Joachim Bouvet

Bouvet arrived in Beijing in the party of French Jesuits sent by Louis XIV, taught the Kangxi emperor mathematics, and developed a reading of the Chinese classics that he believed would open China to Christianity without asking anyone to abandon their own antiquity. The premise was that God gave a revelation to all humanity at the beginning, that fragments of it survive scattered through the oldest books of every people, and that the Chinese classics preserve an unusually pure portion. On that reading the Book of Changes is not a divination manual at all but a coded remnant of the primitive truth, and the sages of Chinese antiquity are witnesses to it.

The attraction of this to a missionary is obvious. It makes conversion a recovery rather than a replacement, and it makes the Chinese tradition an ally instead of a rival. The difficulty was that it convinced almost nobody. His own order was uneasy, Rome was hostile, and the wider dispute over whether Chinese converts might continue to honour their ancestors was moving against the Jesuit position at the same time. Figurism was effectively disowned, and Bouvet did not publish the bulk of what he wrote on it.

There was also a question of who was being persuaded. Figurism addressed two audiences at once. Chinese scholars were being told that their own canon pointed toward Christianity, and European readers were being told that Chinese antiquity was not a rival revelation but a damaged copy of their own. Both messages were flattering, and neither was entirely candid about what the other audience was hearing, which is a recurring difficulty in missionary theology rather than a fault peculiar to this case.

The one lasting result of the Figurist programme came out of correspondence. Bouvet sent Leibniz a diagram of the sixty four hexagrams in the arrangement attributed to Fuxi. Leibniz had been working on binary arithmetic for years and recognised his own notation at once: read a broken line as nought and a solid line as one, and the Fuxi order counts from zero to sixty three in binary. Each man took the coincidence as confirmation of what he already held. For Bouvet it proved that the classics preserved a lost science. For Leibniz it suggested that the ancient Chinese had known a truth their descendants had forgotten, and it fitted his own theological reading of binary, in which everything is generated from one and nothing.

Almost every later Western treatment of the Book of Changes as a binary, mathematical or informational system descends from that exchange, and it is worth being clear about what the exchange did and did not establish. The correspondence between the Fuxi order and binary counting is exact and is not in dispute. What neither man could show is that anyone in China had ever read the arrangement that way, and the ordering itself is a product of the Song dynasty rather than of high antiquity.