in an imperial order designed by God did not conflict with the medieval authors’ conviction that they could draw a neat distinction between themselves as Christians and those they would call “heathen” or “pagans.” Since Constantine the Great officially accepted Christianity in 313, it blossomed under official protection all over the empire. Confronted with what Emperor Theodosius established as the state religion in 380, the so-called pagan culture, (i. e. the ancient Roman and Greek heritage) was increasingly neglected unless it could be integrated into Christian learning and theories. Thus, a large part of the classical corpus was lost or forgotten. Pagan authors such as Sallust and Ovid, for example, were read only because their texts provided examples that could be used to offer moral advice within a Christian context.

This changed in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries during the Renaissance, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, periodization became a “largely Protestant and German” endeavor (and has remained so ever since). It was used to examine, by way of philological techniques, the different existing calendrical calculations of time and to combine them within epochs that were believed to reveal the divine order of secular history.118 In the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment, European philosophers began to consider History, now in the singular, as one continuous process and as something definitely different from the histories in the plural that had been narrated by Christian chroniclers but had remained meaningless ephemeral earthly facts as opposed to the eternal verity of revealed salvific history.119 History in the singular, on the other hand, was human, mundane, and secular. Enlightenment authors such as Adam Smith (1723–1790)120 or Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794)121 began to reconceive the past as a sequence of periods, referring to an end that humankind would accomplish imminently within this world: the progress of humanity and civilization in a succession of social stages, skills, and advancements in learning.

Such interpretations of the history of humankind can be understood as a secularization of the Christian model of linear ascendency.122 However, they implied a decisive difference in teleology: the new telos – that is, the goal and the purpose of history in the singular – was an immanent (i. e. secular) process. History no longer had an origin or end in a revelation ordered by the Christian God. History now became the structured development of humankind advancing through time in establishing increasingly sophisticated political, economic, social and cultural structures and eventually making the world perfect since the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ note
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I Periodization
• Part II Renaissances
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• Works cited
• Index of names and places