From the Debate over the City God to the Transformation of Cosmology: 口鐸日抄 (Kouduo Richao) and the Introduction of the Catholic Concept of God in Late Ming

Abstract

This paper takes the interaction between late-Ming Jesuits and Chinese City God (chenghuang, 城隍) worship as a case study, employing the “Great Tradition/Little Tradition” framework to examine the confrontation between “humans-becoming-gods” and “God-creating-angels”. It argues that the Confucian Great Tradition integrated popular beliefs through using the divine way to implement moral instruction (shendao shejiao, 神道設教), maintaining state–religion unity and a monistic cosmology. By contrast, Catholicism, centered on monotheism and a transcendent God, reallocated mystical power from imperial and local deities to the Christian God, thus implicitly reconstructing traditional Chinese knowledge systems under an apparent compromise. The article concludes that Catholicism in late Ming China signified not merely religious transmission but also the penetration of a transcendent God-concept and a dualistic cosmology dividing the otherworldly from the this-worldly into China’s this-worldly monistic cosmology, thereby clarifying the intellectual tensions revealed by the Jesuit encounter with Chinese cosmology.

1. Introduction: Problems and Methods

In the seventeenth century, in the coastal cities of southern China’s Fujian province, a group of Jesuits from distant Europe was actively engaged in missionary work. Among these missionaries, the one most proficient in both spoken and written Chinese—and most beloved by the local populace—was the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni 艾儒略 (1582–1649). Aleni inherited the mission of his predecessors Michele Ruggieri 羅明堅 (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610), and, guided by his Christian faith, the latest scientific knowledge, and a refined command of the Chinese language, sought to introduce Christianity to local lower- and middle-level Confucian scholars. Under the enthusiastic efforts of Li Jiubiao 李九標 ( –1646?) and other local converts—who recorded, edited, and compiled the missionary dialogues—the sayings and exchanges between Aleni and his interlocutors were rendered into written Chinese (both vernacular and classical) between the 1630s and 1640s. These were subsequently published in dialogue and question–answer format as the Daily Records of Oral Admonitions (Kouduo Richao 口鐸日抄), a collection in eight volumes (Zürcher 2007, 1ff; Xiao 2015, 22ff). As a textual vehicle that vividly records the dialogic and relatively equal exchange between Western culture, represented by Catholicism, and Chinese culture, represented by Confucianism, the Kouduo Richao has long drawn considerable scholarly attention. For the purposes of this study, the approach proposed by Nicolas Standaert (Sun and Zhong 2004, 32ff) proves particularly illuminating: he advocates applying methods from historical anthropology to explore interactions between Christian belief and Chinese popular religion from the perspective of common people and folk culture. Building on this, the present paper introduces the Confucian “Great Tradition” alongside the Christian Great Tradition and Chinese folk “Little Tradition”, taking the discussions of the City God (chenghuang 城隍) in the Kouduo Richao as an entry point to investigate the interaction among these three traditions. In doing so, this study aims to reveal how Catholicism—as a foreign “other” entering China on relatively equal terms—introduced new cosmological and epistemological frameworks that challenged indigenous Chinese worldviews.

The belief in the City God holds special significance for the present inquiry. The chenghuang, a local deity with human-like characteristics, was typically the deified spirit of an individual who had died under special circumstances, later elevated and often recognized by the imperial state (Harrell 1974; Wolf 1974). This transformation—from human to ghost to deity—has no basis in the canonical Confucian classics but is prevalent in popular tales of the supernatural and folk ritual practices, which were, to some extent, sanctioned by secular authority through the conferral of official titles. The City God thus occupied a unique space: neither the rationally venerated natural spirits of Confucian orthodoxy nor the “licentious cults” condemned by the state, but rather a locus of active interaction between China’s Great and Little Traditions. The City God constitutes a decisive site for the cosmological confrontation at the heart of this study rather than a merely local ritual concern. Unlike cults associated with Confucian orthodoxy—such as ancestor veneration or the cult of Confucius, which are embedded in canonical discourse and state rites—the chenghuang occupies an intermediate position between the Great and Little Traditions and is often rooted in popular narratives of human transfiguration. This intermediate status should be distinguished from other deities such as Guan Di or Mazu, who, despite being incorporated into state-sponsored worship, are typically venerated as individual deities within specific local contexts. Due to their pronounced personal characteristics, Guan Di and Mazu almost entirely resist the possibility of depersonalization, which starkly contrasts with the bureaucratic nature of the City God (B. Li 1997; Bao 2005; Xiaofen Zhang 2006). A brief comparison with these popular deities thus makes clear that the chenghuang is not an arbitrary choice, but one of the most institutionally abstractable sites within the Chinese religious system. This distinction underscores the unique role of the City God in embodying the systematic governance of the supernatural realm by secular authority, further enhancing its analytical potential. As discussed above, the City God functions here as a diagnostic rather than a representative case. It is precisely the City God’s capacity for institutionalization—and the way this links secular office-holding to spiritual jurisdiction—that renders it a particularly revealing test case: disputes over its appointment and status strike directly at contrasting assumptions about political sovereignty and spiritual governance, and thus illuminate the deeper incompatibilities between Confucian and Catholic cosmologies that this study interrogates.

Unlike works such as The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義), which reflect Ricci’s dialogues with China’s upper-class intellectual elites, the interlocutors in Aleni’s Kouduo Richao were primarily middle- and lower-level Confucian scholars from coastal Fujian. These figures—local cultural elites—combined rational reflection and intellectual curiosity with intimate familiarity with the vibrancy of local folk religion. They thus served as crucial mediators in the interaction, negotiation, and reconstruction between China’s Confucian Great Tradition and folk Little Tradition. The occasional references in the Kouduo Richao to the attitudes of upper-class literati toward the City God further provide insights into the Great Tradition’s perspectives. In this sense, the Kouduo Richao offers an exceptional platform for examining the intercommunication and mutual constitution of three civilizational dimensions: the Western Christian Great Tradition (represented by the Jesuits), the Chinese Great Tradition (represented by elite Confucianism), and the Chinese Little Tradition (embodied in the responses of local scholars).

