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The Comparison Game

by Christian Huebner 

One of the most necessary and enjoyable pastimes in studying history or politics is comparing the present to the past.

At the moment, comparisons abound between our Great Recession and our grandparents’ Great Depression. You notice it in a hundred little news wire stories and scrollbar headlines. Each day some new statistic or sentiment is revealed which has “not been seen since the Great Depression.”

These comparisons can change quickly. Last summer and fall, Civil War metaphors ran rampant as many people hoped that a legislator from Illinois could heal a Blue-Red divide in the same way that a predecessor had overcome a Blue-Gray one. And not too long before that, I remember quite different arguments painting America as everything from a late-1930s Germany, to an early-1940s Britain, to a new Carolingian France. 

Step back a few years further still and you might remember some great to-do about the Pax Americana. After the rending of the Iron Curtain, the world’s remaining great power was supposed to ride the wave of liberal markets and liberal democracy into the horizon at the end of history. The obvious comparison seemed to be with the Pax Romana, when the Roman Empire consolidated its power and oversaw 200 years of relatively uneventful prosperity (overlooking the stir caused by a charismatic itinerant prophet out in the Judean backwater). It turned out that neither Pax was permanent.

It’s not only Americans, or even Westerners, who play the comparison game.  At this moment, a monumental example of that is making its way around the United States from China. The “Terra Cotta Warriors” exhibit – currently in transit from Houston to the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. – features a sampling of the thousands of life-sized statues excavated from an underground city the size of Manhattan after being buried nearly 2,200 years ago in central China. 

The massive tomb was commissioned by a draconian ruler who united ancient China’s warring states, and who called himself the First Emperor.  He expected his dynasty to last a thousand generations: instead, it died out with the first after only two decades of rule.  Like something out of Tolkien, this wonder of the ancient world passed out of all memory.

The First Emperor was lucky later in death, however.  Drought-stricken peasants found the city and the warriors while they were digging for wells in the 1970s, and the discovery dovetailed nicely with Mao Zedong’s efforts to unify modern Chinese under communist rule. Mao thought the First Emperor’s mission looked a lot like his own, so he adopted and promoted the glory of the Terra Cotta Warriors as a foreshadow of his own.

So then, the historical comparison game can be a political tool. It can be a misleading sign of current but fleeting sentiments. It can also be the key to wisdom, as the Psalmist knew when he reflected back upon the Exodus of Israel.
Moreover, whatever else the historical comparison game may be, it’s also a lot of fun.  Which is why I can’t resist offering my own spin at the wheel:

My hunch, the hunch of a 26-year-old, American, Catholic Christian, perched at the beginning of the 21st century, is that we should get used to more excavations and traveling exhibitions from China. Nor is this a bad thing. In fact, from the perspective of the Church, it puts us in a similar position as Michelangelo, lying on his back, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the flower of the Italian Renaissance.

Let me explain, since the comparison may not seem obvious at first blush. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, we see a visual expression of an idea, a dawning realization, which had been centuries in the making. Circling the perimeter of the ceiling are a number of male and female figures – pillars, as it were, of the gospel story Michelangelo is telling throughout the chapel. Not surprisingly, half of these figures are Old Testament prophets. More intriguingly, the other half are pagan prophets, the Greco-Roman sybils. 

What Michelangelo and the mind of the Church recognized was that the Greco-Roman strand of Western civilization had a place in the greater story of God’s plan for history. The sybils might have seemed unnecessary because they were pagan, but a closer look revealed that what the Hebrew prophets had foretold about the Messiah was also implicit in the yearning of pagan seers, in the beauty of pagan art, in the natural wisdom of pagan philosophy.

So too, it seems, the Church should be on pins and needles with excitement about what treasures may be unearthed in Chinese heritage – which according to Benedict XVI “has distinguished itself among the other peoples of Asia for the splendour of its ancient civilization, with all its experience of wisdom, philosophy, art and science – as that nation gains newfound prominence.

Missions to China are nothing new – Christ has been preached in stops and starts there since the first millennium – and by all accounts the gospel is a gathering force again today. What is new is the possibility that the current evangelization could become a two-way exchange: China receives the revelation of Jesus Christ, like Paul naming the Unknown God at Mars Hill, and the Church receives a more profound understanding of her own history, which will now be understood to encompass China’s history, too.

I thought of this recently, wandering among the warriors in the museum. Each statue uncovered so far in the First Emperor’s underground city has a unique face, so that some speculate the warriors were modeled after real, individual people. That means that each clay face was like a 2,200-year-old photograph. Their lives were not in vain; the civilization which they received and passed on is a theme in a larger story – a story far greater than what even Mao envisioned. Now, millennia later, that theme is coming into view in a way these ancient models could not have imagined, and which we are only beginning to glimpse.

It is difficult to believe that a civilization with 4,000 years of memory will not someday be woven into the narrative of, not the West, but of Christ, in whom there is ultimately no east or west. And some future Michelangelo will paint three – or more – kinds of foreshadowers of the good news.

But that’s just one person’s try in the game of comparison.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)