Chinese learning posed an opportunity as well as a difficulty for a Christian account of the past. Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), a Jesuit working at the Qing court, believed the Yijing, or Book of Changes, contained traces of knowledge shared by humanity before its religious divisions. Its figures of broken and unbroken lines had long been used in Chinese divination and philosophy. Bouvet thought an even older meaning could be recovered beneath those interpretations.
Writing from Beijing to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) in 1701, he connected the book’s legendary author Fuxi with figures familiar from European accounts of sacred antiquity, including Enoch. The identification allowed Chinese tradition to enter a history of revelation from before Moses. It also changed the standing of Chinese commentators. Their work preserved the book, but Bouvet’s proposed original meaning could overrule their explanations of it.
Bouvet’s opportunities depended partly on his work as a scientific teacher at court. Astronomy and mathematics brought Jesuit scholars into conversations with the emperor and his advisers, while correspondence connected that setting with learned Europe. Religious interpretations of Chinese books nevertheless attracted scrutiny from fellow missionaries. Access to imperial patronage did not give him unrestricted authority to speak for Christianity or for the Chinese tradition.
The correspondence produced an agreement more limited than Bouvet’s religious hopes. When Leibniz explained binary arithmetic, which represents numbers using two values, Bouvet recognized a correspondence in one ordering of the Chinese figures. Leibniz published the connection without taking over most of his correspondent’s Christian interpretation. The same diagrams could interest two scholars for reasons that overlapped without becoming identical.
The mathematical connection reached a public that did not have to accept Bouvet’s account of Enoch. His correspondence thus carried a result narrower than the religious discovery he had hoped to announce. The Chinese figures remained available to European readers, accompanied by different explanations of why they mattered.