Polytheism and Nationalism: The Copernican Theological Shift

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be. Not because of the defeat itself necessarily, but because the barbarians had no interest in accepting the cultural superiority of the Chinese Literati as other barbarian conquerors had done before. Here was something totally alien to the Literati’s theological system, something that could not be explained. This was an existential problem that the Literati failed to solve.

This theological problem is the root of their inability to reform. This means that either the god is powerless or the methods are now unknown. Therefore the god is abandoned. (Weber 1965, 32)

It is in situations like this in our adapted Weberian framework, that prophets emerge.

By looking at the exact nature of the Chinese theological system that was being challenged we can then go on to look at why certain prophetic voices rose to dominance through offering what were seen as effective solutions.

4.2.1 Polytheism and Nationalism: The Copernican Theological Shift

The fact that there were outsiders who embodied an explicit and undeniable rejection of both the cultural superiority of the Chinese Literati, and therefore the cosmic and theological centrality of China itself, placed huge questions over the assumed monotheism behind the literati. This monotheism was based upon the idea that China was the centre of the world, the theological and cultural centre of humanity. The existence of these western powers alone was disproof of this fundamental tenant of Chinese theology at the time. This proof that the specific brand of monotheism that the Chinese theological system was built on was false shaped the direction of the coming theological revolution.

The only adequate response to the challenge posed was to embrace a certain form of polytheism. This is exactly the change that shaped the collective self-conception of what China was. This is when China became a nation. These proposals for reform were indicative of a deeper shift in the theological makeup of the Chinese system. The primary basis of the prophetic movement was a rejection of the monotheism that the literati had built itself upon.

This was a Copernican revolution in thought, a shift in the conception of the divinity, the devotion to which held the society together.

We see this in how the conception of the language and how it was used. As noted previously, tied to the fact that the priesthood was the literati, culture itself is seen to be born from the written word, knowledge of which gave the wielder of language the power to divine the true nature of reality. This is what made China the centre of the world. ‘[T]he literati were

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adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine.’ (Anderson 2006, 14-16)

Weber notes that ‘even in the oldest tradition the ancient scriptures were considered magical objects, and the men conversant with them were considered holders of magical charisma.’ (Weber 1968, 108-109) We can see the fear that the literati felt in the veneration that the written word was shown in this time of crisis. In the face of wholesale abandonment of Chinese heritage and dominance of new western ideas and teachings, a worship of the written word (xizizhi) was revolutionised and championed as a practice among literati in China. It involved a reward and punishment system based on how far you revered the written word.

(Chau 2017) For the last generation of the Confucian Elite, this became seen on the national scale; the fate of China was tied to the fate of the writing system. ‘There was writing first and then there was a country and a society.’ Writing is seen as the basis for everything, justice, relationships, and commerce. Natural disasters became linked to people not caring for the written word. Chau calls this ‘Script Fundamentalism.’ This period saw attempts to share this principle across society, not just the literary elite, but everybody should seek to preserve the written word, the fate of the country rested on it, individuals in the stories were rewarded for preserving the written word.

However, a failure of Anderson is that he only sees the loss of that sense of the divine being communicable through the language. Nations have a different conception of the divine to empires, not no conception. Both nations and empires are theological bodies, but as their understandings of divinity is different so their understanding of how divinity is mediated to the community is also different. This is the importance of the printed vernacular is well explored in Anderson’s work, but the theological implications are not. In chapter five of Imagined Communities, Anderson aims at explaining the populist and liberalist idea of the nationalisms in Europe, which made them different from those earlier ones of the Americas. Here the fact that language was central to the conception meant that ‘the ultimate locus of sovereignty had to be the collectivity of [the languages] speakers.’ (Anderson 2006, 82) In other words; the imagined collectivity of the people themselves, the god demos, becomes the locus of divinity.

