The Ghosts of Monotheism: Heaven, Fortune, and Universalism in Early Chinese and Greco-Roman Historiography

This essay analyzes the creation of the empires of Rome over the Mediterranean and of the Han dynasty over the Central Plains between the third and the second centuries BCE. It focuses on the historiographical oeuvres of Polybius and Sima Qian, as the two men tried to make sense of the unification of the world as they knew it. The essay does away with the subsequent methodological and conceptual biases introduced by interpreters who approached the material from the vantage point of Abrahamic religions, according to which transcendent personal entities could favor the foundation of unitary political and moral systems. By considering the impact of the different contexts and of the two authors’ subjective experiences, the essay tries to ascertain the extent to which Polybius and Sima Qian tended to associate unified rule with the triumph of universal values and the establishment of superior, divine justice. All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.—Benedict Anderson1 The nation as the subject of History is never able to completely bridge the aporia between the past and the present.—Prasenjit Duara2 Any structure is the ingenuous re-proposition of a hidden god; any systemic approach might actually constitute a crypto-theology.—Benedetto Croce3 Introduction: Monotheism, Systemic Unities, and Ethnocentrism Scholars who engage in comparisons are often wary of the ethnocentric biases that lurk behind their endeavors. Seldom do interdisciplinary works historicize the concept of religion, tending instead toward interpretations rooted in monotheistic, Abrahamic terms, as well as classifications of religion as an unproblematically universal category.4 In his final attempt at writing a universal religious history, the late Robert Bellah (1927–2013) programmatically adopted Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) structuralist interpretation: “Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community.”5 MARSILI: The Ghosts of Monotheism Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 44 For a scholar of the ancient Mediterranean and perhaps even more so for one of early China, this formulation is based on key assumptions clearly derived from Abrahamic traditions, traditions that posit religion as a totalizing experience that defines individual and collective identities in an exclusive way.6 Consequently, such assumptions about the “sacred,” or the “invisible,” tend to privilege the cultural role of well-formalized ideas and beliefs over actual social practices and processes.7 These assumptions presuppose the universality of the need to organize behaviors and notions concerning “the extra-human realm” into a coherent and unitary intellectual system. Such conceits interfere with purely historical inquiries, for they reintroduce insidious ethnocentric biases and teleological drives in pursuit of philosophical or systemic coherence. In the post-9/11 world, the specter of a “clash of civilizations” and the urge to establish the basis for fruitful intercultural dialogues has prompted researchers to look for comprehensive views (i.e., Weltanschauungen) that treat civilizations as moral and ideological unities.8 Such approaches— especially when the comparison is cultural—tend to treat religion or mankind’s relationship with the supernatural as a defining element that explains collective agency. Several contemporary discussions on universalism, secularism, and neoatheism reflect this “hegemony of monotheism” insofar as they conceive of the relationships between religion, identity, and agency in systemic terms.9 And such intellectual stances still condition the ways non-Western experiences are conceptualized. Therefore, the study of Asian and ancient Mediterranean cases (particularly those that are pre-Buddhist and pre-Christian) holds promise for emancipating intercultural exchanges from implicit ethnocentrism and promoting a truly inclusive approach. In the West, the propensity to conceive of religion in terms of systems and exclusive identities owes much to the influence of Greek philosophical and Roman legal traditions. In pre-Christian Rome, for example, the coexistence of different customs and attitudes concerning the sacred was conceivable and accepted within the capital city, as well as throughout Italy and the provinces of the Roman empire.10 Things began to change in the fourth century. An official notion of religion based in the Church’s monopoly on interpreting scripture, defining orthodoxy, and carrying out rituals was established over the course of many negotiations, conflicts, and countless councils. The concept of religion that resulted from these cultural and political processes would be conceived of as exclusive (in that alternatives would not be tolerated) as well as capable of explaining all phenomena and regulating all human interactions. It became progressively associated with the moral and political necessity of a unified empire. The Reformation would eventually contest this centralized view, but nonetheless reinforced the relationship between religious affiliations MARSILI: The Ghosts of Monotheism Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 45 and moral, ethnic, and national identities. This approach is deeply rooted in the history of the Mediterranean and Europe and still broadly adopted in contemporary intercultural discourses. Since its inception, the comparative study of religions seems to have been particularly prone to the rationalization of meta-historical assumptions of Western origin aimed at recognizing unity. This idea of unity has rarely been conceived of as a result of cultural compromise and abstraction, but rather arrived at either in terms of a common revelation or a universality of psycholinguistic structures. Frontiersmen of the field, such as Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) and Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), trained as philologists and interested in the supposed Indo-European origins of Western civilization, sought evidence of shared psychological structures and attitudes among humans toward the sacred. Their research topics included Asia (in their case India), as it was thought to represent an earlier stage of Western civilization.11 As for Chinese civilization, it finally became integrated in the European comparative discourse on world religions only after the work of James Legge (1815–1897). By contributing to Max Müller’s monumental editorial project on the Sacred Books of the East with his translation of the so-called “Confucian” classics, Legge allowed an international readership to acknowledge China as a civilization with its own corpus of scriptures and foundational mythology.12 In his enormously influential translations, Legge treated Chinese myths either as imperfect renditions of biblical truths, or as fictionalized, if not simply faulty historical accounts.13 Such an approach seems consistent with the idea that all non-monotheistic religions represented a degenerate form or misunderstood version of an original revelation.14 Although contemporary historians and philologists of ancient China rarely resort to the reduction of Chinese phenomena to foreign conceptions, the almost apologetic tendency to re-elaborate (or rationalize, in Weberian terms) Chinese religious or intellectual traditions in terms of systemic unities still reflects the hegemony of Western formulations.15 In generalist and comparative works, the assumption of notions of transcendence and religion specific to the Abrahamic traditions is evident in the recent revival of the ahistorical Axial Age theory, elaborated upon by the German philosopher and psychologist, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). The Axial Age theory posits that all the religions and philosophies of the world would reach maturity in specific ages (such as the period between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE, for example), as the “simultaneous” and polycentric epiphany of the same revelation.16 Jaspers suggests that discrete cultural achievements in different circumstances and places would serve the same ideas of progress and civilization. The Axial Age theory—which draws from German idealism, Jungian psychology, and Weberian sociological analysis—offers a philosophical justification for a MARSILI: The Ghosts of Monotheism Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 46 kind of universalism typical of the monotheistic traditions.17 In addition, subscribers of this paradigm take religious experiences into consideration only insofar as they can be analyzed consistently by means of a systemic philosophical approach, one that underplays aspects of religious life that would not contribute to the rational development of the individual within society. Hence, the notion of universalism propounded by such a view no longer represents merely an ethical and political attitude but becomes an epistemological axiom that can seriously hamper a strictly historical approach as well as a truly inclusive intercultural attitude. This paper takes issue with the still common tendency to reduce the concept of Tian (Heaven) in early China to “the Chinese notion of God,”18 “supreme authority” or “sky-god,”19 and to assume that it constantly characterized Chinese “religion” throughout history. It concentrates on the notions of “Heaven” and “ Fortune” in Sima Qian’s (?145–86 BCE) Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記, hereafter the Records)20 and in Polybius’s (200–118 BCE) Histories as case studies on the role of meta-historical factors in accounts of the establishment of the Han and Roman unified rules.