Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Aged forty-one, Johann Grueber looked much younger, despite the strain of the journey. He was a sturdy man with a massive but well-proportioned head, a flowing beard & fairly long black hair, which he threw back over his shoulders. His skin had been tanned by the desert sun, his gestures were slow & measured. His gray eyes, slanting as if from his long stay in China, had a slightly timid, almost dreamy look that still seemed to be fixed on those marvelous countries that he admitted he had only left with great regret. Of a jovial disposition, great courtesy & a very pleasant German frankness, he was such a gentleman that even if he had not been a Jesuit he would have enjoyed the esteem of everyone he encountered.

Father Henry Roth was a striking contrast with Grueber: small & puny with sparse white hair, he compensated for his apparent constitutional weakness with a moral rigor and authority in dogma that impressed us all.

After the effusive welcome home & a few days rest, the two travelers came to recount to Kircher everything they had observed during their peregrinations. Aware that my master was working on a major book about China, they humbly decided that there was no point in publishing their own writings on the subject; however, unwilling to allow the spiders & worms to eat away at this precious material in a corner of the library, they happily entrusted it to Kircher so that he could incorporate their observations in his book, which, in truth, was the best way of making them known to the widest number of people.

The first news we heard from Grueber’s lips was the death of our dear Michal Boym, which affected my master more than I can say …

After leaving Lisbon at the beginning of 1656, Father Boym had arrived in Goa one year later. Held up in that town for various reasons, later besieged by the Dutch, he had only reached the kingdom of Siam in 1658. Once he was in Macau & still bearing letters from Pope Alexander VII for the Chinese Empress Helena & the eunuch general Pan Achilles, he found that the Portuguese authorities refused him permission to return to China out of fear of reprisals against them from the Tartars. Determined to face any danger to accomplish his mission, Father Boym embarked in a junk, accompanied by the convert Xiao Cheng, & reached Tonkin, from where he reckoned he could cross unseen into China. In 1659, after further delays while looking for guides capable of helping them to cross the frontier, the two men finally succeeded in entering the Celestial Empire by the province of Kwangsi. It was, alas, only to find all the passes blocked by the Tartar army. Seeing that it was impossible to continue by that route, Boym decided to return to Tonkin to try another way, but the government of that country would not authorize this. Trapped in the jungle, where he was hiding from the Tartars & depressed by the failure of his mission, Boym was struck down with the “Vomito negro” & called on his Maker after suffering terrible agonies. Faithful to his master even in those extremely distressing moments, Xiao Cheng buried the good father beside the road, together with the missives for which the unfortunate man had given his life, then planted a tree on his grave and escaped through the mountains. One year later he reached Canton, which Grueber happened to be visiting, & recounted the sad end of that excellent man to him.

Kircher had a mass said in memory of his friend during which he gave a sermon recalling Boym’s numerous works on botany while emphasizing the human qualities of a man who, from that moment on, could be looked upon as a martyr to the faith.

These reflections on the difficulties encountered by Boym in carrying out his mission made it necessary to have a report on developments in China, which Father Roth provided for us quickly, but leaving no doubt as to his familiarity with the material. To spare the reader tiresome details, it is sufficient to recall that the heir to the Ming emperors, his son Constantin & all his faithful followers, among whom was the eunuch Pan Achilles, were exterminated in 1661 by the Tartar armies of Wu San-Kuei in the province of Yunnan, where they had taken refuge. Since 1655 the Tartar Emperor Shun-chih, founder of the Ch’ing dynasty, had made great & ultimately successful efforts to establish his power in a China that had finally been completely conquered. An enlightened sovereign, patron of Chinese arts & letters, he had succeeded in restoring peace to his kingdom & governed with discretion a nation that hardly looked favorably on his race. From invader, he transformed himself into the defender of China &, what was very important for the Church, showed greater favor to our Jesuit missionaries than any monarch before him, an attitude that allowed us great hope for the progress of the Christian religion in those distant lands.

Grueber, however, modified this idyllic report.

“What distressed me most,” he said, “was to see, while I was traveling upriver on a Dutch boat, the cruelty with which the Tartars treated the Chinese pulling our vessel, which was simply the result of the natural hatred between the two nations. To tell the truth, hatred is nothing but cold, pernicious malice; it’s always sitting on a few serpent’s eggs from which it hatches out an infinite number of disasters &, not content with pouring its venom over particular places & at particular times, goes to the ends of the earth & on to eternity. This teaches us that it is difficult to make a whole empire love a man, as if one were claiming one could start friendships by cannon fire. Don’t keep going on about a Nero, a Caligula, a Tiberius, a Scylla or other Roman emperors, don’t talk to me of the Scythians, the Etruscans & other nations who boasted of their cruelty. I can truly say that I have never seen anything more cruel, nor more perfidious than the behavior of the Tartars toward their wretched captives. I have seen those stony-hearted creatures smile at the terrible groans, even at the death throes of the poor Chinese worn down by hunger, blows & labor. You would say, Father Athanasius, that they were made up of instruments of torture or, rather, demons that had slipped into that beautiful kingdom to make it into a hell on earth. They think that the principal mark of their power is to squeeze the life out of those miserable bodies drop by drop; would it not be more secure & more useful for these proud conquerors to assuage the just rancor of their vanquished subjects, to adopt gentler habits, pleasures without such excesses, splendor without such deviousness & devotion without so many crimes and torments—”

Father Roth protested, accusing his colleague of exaggeration in the picture he had painted, but Kircher intervened to calm them down. “There are, alas, some loves and hates that one cannot put on & take off as easily as a shirt. Anger is more transitory, more specific, more seething & easier to cure, but hate is more deep-rooted, more general, more joyless & irremediable. It has two notable properties, one of which consists of aversion & flight, the other of persecution & harming. These degrees of hatred are so widespread in nature that they can even be found in brute beasts who, no sooner have they been born, than they are pursuing their enmities and wars in the world. A little chicken with its shell still stuck to it has no fear of a horse or an elephant — which ought to seem such frightening animals to those unaware of their natures — but it is already in terror of the sparrow-hawk & as soon as it sees one goes to hide under its mother’s wing. The lion trembles at the crow of the cock; the eagle hates the goose so much that just one of its feathers will burn the whole of a goose’s plumage; the stag persecutes the snake, for by breathing deeply at the entrance to its hole, it pulls it out & devours it. There is also eternal enmity between the eagle & the swan, between the crow & the kite, the mole & the owl, the wolf & the sheep, the panther & the hyena, the scorpion & the tarantula, the rhinoceros & the viper, the mule & the weasel, & between many other animals, plants or even rocks that are repugnant to each other. These harmful contradictions also exist among the idolaters & can be seen, you say, between the Tartars & the Chinese, but God has made it possible for us, in contrast to the rest of the natural world, to overcome these antagonisms & settle differences in a merciful way. And there can be no doubt that the progress of the Christian religion in the land of China will extinguish these enmities just as thoroughly as water will destroy the immemorial hatred opposing wood to fire.