The conceptual distinction between the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition originates from Redfield (1956, 70ff). Redfield emphasized two key ideas: first, that the two traditions are distinct—the Great Tradition being cultivated by a small number of literate elites in schools or temples, and the Little Tradition arising spontaneously among illiterate villagers in local communities; second, that they are mutually dependent and continually interreferential: “Great and little tradition can be thought of as two currents of thought and action, distinguishable, yet ever flowing into and out of each other.” (Redfield 1956, p. 72) Redfield further proposed the distinction between “primary civilizations” and “secondary civilizations.” Primary civilizations, such as China and India, though influenced by external forces, retain an enduring indigenous civilizational continuity that binds peasants to their cultural roots. Secondary civilizations, by contrast, emerge from the hybridization of different civilizational types—for example, Mexico and Peru, where the invading Spanish–Catholic Great Tradition intermingled with indigenous Latin American civilizations. The formation of a Great Tradition marks the genesis of a primary civilization, whereas the rise of a secondary civilization, as Redfield (1956, p. 78), quoting Kidder, notes, entails the “decapitation” of the native Great Tradition—a process of “deculturation.” Redfield’s paradigms of Great/Little and Primary/Secondary civilizations have since been widely applied in comparative civilizational studies within historical anthropology. Singer (1972), for instance, employed them to explore the interaction, adaptation, and reconciliation between India’s Great and Little Traditions and modern civilization in urban contexts. Within the context of Jesuit missions to China in the late Ming and early Qing, the theory of Great and Little Traditions has often been used to interpret the causes of the Rites Controversy. As Xiao (2015, 198ff) observes, differences between upper-class Confucian scholars and common people in their understandings of ancestral and Confucian rituals shaped the missionaries’ judgments about whether such practices possessed religious significance, ultimately leading to divergent positions in the controversy.

The present study adopts Redfield’s framework for three reasons. First, Redfield provides a conceptual space for examining the interaction between text-centered Great Traditions and practice-centered Little Traditions—an approach well suited to analyzing the interplay among the Christian and Confucian Great Traditions and the Chinese folk Little Tradition preserved in historical records. Second, his distinction between Great and Little Traditions offers an operational conceptual framework for differentiating the various cultural components within Chinese civilization—particularly those holding divergent attitudes toward City God worship. Third, Redfield’s discussion of primary and secondary civilizations inherently involves issues of civilizational comparison, interaction, and transmission. Unlike the violent “decapitation” that characterizes the formation of secondary civilizations, however, the Jesuit encounter with local Chinese believers in the late Ming was a peaceful dialogue. The nested structure of the Great/Little and Primary/Foreign Civilization paradigms thus allows us to pose a critical question: If a foreign primary civilization ignores the native primary civilization and seeks only to eradicate local Little Traditions, will the native Great Tradition also be destroyed? This question underlies the Jesuit strategy of “supplementing Confucianism and transforming Buddhism”, whereby missionaries sought to reform Chinese practices such as geomancy, divination, and astrology—encounters that inevitably engaged with the cult of the City God.

This study demonstrates that through monotheism and a conception of an omnipotent, transcendent God, the Jesuits reinterpreted and transformed the Chinese belief in City Gods—deities once derived from human spirits—transferring the locus of divine authority from the earthly emperor to the Christian God. In doing so, they directly confronted the core Confucian principle of zheng zhu jiao cong 政主教從—the subordination of religion to political authority—and challenged the this-worldly monistic cosmology that was deeply intertwined with this politico-religious order. By examining how the Great Traditions of China and the West sought to reshape specific forms of Little Tradition, we can discern the essential, historically persistent characteristics of each civilization and grasp the radically heterogenous cosmology and mode of thought that Catholicism introduced to late Ming China. This exploration highlights the significance of the City God controversy as a critical site for understanding the deeper incompatibilities between these cosmologies, setting the stage for the following analysis, which will proceed in three parts. First, drawing on historical Chinese sources, it will examine the contestations between the Chinese Great and Little Traditions surrounding the City God during the Ming dynasty, showing how the two ultimately reached a compromise: the City God emerged as a human-ghost deity whose authority was sanctioned by the earthly emperor. Second, the study will focus on how Giulio Aleni reinterpreted the City God belief in the Kouduo Richao, demonstrating how Christianity creatively transformed the City God into a celestial being created by God, thereby relocating authority to a transcendent realm. Finally, by revisiting the translation controversies of the late Ming and early Qing, the paper argues that the core dispute between Chinese civilization and Western Christianity over the City God centers on differing cosmological understandings of political–religious relations and the regulation of mystical power; the broader analytical implications of this structural contrast are further developed in Section 4. In this sense, through the transformation of the Chinese Little Tradition of City God worship, the Jesuits introduced a transcendent theology and new cosmology that—under the guise of accommodation—fundamentally challenged the this-worldly monistic worldview of Chinese civilization.

2. The Contest Between the Great and Little Traditions in China: “Humans-Becoming-Gods”—Transferring Authority to the Emperor

In China’s orthodox classical canon, no record of City God worship exists. The Qing dynasty scholar Qin Huitian 秦蕙田 （卷四十五） observed:

古唯社稷，而後世則有城隍，且其義其秩頗與社稷類，而威靈赫濯，奔走巫祝，為民物之保障，官吏之所倚庇者，則更甚於社稷。

In ancient times there were only the gods of soil and grain (Sheji 社稷), but in later ages City Gods also appeared. Their meanings and ranks resemble those of sheji, yet their mystical power and the people’s devotion to them are even greater; they have become the protectors of the people and the refuge of officials.

This reveals that City God worship was a post-classical popular cult—one with obvious shamanistic characteristics and social influence. Qin’s awareness of the magical elements in the City God cult, and its functional rivalry with the orthodox cult of sheji, already implied a latent tension between China’s Great Tradition (the Confucian orthodoxy) and the Little Tradition (local popular religion).

The City God, the tutelary deity of the city, bears resemblance to the earth spirits (diqi, 地祇) worshiped in traditional Chinese ritual. According to earlier scholarship, the paired term “chenghuang” first appeared during the Western Han dynasty, and sacrifices to the City God were clearly recorded only from the Southern and Northern Dynasties onward. Naming specific individuals as City Gods and composing ritual texts for them began in the Tang, while their inclusion in the state sacrificial canon and nationwide worship occurred in the Song. By the Tang–Song transition, official records already show that City Gods were often granted honorific titles, and a more systematic and hierarchical structure of City God worship appeared in the Ming and Qing dynasties (Qin 2020; Deng 1935; H. Zhang 1995; Hamashima 1991). City Gods are distinctly anthropomorphic—often deified human ghosts. As the Erya 爾雅 explains, “The term gui (ghost) means ‘to return.’” Xing Shu 刑疏 glosses, “Gui is to return, as in returning home.” The Shuowen 說文 states, “That to which a person returns becomes a ghost.” The Liji, Jifa 禮記•祭法 notes, citing the Chunqiu Zhuan 春秋傳: “When ghosts have a place to return, they are no longer malevolent.” Wu (2022), after surveying numerous traditional sources, concludes that the notion of humans turning into ghosts after death is the most credible. A deceased person becomes an ancestor if properly enshrined by descendants, but turns into a restless ghost (ligui 厲鬼) if without a resting place or dying unjustly. In order to prevent such spirits from harming the living, communities often built shrines for them and even elevated them to divine status—as seen in ethnographic studies by Harrell (1974) and Wolf (1974). The transformation of human ghosts into gods does not appear in the Confucian canon but is ubiquitous in zhiguai tales and folk ritual practices, such as the cults of Guan Gong, Mazu, and the City God. These deifications were at times recognized and sanctioned by the state through the conferral of official titles.

