Religion and the Early Modern State. Views from China, Russia, and the West (review)

In fifteenth century Ming China, a soldier turned religious teacher, Luo Qing, came to a critical insight of "Vacuous Emptiness" and "actionless action" (pp. 22-24). Luo Qing then laid out a text that was to become the germ of a heterodox, widespread, and persistent group of sects centered on the Eternal Mother, which inspired fear and provoked violent repression among imperial state officials. Though the Eternal Mother sects shared a belief that the predestined faithful would be saved from impending world catastrophe (p. 30), they branched into many forms. A branch of the sect in the 1570's was led by an adolescent girl and group of nuns (p. 32); the Red Sun sect preached that the youngest son of the Eternal Mother would descend to earth to save the elect (p. 33); the Unity Sect and Dragon Flower Vegetarian Assembly centered on a kind of Mater lacrimosa, "with tears running continuously from her eyes and drenching her clothes," mourning her fallen children (p. 35); and the apocalyptic Incense-Smelling sect had somewhere near two million followers and led a full-scale rebellion in 1622 (pp. 33-34). Although followers were sentenced to death by decapitation or slow-slicing, imperial officials recognized that the martyrs (to use the western category) "show no regret . . . as they are eager to return to heaven" (p. 38).

The account of the rise and eventual suppression of the Eternal Mother cult in China might seem a perplexing opening chapter to a book that declares in the first line of its introduction that it "owes its origins to a desire to bring together two divergent approaches to the English Reformation." But this excellent and fascinating chapter by Richard Shek clearly and persuasively answers the initial skepticism natural to readers—Why should one read so far from one's geographical area of specialty? The account of the Eternal Mother cult lucidly lays out key conceptual categories that give structure to a collection of essays that could have fallen short of its challenging task in many ways, yet instead yields astonishing insights both through close focus and conceptual flexibility. Balancing between broad thinking through analogy and specific historical circumstances, the volume also addresses questions surrounding the importance of ritual, the definition of the sacred, the desire and ability of the official church or political authority to control religious behavior, and the wondrous ability of dissenting factions not only to survive but also to revolt and even, in the case of Cossacks in Ukraine and Puritans in England, seize control. Although each of the three sections includes an essay from the more familiar English religious history as an anchor, the essays about far-flung China (by Richard Shek and Romeyn Taylor) and Russia (Robert Crummey, Frank Sysyn, and Eve Levin) create a most productive mental ferment.

The two divergent approaches to the English Reformation referred to above are a top-down model—rapid, imposed, and led by the monarch—properly studied as political history, and a popular model—a slowly growing synthesis of Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Zwinglian doctrines and practices at the local level—properly studied as social and cultural history. Indeed, these two models do find resonance in the Russian, Iberian, Dutch, Chinese, and other cases brought forward, but there is also much more. The essays also present rich questions of the relationship between worship practices, beliefs, local communities, and the broader social order. For those readers (this author included) converted to the rewards of a global comparative view, more can be found elsewhere in this series (Catholicism and Aztec religion in the Spanish Empire, and the Jesuits...