Strange names of God: The missionary translation of the divine name and the Chinese responses to Matteo Ricci's Shangti in late Ming China, 1583--1644

The present dissertation provides a historical survey of “the transformation of Christian faith” through cross-cultural missionary translation of the divine name of the Christian God with the specific case of Matteo Ricci's translation, Shangti, and the Chinese intellectuals' responses to the strange name of God in late Ming China (1583–1644). Andrew Walls' emphasis on the transformation of Christian faith through cross-cultural missionary translation is examined with a non-primal Chinese case for the first time. The author argues that the agents of the transformation of Christian faith in the Christian history of China are not only the Jesuit missionaries and first Chinese Christians but also the anti-Christian Chinese intellectuals, who owned a far more accurate understanding of the Christian God, Shangti, than the first Chinese converts.; Chapter one examines the late sixteenth-century Thomistic orientation in the early Jesuit curricula and educational directives. Chapter two presents the early Jesuit missionaries' translation of the divine name in Japan (Francis Xavier), Peru (José de Acosta) and South India (Roberto de Nobili) in a case study format. Chapter three discusses the translation of the divine name before Ricci's Shangti, which includes the translation of the Nestorians, the Keifeng Jews, the Franciscans, the Dominican Juan Cobo, and the Jesuit Michele Ruggieri. Western missionaries' divided responses to Ricci's translation and a brief historical survey of the Chinese term controversy issues after 1644 are then presented. Chapter Four provides the examination of the pre-existing semantic distribution of Shangti in China. It is followed by the examination of Chinese intellectuals' varied responses to Ricci's Shangti, with the intellectuals divided into three groups, viz. the Christian converts (Hsü Kuang-ch'i, Li Chih-tsao, and Yang Ting-yün), the “Permitting” Confucian scholars, and the “Opposing” anti-Christian intellectuals. The study wraps up with an argument that through the anti-Christian intellectuals' ideological rejection of what they considered to be the barbarous mistranslation of Shangti, which was presented in the Sheng-ch'ao P'o-hsieh-chi , for example, Shangti ironically underwent a semantic transformation as the Christian “God” in the Chinese semantic domains.