Because the City God combined the dual attributes of earth spirit and human ghost, the early Ming state adopted an ambivalent stance toward its worship. In 1369 (Hongwu 2), Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 declared to his ministers:

明有禮樂，幽有鬼神。若城隍神者，歷代所祀，宜新封爵。

Among the living there are rites and music; among the dead there are spirits and gods. As City Gods have been worshiped through the ages, they should be newly ennobled.

(Z. Huang 1968, vol. 38)

He thus standardized the City God system on a national scale, assigning official ranks according to each city’s administrative level. This was the first time the City God cult was formally incorporated into the state ritual system, transforming the City God into the underworld counterpart of the local magistrate—a reflection of the Ming conception of “governing both the visible and the invisible realms” (Y. Li 2011, p. 268). By the Qing period, Suzhou 蘇州 had even established City God temples corresponding to higher bureaucratic offices, such as the provincial governor’s City God or fiscal commissioner’s City God (Hamashima 1995). Some scholars (Liu 2021) have even argued that the ritual hierarchy of City Gods mirrored the evolution of Ming–Qing administrative institutions. The 1369 reform thus codified earlier traditions while reinforcing their anthropomorphic elements through the conferral of ranks and titles.

However, in 1370 (Hongwu 3), the state abruptly reversed course. A decree ordered that all City Gods be stripped of their honorary titles, renamed simply as “the God of the City of [X],” and that all temples remove other deities and destroy images:

令各廟屏去他神。定廟制，高廣視官署廳堂。造木為主，毀塑像舁置水中，取其泥塗壁，繪以雲山。

An imperial decree ordered that all temples remove any extraneous deities. The dimensions of the temple halls were to correspond to those of the official administrative offices. The images of the gods were to be replaced with wooden tablets; existing clay statues were to be destroyed and carried into the water, their clay used to plaster the walls, upon which images of clouds and mountains were to be painted.

(Zhang et al. 1974, vol. 49)

This reform sought to depersonalize the City God and restore its status as a territorial spirit. Here, depersonalization denotes that the chenghuang is primarily identified as a bureaucratic functionary devoid of individual personality within the underworld administrative system, rather than being recognized for any exceptional moral qualities or miraculous deeds attributed to them during life or after death. Even in cities lacking a local tradition of chenghuang deities, corresponding chenghuang were systematically assigned from the top down within the institutionalized chenghuang framework, according to the relevant administrative rank. Hamashima (1995) attributes the rapid policy reversal to conflicts between two bureaucratic factions: the pragmatic Zhongshu officials, often of lower social origin and inclined toward Daoist practices, and the Li officials, Confucian literati from Zhejiang representing orthodox thought. For the latter, only the sheji were legitimate state deities, and they argued, “Since we already have the gods of soil and grain, there should not be City Gods as well” (Zhang et al. 1974, vol. 49). Zhu Yuanzhang himself vacillated between these views—relying on Confucian elites for governance yet personally believing in Daoist. His 1369 edicts especially ennobled the City Gods of Kaifeng 開封, Linhao 臨濠, Taiping 太平, Hezhou 和州, and Chuzhou 滁州—sites tied to his military victories—reflecting his conviction in their divine protection. The 1370 reform, therefore, represents the Confucian ideological faction’s ascendancy, a declaration of top-down reform whereby the Great Tradition sought to discipline the Little Tradition.

Nevertheless, the reform failed to achieve its intended outcome. Numerous sources show that City God statues reappeared by mid-Ming, as local officials and gentry yielded to popular custom. As Johnson (1985) notes, the rise of City God worship in the Tang–Song period was closely tied to the economic development, urbanization, and commercialization of South China. During social transformation, urban dwellers and merchants sought new spiritual guardians for their specific needs. Anthropomorphic gods, compatible with magical and petitionary practices, fulfilled this demand. A well-known example is the Tang magistrate Li Yangbing 李陽冰 of Jinyun 縉雲 County, who prayed to the City God during a drought and threatened to burn the temple if rain did not come within five days. When rain fell as promised, he and local elders moved the temple to a hilltop in gratitude (Dong et al. 1983, vol. 437). This episode shows that the City God cult originated in the religious needs of commoners rather than elite rationality. As Weber (2001, p. 272) observed: “A secret doctrine or an ethical system tailored to the needs of intellectually trained elites tends to be transformed into a popular, magical, and messianic-salvational form of official religion adapted to the needs of the non-intellectual masses.” The people’s desire to seek fortune and avert disaster through magical appeal to anthropomorphic deities could not easily be eradicated. Despite repeated imperial prohibitions during the Jiajing 嘉靖, Yongzheng 雍正, and Tongzhi 同治 reigns, local communities continued to deify human ghosts as City Gods, forcing the literati to compromise (Hamashima 1995; Zhu 2016).

While the central government integrated the City God into state ritual yet sought to remove its anthropomorphic traits, local officials—understanding the true intent of imperial policy—often pretended to comply while secretly reinstating images, and the common people, under policy pressure, continued to worship deified human ghosts. This enduring three-way negotiation vividly illustrates the interaction between the Great and Little Traditions in China. Local officials, standing at the intersection of both, are particularly noteworthy: though their covert defiance was never formally approved, they were seldom punished—indicating that such behavior was tacitly permitted within the larger Confucian system, an embodiment of the principle of “using the divine way to implement moral instruction” (shendao shejiao 神道設教).