This theological revolution, Copernican in scale, prompted much work among the traditionalist literati to try to salvage as much as possible from the old system. Initially, the reforms took on the form of what Anderson calls the 'The 'naturalizations' of Europe's dynasties’

(Anderson 2006, 86), or ‘official nationalism’. Anderson writes of this process as it occurred

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in Europe ‘Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian, Greek.’ (Anderson 2006, 85)

The imaginative shift from monotheism to polytheism mirrors the imaginative shift in changing China from an empire to a nation. This is the same process that Anderson describes happening in Russia and Britain as a national conception is invented in order to cement the control of what is a heterogeneous group of people, who, if measured by language, cultural heritage, history, etc., would normally not be classed as a 'nation'. 'It is stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.' (Anderson 2006, 85-86)

This was easier for the Chinese to imagine because their basis for the imperial family was different. As already discussed the impersonal nature of the core concept in the literati's theological system meant that loyalty to the imperial family could already be conceived of as conditional upon their performance of their role. Something alien to Europe before the rise of nationalisms. (Anderson 2006, 85)

Important to note that these ‘official nationalisms’ were reactions from power bases that had already been established. (Anderson 2006, 110) And in China, as in Russia and Britain, the idea of these people belonging to the same ‘nation’ was not a grassroots phenomena but an imposition from above. ‘At that time, (1900s) nationalism, that is, the theory that nation and state should be congruent and that every nation should have a state, became known among Chinese reformist political thinkers and quickly gained popularity.’ (Schneider 2017, 93)

The Qing Empire was diverse, the most popular conception of Chinese nationalism meant the marriage of Han Chinese ethnicity with Qing territory through the concept of

‘assimilative power.’ (Schneider 2017, 93) This is the idea that there are ‘stronger ethnicities’

than can ‘swallow weak ethnicities and erase their frontiers.’ (Schneider 2017, 94) Many of these thinkers associated a strong state with a homogenous state. In this view the ‘sinicization’

(Hanhua) of the “lesser races” of China was either nearly completed, as with Liang Qichao, (Schneider 2017, 95-96) or that it was easy and the best course of action for these people, as with Zhang Taiyan. (Schneider 2017, 96-97) The Manchu ethnicity of the Qing Imperial family was held up as an example of the positives and success of sinicization. However, as the Hundred Days’ Reform period failed, and many of the reformers were exiled to Japan, ‘more

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and more came to believe that the problem was exactly the non-Chinese identity of the Qing emperors and the ruling elites.’ (Schneider 2017, 99) As a result:

…they did not aim at a constitutional monarchy with Manchu emperors anymore, but a republic with a Chinese [Han] ruling elite who would lead the non-Chinese inferior people towards their integration into a Chinese [Han] nation-state. This integration would be based on 'China's assimilative power' which the Chinese possessed because of their cultural and ethnic superiority. (Schneider 2017, 99)

When the Republic was finally established in 1911, the assimilative power of the Han ethnicity and culture showed itself to be much weaker than assumed, with all significant non-Han ethnic groups fighting for, and often winning, effective independence. (Schneider 2017, 99) The full significance of this, and the racial elements that come with it, will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.

The key theme here is a Copernican revolution in terms of China's self-conception and theological makeup. The principle shift theologically was from monotheism to polytheism.

When this is blended with the immanentism of Chinese theology, a strand that remains consistent throughout this period, we see the Chinese people divinised; one of the strongest 'peoples' of the world and deserving of respect in a global system.

One thing to note is that whilst transcendental divinity translates into a priesthood sub-community separated from the laity. Because it is difficult to master the internal evil, therefore fewer achieve this exemplary status. (Monasticism). Immanentist divinity, which sees evil as external, provides much lower separation of the exemplars. In fact as with any nationalism, the most common of people is seen as an exemplary member of the society (Populism).

China thus became the centre of a region, the centre of one civilisation among a handful, as opposed to the centre of the world itself. However, the Communist priesthood initially rejected its culture and traditions, placing the people alone as the sole occupants of the centre.

This is born from this theological shift that saw the Chinese people themselves as the source of divinity.