Blaise Pascal and the History of China. (02/04/2002)
Odd statements are sometimes encountered in strange places. In part 594 of Pascal's Pensees, which he entitles "Against the History of China," he says that
"The historians of Mexico, the five suns, of which the last is only eight hundred years old. The difference between a book accepted by a nation and one which makes a nation."
This comment is odd because it makes no sense to speak of in or out of its context. In the previous part (593) Pascal discusses the history of China, of which little was actually known at the time, by saying that
"I believe only the histories whose witnesses got themselves killed. . . . I tell you there is in it something to blind, and something to enlighten."
If what he says about the history of China refers to something concrete and specific, and it seems relatively obvious that it does, even if impossible now to guess what his subject might be from what he has recorded, it is difficult to see how his comment about Mexico represents something that stands "Against the History of China." In the absence of scholarly commentary on the substance of the issues raised by these two consecutive and apparently interrelated statements, and I do not mean to imply that no one has previously commented on their meaning but only that I have not pursued the matter in critical evaluations of Pascal's work, I am left with the option of seeking explanations elsewhere for their sense, or with pursuing them blindly, as it were, on the strength of pure, if not meaningless, speculation. Choosing the latter course over the former, which is what I have decided to do, means that anything I might say about the sense Pascal attached to parts 593 and 594 of his Apology for the Christian Religion (Pensees) is as likely to be sensible (consistent with his meaning) as not.
One thing that might have been known about China in 1656, when Pascal began collecting material for Pensees, was the existence there of a great and ancient book of wisdom known as the I Ching. According to Richard Wilhelm, in his introduction to the Princeton University edition of the text (Bollingen Series 19, 1990), which he translated, the Book of Changes (as it is also called) brought together the two great branches of Chinese philosophical tradition (Confucianism and Taoism) into a single expression of China's intellectual and cultural experience. Wilhelm puts it in these terms:
"Nearly all that is greatest and most significant in the three thousand years of Chinese cultural history has either taken its inspiration from this book, or has exerted an influence on the interpretation of its text. Therefore it may safely be said that the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years has gone into the making of the I Ching. Small wonder then that both of the two branches of Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism, have their common roots here." (xlvii)
Since the structure of the I Ching is based on a system of constantly changing forces split between yin and yang, which are generally perceived as being opposites (yin as receptive and at rest; yang as creative and in motion), one might be able to attribute Pascal's comment about blindness and enlightenment to an early European perception or sense that Chinese history had somehow developed out of an interplay between light and dark forces. This is especially pertinent in view of the comment Wilhelm makes about the role the book played in the evolution of Chinese cultural history. Yet again, when Pascal cryptically observes that there is a difference between "a book accepted by a nation and one which makes a nation," he seems to be saying exactly what Wilhelm has said here about the I Ching. What that might suggest is that Wilhelm was somehow influenced by Pascal's somewhat enigmatic comments about Chinese history. In other words, Wilhelm may have found in this book an example to support Pascal's assertion.
In ancient Mexico there was a similar tradition, though one that was not nearly as well preserved as the Chinese system of divination. The people of Central America (Maya and Aztec) embraced the notion that a "smoking mirror" existed which obscured the image of anything that was reflected on its surface. This mirror accounts for "blindness" in the way people perceive reality in a philosophical sense. At the same time, some scholars have asserted the existence of a second mirror, but without any convincing evidence, that clarifies the image of anything reflected on its surface. This mirror accounts for "enlightenment" in the way people experience reality. The problem that exists here, as one might anticipate, is that the binary structure, which posits the existence of one mirror that obscures its image and another one that illuminates what it reflects, may say more about the way Europeans apply their own perceptions of reality to foreign cultures than it does about the philosophical underpinnings of the cultures they study. While it is certainly true that the "smoking mirror" existed as an important component of indigenous Mexican cultures, it is less certain that the other one occupied a place in native thought. It would also be difficult to prove that Pascal was aware of this tradition because knowledge of it may not have entered European literature until the early part of the 20th Century.
This same observation points back to the meaning of Pascal's original statement about the "historians of Mexico, the five suns, of which the last is only eight hundred years old." The first difficulty here arises over the identity of the "historians" Pascal has referred to in his observation. The Mexicans themselves recorded and preserved detailed accounts of their own history over long periods of time, many of them longer and more complex than anything that existed with respect to European history at the time Pascal wrote. Many of these histories existed in the form of hieroglyphic books, which Europeans could not decipher at the time, and which were destroyed by Catholic priests in their efforts to convert native Americans to Christianity. One such book, the Popol Vuh, was transcribed in the alphabetic Mayan language of the Quiche people of Guatemala and translated into Spanish about a hundred years before Pascal began the Pensees. Three Maya hieroglyphic books (Dresden, Paris, and Madrid Codices) reached Europe in the early 16th Century, through Vienna probably, and were discovered later (19th Century) in the cities after which they were named. It is not impossible to assume that Pascal might have seen one of these Maya Codices. Even if he had done so, however, since the books could not be read by anyone at the time, and because there are no clear references to the "five suns" of Mesoamerican time cycles in any of the three books, it is very unlikely that Pascal derived his knowledge of that concept from original Mexican sources.
The more likely possibility is that Pascal's reference to the "historians of Mexico" points to one of the early attempts made by Spanish authors to construct a history of the native people of Mesoamerica during the colonial period. Bernardino de Sahagun's Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana is one such possible source for Pascal's knowledge of Mexican time cycles. An important point of disparity exists in what Pascal says, however, and what would have been true at the time he wrote these comments; that is, when he notes that the current, or fifth, "sun" was only "eight hundred years old," his estimate was many thousands of years in error. In fact, on February 4, 1656, if one were to take that date as a point of correspondence between the Maya calendar as it was counted during their Classic Period (and as it would have been extended forward to Pascal's time), the Maya would have recorded the same day as 12.4.16.2.2 1 Ik 0 Pop in their notational structure. This date fell 4,829 years after the zero base-day (designated by 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku) of the fifth "sun" and 371 years before it reached its terminal point at 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin (August 14, 1955). What this suggests is that Pascal's source of information, whatever it might have been, was seriously flawed in terms of the way its author understood the essential characteristics of the Mesoamerican calendar.
Sahagun claims to have been an eyewitness to Cortez's conquest of the Aztec kingdom in 1519 AD. His history was written several years later and has always been taken as one of the most reliable European accounts both of the conquest and of the nature of the civilization that was conquered by the Spanish invasion of the New World. While his calendrical data may or may not be the most reliable that was produced during this period, and while it is not clear that Pascal used it as his source for arguing the relative age of the fifth "sun" as being "eight hundred years old" in 1656, the extent of his error implies that Europeans at the time were anything but well-informed about the nature of the world they had systematically destroyed in the Americas. This is significant because European scholars made several crucial decisions in the 1930's about the best way to read Mesoamerican history (calendrical history especially) which were predicated on the assumption that ethnohistorical data derived from sources like Sahagun's were reliable enough to provide accurate assessments of precisely where a correlation between the Maya calendar and its European equivalent could be fixed. The fact that Pascal, even if not the best research scholar in the field of Maya calendrical history, was able to assert, with such complete inaccuracy, the then current age of the fifth "sun," points to the existence of flawed data circulating in Europe only a hundred or so years after that data was compiled by the people who "witnessed" the conquest itself. Why, or how, that data was corrected and revised between 1656 and 1930, when and by whom, are questions that must be addressed if the decision to base all correlation solutions on ethnohistorical data is to retain its privileged status.