Two key implications emerge from this principle. First, political authority monopolized the interpretation and control of supernatural power originating from the popular. By sanctioning locally revered human ghosts through official enshrinement, the state domesticated popular supernatural forces, thereby converting religious legitimacy into political legitimacy. Confucian orthodoxy recognized only three sacrificial categories—heavenly gods, earth spirits, and ancestral ghosts—but popular religion constantly transformed certain human ghosts into powerful gods, such as Mazu and Guan Gong. What mattered was not whether these “gods” actually wielded supernatural power, but that the people believed they did. Official canonization thus brought those powers under imperial sovereignty, reinforcing the moral and political order.

Secondly, shendao shejiao also implied a recognition of the legitimacy of popular beliefs. Rather than forcefully eradicating all elements inconsistent with orthodox doctrine, it sought to effect a moral transformation of their content, thereby demonstrating great flexibility in both governance and moral instruction. The case of Jiang Ziwen 蔣子文, the City God of Jiang Temple, illustrates this. In Gan Bao 干寶’s Soushen ji 搜神記 (Gan 2019), Jiang was portrayed as a licentious ruffian who threatened Sun Quan 孫權 with droughts and plagues until deified as a local earth god. Through successive reinterpretations, Jiang’s image was moralized into that of a righteous and benevolent deity. As Zhu (2016) notes, under Ming prohibitions of “licentious cults”, local worshippers often beautified or fabricated the virtuous deeds of their gods to secure state approval—likely the case for Hangzhou 杭州’s City God, whose earlier figure was replaced by the upright official Zhou Xin 周新.

Building on the foregoing, the historical negotiation over City God worship makes explicit a distinctive feature of the Confucian Great Tradition: its capacity to absorb and reorganize popular religious forces. Through the principle of shendao shejiao, the state neither wholly rejected nor uncritically endorsed popular beliefs; rather, it moralized and bureaucratized them selectively, tolerating deified human ghosts like the City God only insofar as their numinous authority could be redirected to uphold social order and political legitimacy. By conferring titles, delineating jurisdictions, and embedding such deities within the imperial administrative hierarchy, the state converted a potentially unruly source of supernatural agency into an extension of secular governance—the divine was not expelled but rendered legible, controllable, and instrumental. This arrangement exemplifies what I later describe as a semi-diffused sacred order. This arrangement depended on a this-worldly, monistic cosmology in which political authority and spiritual efficacy remained fundamentally continuous; shendao shejiao thus embodied both the tolerance and the boundary-drawing of Chinese culture. The worship of deified ghosts was permitted, provided their power was acknowledged as subordinate to the human emperor—expressing the Great Tradition’s principle of zheng zhu jiao cong, the subordination of religion to political authority. It is precisely this continuity that came under significant strain when confronted with a cosmology grounded in a transcendent Creator, and, positioned at the intersection of popular belief and imperial sovereignty, the City God thus emerged as a particularly revealing locus of tension in the Jesuit encounter with Chinese religious life.

3. The Jesuit Position: “God-Creating-Angels”—Transferring Authority to the Christian God

Against this background, Giulio Aleni’s engagement with the City God was not a marginal pastoral matter but a necessary theological confrontation produced by Catholic monotheism. Aleni challenged not merely the practice of worship but the notion that spiritual authority could be grounded in human political order. By rejecting the identification of the City God with deified human spirits and recasting it as a celestial being created by God, he relocated spiritual governance from imperial institutions to a transcendent divine order—thereby denying the Confucian premise that political sovereignty could extend into the unseen. The City God thus became the decisive site where Confucian domestication of the sacred clashed with Catholic insistence on God’s exclusive sovereignty.

Strictly speaking, within orthodox Catholic theology, there can be no such thing as “city gods,” since Catholicism worships only one God and regards all other so-called deities as idolatrous. Yet at the level of popular belief, Catholicism does recognize patron saints, who perform functions similar to those of China’s chenghuang. The Church teaches, however, that while only God is to be adored, the Virgin Mary and the saints may be venerated. Interestingly, when Giulio Aleni encountered the Chinese cult of City Gods, he did not identify them with Catholic patron saints, nor did he attempt to regulate Chinese devotion to them by the standards of Catholic saint veneration. Instead, he reinterpreted chenghuang as corresponding to the celestial spirits (tianshen, 天神), or angels, spiritual beings created by God. This hermeneutic move reflected a shared stance between the Chinese and Western Great Traditions in opposing popular magical practices, yet their modes of transforming the Little Tradition diverged significantly, revealing deep structural differences between the two civilizations.

The theological foundation of patron saints lies in the doctrine of the Communion of Saints (Sanctorum Communio). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997, §957):

Nam sicut christiana inter viatores communio propinquius nos ad Christum adducit, ita consortium cum sanctis nos Christo coniungit, a quo tamquam a fonte et capite omnis gratia et ipsius populi Dei vita promanat.

Exactly as Christian communion among our fellow pilgrims brings us closer to Christ, so our communion with the saints joins us to Christ, from whom, as from its fountain and head, issue all grace and the life of the People of God itself.

Saints, having demonstrated heroic virtue and miraculous power in life and canonized by papal authority, function as mediators linking believers to Christ through their intercessions. They often become patrons of specific cities with which they had special historical ties: Saint Ambrose, who defended and governed Milan as its bishop, became the city’s patron; Saint Genevieve, who rallied Parisians in prayer against Attila’s Huns, became patron of Paris; and Saint Patrick, who converted Ireland, became patron of Dublin (Farmer 2011, pp. 17, 180, 344–45). Churches, coins, and festivals commemorating these saints served as civic symbols of divine protection.

In terms of their protective function, Catholic patron saints most closely resemble China’s City Gods. Yet Aleni deliberately avoided equating the two. Instead, he chose to interpret chenghuang as angels or celestial spirits—an interpretive strategy revealing both prudence and creativity in Jesuit accommodation to Chinese culture. The Kouduo richao records three discussions of the chenghuang: two with lower Confucian literati (vols. 2 and 3) and one with a Grand Secretary (vol. 8). Scholars such as Xianqing Zhang (2002) and Xiao (2015) have summarized Aleni’s attitude as an attempt to “weaken the anthropomorphic elements of the City God while incorporating its worship into the orbit of Catholic piety.” Xiao further argues that this was a pragmatic strategy: to make Catholicism more acceptable to potential converts and to allow Confucian believers to integrate their ritual lives with the new faith. Both scholars recognized the Jesuits’ ambivalence toward Chinese popular religion, but the depth of this ambivalence merits closer analysis. Two questions arise: (1) Why did Aleni not employ the model of patron saints to explain the chenghuang? (2) What did his creative reinterpretation of the chenghuang as tianshen (heavenly spirits) signify?

First, the canonization of patron saints depends on Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity—qualities not possessed by those who became chenghuang in China. Even when the latter’s lives were morally idealized after death, the standards invoked were Confucian rather than Christian. Moreover, the link between a saint and his or her city in Europe is based on specific historical deeds. Aleni could neither recast Chinese chenghuang as Catholic saints nor assign existing saints to Chinese cities. His rejection of the analogy was thus natural. But beyond this practical reason lay a deeper concern: the magical and idolatrous tendencies of saint veneration among the laity. During the Protestant Reformation, many reformers attacked Catholic practices of saint and image veneration as idolatrous. In response, the Council of Trent (1563) issued a decree “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images” (De invocatione, veneratione, et Reliquiis Sanctorum, et sacris Imaginibus), clarifying the Church’s position:

non quod credatur inesse aliqua in iis divinitas vel virtue, propter quam sint colendae; vel quod ab eis sit aliquid petendum; vel quod fiducia in imaginibus sit figenda, veluti olim fiebat a Gentibus, quae in idolis spem suam collocabant; sed quoniam honos, qui eis exhibetur, refertur ad prototypa, quae illae repraesentant; ita ut per imagines, quas osculamur, et coram quibus caput aperimus, et procumbimus, Chriftum adoremus, et Sanctos, quorum illae similitudinem gerunt, veneremur.

Not because any divinity or power is believed to reside in them, nor because something is to be sought from them, nor that trust is to be placed in them as the Gentiles once did in idols; but because the honor shown to them is referred to the prototypes which they represent. Thus, through the images we kiss and before which we uncover our heads and kneel, we adore Christ and venerate the saints whose likeness they bear.

(Typis Vaticanis 1619, Sessio XXV)

The decree reaffirmed that images and saintly veneration were theologically legitimate only when the honor rendered to them was directed toward Christ, their prototype. The distinction was made clear: adoration (adoremus) belongs solely to Christ, while veneration (veneremur) is accorded to the saints. Only when properly oriented could devotion avoid degenerating into magical practice or idolatry.

In this rejection of magical religiosity, the Catholic Great Tradition stood in solidarity with its Confucian counterpart. Aleni, well acquainted with Ming religious policy, even cited the Hongwu Emperor’s 1370 reform edict abolishing anthropomorphic images of the chenghuang as a historical precedent:

余不敏，嘗閲中邦史書，知前代舊弊，各處城隍岳瀆，皆有封號。獨熙朝詔削之，止稱某府州縣城隍之神。造木主，毀塑像，其山川岳瀆，亦去前代所崇美名，只以山水本名稱之。[…]皇哉聖意，可正千古之謬矣，豈若今之衣冠而人鬼哉？

I am not a man of great ability, yet I have read the histories of the Central Kingdom and have come to know the corrupt practices of former ages: everywhere the City Gods and the spirits of mountains and rivers were granted official titles. Only in the august Ming reign was an edict issued to abolish these titles, so that they were referred to merely as ‘the City God of such-and-such prefecture, subprefecture, or county.’ Wooden tablets were made to serve as their symbols, and their clay images were destroyed. Likewise, the mountains and rivers were stripped of the honorific names bestowed upon them in former times and called simply by their natural appellations. […] How sublime is the imperial intention! It rectifies the errors of a thousand ages—how could we now tolerate men in official robes being worshipped as ghosts?

(Ai and Li 2002, vol. 3)

The Confucian Great Tradition, grounded in rationalism, denied that human souls could persist after death as deities wielding supernatural power. The Jesuits, defending monotheism, rejected both idol worship and polytheism. Despite differing rationales, this convergence allowed Jesuits to appeal to Confucian literati—both lower and upper ranks, such as Zhu Zongbo (朱宗伯, i.e., Zhu Jizu 朱繼祚, a Grand Secretary, according to Xiao (2015, p. 160))—who found the “de-anthropomorphization” of the chenghuang unobjectionable. Jesuits could thus invoke the Hongwu edict as legitimation for forbidding converts from venerating the City God.

Nevertheless, a crucial and subtle difference remained: the question of where ultimate authority over the supernatural resided. Orthodox Confucianism, exalting the moral courage of the junzi 君子 (gentleman), held that virtuous character, not divine favor, determined one’s fate. Yet recognizing the limits of such idealism, Confucian governance tolerated pragmatic, magical, and ritual practices among commoners so long as they were morally aligned with Confucian ethics. As discussed earlier, the principle of shendao shejiao functioned as a flexible mechanism for moralizing and politically domesticating popular religion. Though granting noble titles to City Gods contradicted doctrinal orthodoxy, it fit the Confucian logic of zheng zhu jiao cong—the subordination of religion to political authority—and thus remained permissible.

In sharp contrast, the Jesuits insisted that all supernatural power belonged exclusively to Tianzhu 天主 (the Lord of Heaven, Christian God). Aleni rejected the idea that anthropomorphic City Gods could control human fortune, declaring: “It is unreasonable that mortals should wield the authority of the Tianzhu.” He also denied that the state could grant titles to spirits: “For all spirits receive their mandate from above, not from any temporal government.” Beyond destroying images, he even proposed that City God tablets should bear the inscription: “The spirit appointed by the Lord of Heaven to guard this city.” (Ai and Li 2002, vol. 3) Every element of this reasoning underscored divine sovereignty: supernatural authority derived from, and belonging solely to, God. Only the omniscient and omnipotent Lord possessed the power to reward and punish; human beings must expose false gods and worship only the true one. By redefining the chenghuang as one among the nine orders of heavenly spirits created by God, Aleni did not compromise with Chinese religion but rather reoriented the locus of power from imperial sovereignty to divine omnipotence.

In effect, the Jesuits pursued a twofold mission. First, by invoking natural reason, they sought to dismantle China’s magical techniques—geomancy, astrology, divination—through empirical and logical critique, replacing an animistic worldview with a rational one. Second, they introduced the transcendent Tianzhu as the ultimate source of all cosmic agency. Jesuit thought was not mechanistic: Aleni held that natural events were governed jointly by natural law and divine will. Earthquakes, for instance, he explained as resulting from air trapped within the earth’s cavities, yet he also affirmed that such disasters could express divine punishment: “When cities and their people perish together, it is a sign of God’s chastisement” (Ai and Li 2002, vol. 2). Human life, likewise, depended on three factors—heredity, personal conduct, and divine will—“for longevity and brevity alike come partly from one’s parents, partly from oneself, and partly from the Lord of Heaven” (Ai and Li 2002, vol. 2). What reason and effort could not control lay entirely within God’s hand. Thus, by reclassifying the City God as a heavenly spirit, Aleni effectively transferred the governance of all mysterious powers to God.

Giulio Aleni’s transformation of the City God was not an ex nihilo invention; rather, it was built upon the chenghuang’s preexisting institutional form. Within the “great tradition” of Chinese religion, the chenghuang had long been highly bureaucratized and, to a considerable extent, depersonalized: its powers were typically expressed not through a vivid, individualized divine persona, but through offices, ranks, jurisdictions, and document-like procedures of adjudication, thereby forming a governing structure that can be understood as an underworld bureaucratic apparatus. It was precisely this structural, readily abstractable character that left room for the chenghuang to be recoded: without having to preserve a strongly personalized mythic narrative, it could be articulated with the Catholic angelic order—created by God and subordinated to His sovereignty—as a functional, office-like being that could be incorporated. Aleni’s move can thus be read as an attempt to recentralize sacred power. By contrast, although Guandi and Mazu were also at times absorbed into the state cult, the core of their worship remained heavily dependent on identifiable personal deeds, miracle tales, and an affectively charged charismatic persona. The pronounced personalization of their divinity leaves little scope for depersonalization into a replaceable bureaucratic office.

In conclusion, the Confucian Great Tradition adopted a pragmatic policy of shendao shejiao, tolerating diverse forms of belief in supernatural powers under the principle of zheng zhu jiao cong. Catholicism, by contrast, insisted on the purity of monotheism, condemning all other deities as false and claiming exclusive authority over the supernatural. Remarkably, these two divergent systems appeared outwardly convergent in their treatment of the chenghuang. The famous anti-Christian polemic Shengchao Pojie Ji (聖朝破邪集, The Sacred Dynasty’s Refutation of Heresy) contains no direct refutation of Jesuit views on the City God. The tension, instead, was hidden in translation itself. When this tension surfaced fully during the “Term Controversy” (yiming zhi zheng, 譯名之爭) and the later “Chinese Rites Controversy” (zhongguo liyi zhi zheng 中國禮儀之爭), the unique cosmology and theological rationality of Catholicism stood revealed before the intellectual world of late Ming and early Qing China.

4. The Cosmological Transformation Behind the “Term Controversy”

In the late Ming period, Jesuit missionaries carefully distinguished among different types of worship and adopted differentiated responses to them. While reinforcing the political, secular, and de-religious character of ancestor veneration and Confucian sacrifice at the core of China’s Great Tradition of ritual, they simultaneously sought to transform China’s Little Tradition in ways that subtly subverted the Great Tradition’s foundational principle of subordinating religion to political authority. By contrast, after entering China, Dominican and Franciscan missionaries indiscriminately questioned all forms of Chinese worship, including sacrifices to Confucius and ancestors as well as the veneration of city gods, and reported the resulting controversies to the Roman Curia. As a consequence, in 1645, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith issued a decree classifying China’s city-god cults, ancestor worship, and Confucian sacrificial rites uniformly as idolatry and prohibiting both missionaries and Chinese converts from participating in them (Noll 1992, pp. 1–5). Although the Congregation for the Clergy in 1656 permitted secular and political forms of Confucian and ancestral rites, Charles Maigrot of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1693 strictly forbade Christians in the Fujian vicariate from performing ancestral and Confucian sacrifices and prohibited the use of Tian 天 (Heaven) and Shangdi 上帝 (Supreme Emperor) to refer to God. His elevation to the episcopacy in 1696 further amplified the influence of his personal stance, placing Catholic tradition in direct opposition to China’s Great Tradition and provoking strong resistance from the latter (Y. Huang 2007, 391ff). As the controversy intensified, tensions between the Chinese emperor and Catholic missionaries increasingly converged on the core issue of ancestor and Confucian rites, while questions concerning city-god worship and terminological disputes over translation were relatively neglected.

The “Term Controversy” constituted an integral part of the larger Chinese Rites Controversy. It first emerged among the Jesuits themselves and revolved around a key theological-linguistic question: how should the Latin Deus (God) be rendered in Chinese? Should it be translated as Tian, Shangdi, or Tianzhu 天主 (Lord of Heaven)? Matteo Ricci was the first to translate Deus as Shangdi, drawing from ancient Chinese classics of the pre-Qin period. However, his successor, Niccolò Longobardo, Superior of the China Jesuit Mission, challenged this approach. Longobardo argued that Tian and Shangdi in the Confucian canon—especially as interpreted through Neo-Confucianism (Cheng-Zhu Learning)—carried religious connotations inconsistent with orthodox Christian theology. To equate Deus with Shangdi, therefore, amounted to heresy. This position posed a serious challenge to Ricci and to Giulio Aleni, who inherited Ricci’s accommodationist strategy. The debate eventually transcended the confines of the Jesuit order and became part of a broader cultural dispute within Europe itself, culminating in the Chinese Rites Controversy that erupted during the reign of the Kangxi 康熙 Emperor.

Starting from the issue of City God worship, this study reconsiders the Chinese Rites Controversy and argues that the disputes over terminology and ritual practice reflected two fundamentally different understandings of the relationship between politics and religion, rooted, respectively, in two original civilizations. In essence, the controversy revealed a profound conflict between a this-worldly monistic cosmology and a dualistic cosmology founded upon a transcendent Creator. In this sense, the seemingly inconsequential “Term Controversy,” which appeared to make little impact among Chinese converts, can be read as exposing a new cosmological and epistemological orientation—one that the Chinese ruling elite regarded with deep suspicion. Although the propagation of Catholicism in China fell into temporary decline following the Chinese Rites Controversy, the new mode of thought introduced by the Jesuits had become conceptually legible within the late Ming intellectual world, revealing tensions inherent in the encounter between Catholic theology and the Confucian cosmological order.

According to the research of T. Li (1998), the Term Controversy appears to have exerted little direct influence on Chinese converts. Compared with the debate over Confucian and ancestral rites—which directly concerned the ritual practices of Chinese Christians—the dispute over terminology seemed confined to the level of paper and ink. For most Chinese intellectuals who were primarily interested in the “practical learning” (shixue, 實學) within “Western Learning” (xixue, 西學), the choice of translation for Deus seemed of marginal importance. Before turning to the structural implications of the Term Controversy, it is worth noting that the translation of Deus as Shangdi did not circulate as a fixed or uniformly understood concept within late Ming catechetical and literati settings. Rather, its semantic range was selectively expanded or restrained according to pedagogical context and audience. Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義), written for upper-level Confucian scholar-officials, deliberately aligned Shangdi or Tian with its classical usage while avoiding explicit Christological doctrines such as the Incarnation or the Crucifixion (Ricci 1965). This strategy facilitated an initial perception of compatibility between Confucianism and Christianity and helps explain why many elite literati embraced “Heavenly Learning” (tianxue, 天學) as a form of harmonizing Heaven and Confucianism, even as elite Confucian critics opposed tianxue precisely because they rejected the claimed identity between the Catholic God and the Shangdi of the Confucian classics (Y. Huang 2007, 105ff, 124ff). By contrast, Kouduo richao, which records Giulio Aleni’s dialogues with middle- and lower-level literati in Fujian, employs the same term Shangdi while introducing explicitly Christian narratives—including the Virgin Birth and Christ’s death on the Cross—without provoking strong resistance (vol. 1, 5). This contrast suggests that the effectiveness of Shangdi as a translation did not depend on semantic identity alone, but on its capacity to sustain a degree of doctrinal ambiguity across different instructional settings. It was precisely this ambiguity that could defer, rather than resolve, the deeper cosmological tensions later crystallized in the Term Controversy. Given the evidentiary limits of the surviving record, the discussion here focuses on elite and semi-elite textual settings (in Redfield’s terms, ‘Great’ and intermediary ‘Little’ traditions) where reception can be traced with some granularity; direct access to non-literate, popular reception is more fragmentary and usually mediated through missionary or local-elite voices.

Nonetheless, this paper argues that the significance of the Term Controversy cannot be assessed merely by the quantity of texts produced or the scale of discussion. In essence, the controversy concerned the ontological identity between the Catholic Deus and the Tian or Shangdi found in the Confucian classics. It is therefore necessary to examine the implications that maintaining the equivalence between Deus and Tian held for the Great traditions of both civilizations. It must first be emphasized that the perceived identity between Deus and Tian was not a coincidence, but a deliberate construction actively maintained by Jesuits—especially those following Ricci’s line—and supported by Confucian literati. Before the Rites Controversy, Jesuit publications consistently rendered Deus as Tian or Shangdi. The term Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven), now commonly seen in extant editions, often represents a later modification—where the original characters were scraped away and replaced following the official ban issued during the Rites Controversy. As Sun (1994, p. 24) notes, Ricci’s translation strategy contained both strategic and intellectual elements: it sought, on one hand, to align Catholic faith as closely as possible with Confucian orthodoxy in order to gain literati support; and on the other, it rested upon the theological judgment that Tian and Shangdi in Confucianism referred to the one true God and lacked any idolatrous implications. These dual considerations received wide approval among Confucian scholar-officials and the imperial establishment. When Longobardo consulted Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 regarding the translation of Deus, Xu firmly sided with Ricci. Likewise, Yan Mo 嚴謨 wrote essays supporting Ricci’s translation, while the Kangxi 康熙 Emperor himself declared that Ricci’s precedent should serve as the guiding principle for missionaries entering China—a statement that effectively established Ricci’s rule as the official standard for Christian terminology.

The reasons for the intense internal controversy within the Jesuit order over Ricci’s translation principle have already been explored by many scholars. The present study approaches the issue through the lens of City God worship, seeking to uncover the deeper reasons why the Chinese civilizational tradition resisted the translation of Deus as Tianzhu. Prior to the Term Controversy, the Jesuits had consciously maintained, across various levels of interpretation, the impression of an identity between the Catholic Deus and the Tian or Shangdi of the Confucian classics. Within the discursive context of the City God debate, the Chinese convert Huang Benyu 黃賁宇 cited the Book of Documents (Shangshu, 尚書) passage—“Only you have spirits who can assist and help the people; do not bring shame upon the spirits” (唯爾有神，尚克相於，以濟兆民，無作神羞)—as evidence that Emperor Shun 舜 also sacrificed to the mountain and river gods under the dominion of Shangdi. In response, Giulio Aleni sought to reinterpret these mountain and river gods as beings of the nine celestial ranks created by Deus, thereby stripping them of any anthropomorphic characteristics (Rouduo Richao, vol. 3). In this dialogue, Aleni consciously preserved the unity between the Catholic Deus and the Shangdi of the Confucian tradition, arguing that the City Gods, as deities of the ninth celestial rank, were created by and subordinate to Deus. This interpretive strategy effectively bridged the great traditions of Western Catholicism and Chinese Confucianism. From the Catholic perspective, it upheld the supreme authority of Deus and the monotheistic doctrine of the one true God. From the Confucian perspective, the secular ruler—the emperor, as the Son of Heaven (tyanzi, 天子)—derived his legitimacy from Heaven or Shangdi, functioning as the sole mediator between Heaven and humankind. Consequently, the nine celestial deities created by Shangdi naturally fell under imperial authority. The reform of the City God cult during the second year of the Hongwu reign (1369), which formally incorporated City Gods into the state sacrificial system, further strengthened this structure: the City Gods became an essential extension of the emperor’s spiritual authority. When Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed that “the realms of the living and the dead shall be governed together” (you ming gong zhi, 幽冥共治) and conferred noble titles upon the City Gods across the empire, he clearly viewed them as his subordinates—spiritual inspectors overseeing local officials and ensuring their accountability.

In multiple passages of The Kouduo Richao, Aleni compared Deus to an earthly emperor, yet he never explicitly clarified the hierarchical distinction between the two. The translation of Deus as Shangdi thus maintained an ambiguous compatibility between the Catholic and Confucian great traditions, keeping their potential theological tension within acceptable bounds. In fact, the relationship between Heaven (tian, 天) and the Son of Heaven (tianzi, 天子) in the Chinese great tradition had always been dialectical. The legitimacy of imperial rule in the human realm depended upon Heaven’s mandate; the emperor was simultaneously the “son” of Heaven, subject at all times to its supervision and judgment. Yet, as The Analects (Lun Yu 論語) famously puts it, “Heaven does not speak” (tian he yan zai, 天何言哉). Even within the cosmological framework of Heaven–human resonance (tianren ganying, 天人感應), Heaven could only communicate its will through ambiguous omens and portents—the interpretation of which always remained in the hands of secular authority. When Aleni asserted that human emperors had no right to grant titles to the nine celestial deities created by Deus, he implicitly introduced a latent conflict between divine and imperial authority, thus opening a new field of political theology in the Chinese context. Nevertheless, because such tension already existed in a dialectical balance within the traditional Chinese cosmology, it did not immediately produce subversive consequences.

However, if the Catholic Deus—the Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) in Jesuit terminology—was a deity utterly unknown to the Chinese classics, entirely unrelated to the imperial title of the “Son of Heaven”, and possessing absolute, transcendent power, then such a concept inevitably provoked strong resistance from China’s great tradition. Giulio Aleni’s inclusion of the City God within the hierarchy of the nine celestial spirits created by Tianzhu was therefore not a concession to Chinese culture but introduced a reconfiguration that quietly unsettled the established politico-religious order. By reclaiming the City God under divine rather than imperial authority, Aleni effectively displaced the emperor’s sovereignty over sacred power. The resulting configuration of religious and political relations was no longer one of zheng zhu jiao cong (政主教從, political primacy over religion); rather, it implied a form of dual governance, in which political and religious authorities coexisted in parallel. From a retrospective perspective, Aleni’s handling of the City God issue can be characterized as building an open road while crossing the river secretly—an apparent “supplement to Confucianism” (bu Ru, 補儒), but in substance an “anti-Confucian” (fan Ru, 反儒) endeavor. The subversive potential of this move was concealed by the deliberate ambiguity maintained through translation—what later came to be known as the Term Controversy—which preserved a delicate balance between the two great traditions until the controversy made the underlying tensions explicit. Consequently, even incidents such as the removal of the Jingtian (敬天, Reverence for Heaven) plaque by Emperor Kangxi’s order, and the debates over orthodox lineage (daotong, 道統) and political succession (zhitong, 治統), as well as the argument that Jesus, being a sinner, could not be divine, recorded in the Shengchao poxie ji 聖朝破邪集, may all be viewed as extensions of this broader Term Controversy. The issue of the City God thus illuminated an otherwise unspoken political-theological problem: the division between royal and ecclesiastical sovereignty in the West. Chinese literati were quick to perceive the threat. Zhang Guangtian 張廣湉, in his Bixie zhaiyao lüeyi (辟邪摘要略議, Summary Reflections on the Refutation of Heterodoxy), denounced the Western practice of placing the “Emperor of the Temporal Realm” alongside the “Emperor of Moral Instruction” as “two suns under one heaven, two sovereigns in one state.” He lamented:

無論堯、舜、禹、湯、文、武、周公、孔子之政教紀綱，一旦變易其經嘗。即如我皇上可亦為其所統御，而輸貢獻耶？嗟夫！何物妖夷，敢以彼國二主之夷風，亂我國一君之治統？

“If the political and religious order established by Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius were suddenly overturned, would even our Emperor come to be ruled by them and offer tribute to their sovereignty? Alas! What manner of barbarian dares to disturb our unified rule with their two-sovereign heresy?”

(Xu n.d., vol. 5)

Such remarks made explicit that, within China, political and religious authority were unified under the emperor, and that Catholic practice was perceived as an attempt to destabilize this order.

The issue of the City God touches upon the governance of mystical power, revealing the close relationship between cosmology and political theology. In China, secular authority derived its legitimacy from Heaven’s mandate, while simultaneously asserting control over spiritual power by conferring titles and honors upon local deities. Through the principle of shendao shejiao, the state permitted limited popular participation in the construction of sacred power, provided that it conformed to moral orthodoxy. Thus, both political authority (the power to govern humans) and religious authority (the power to govern the divine) were concentrated in the person of the emperor, and the sacred was diffused within the secular order. This structure presupposed a this-worldly cosmology, in which mystical power was semi-centralized and semi-diffused within a world understood as a whole grounded in the temporal realm. The diffused portion of sacred power, continually regenerated in the little tradition, carried the latent potential to be re-centralized outside imperial control, occasionally erupting in opposition to the existing political order—particularly when the secular state failed to meet the people’s moral or material needs. As a result, Chinese regimes were perennially anxious toward any manifestation of uncontrolled mystical power, often reacting with excessive and even absurd overreach. Kuhn’s (1990) classic study of the 1768 “sorcery scare” during the Qing dynasty offers a vivid example of how this cosmology operated in practice. A group of monks fabricated tales of magical aggression to undermine a rival temple, inadvertently triggering panic at the highest levels of the imperial administration. Local officials, seeking to demonstrate loyalty, falsified evidence and expanded the list of “culprits”, while commoners exploited the panic to eliminate personal enemies. The ensuing social chaos ironically confirmed the emperor’s initial fears. At its core, this episode exemplifies how the structural logic of China’s cosmology prevented the great tradition from fully monopolizing sacred power, which continually regenerated within the popular realm and entered into perpetual negotiation with the political hierarchy under conditions of asymmetrical power.

In contrast, early modern Western Europe witnessed the institutional centralization of sacred power within the Catholic Church, creating a dual structure of church and state. Secular authority, in itself, lacked divine legitimacy; only through coronation by the Pope could monarchs acquire a derivative sanctity. Within this framework, the mystical powers that emerged from the popular little tradition—such as folk healing or witchcraft—were regarded as enemies of the Church but could, paradoxically, become allies of secular power. Bloch’s (1973) seminal study of the royal “healing touch” in late medieval and early modern England and France revealed the dynamics of this triangular relationship: monarchs sought to liberate their authority from ecclesiastical control by appropriating sacred charisma through miraculous healing, while the Church strove to subordinate royal sanctity within its own sacramental order. Both institutions thus attempted to appropriate popular mystical power, achieving a precarious balance between cooperation and rivalry.

Compared with China—where sacred power was both embedded in the this-worldly order and perpetually renegotiated across elite, state, and popular domains—the general pattern of church–state relations under the Latin Christian tradition developed within a cosmological framework that sharply distinguished the transcendent source of sacred power from the immanent world. The belief in a single omnipotent Creator who existed beyond nature provided an ultimate and exclusive repository of mystical power. By contrast, late imperial China was characterized by a semi-diffused cosmological structure in which sacred power was neither monopolized by an autonomous religious institution nor fully detached from the natural and social world. Within the framework of the Great and Little Traditions and the principle of shendao shejiao, mystical power was continuously regenerated in the popular sphere and only partially regulated through state ritual and bureaucratic incorporation. When Jesuit missionaries advanced a transcendent cosmology that redefined the ultimate source of sacred authority, they reoriented prevailing claims about where such authority resided. This shift tended to narrow (at least discursively) the space through which mystical power had previously circulated between the Great and Little Traditions, thereby interrupting established channels linking elite rationalism, state ritual regulation, and popular practice. As a result, the challenge posed by Western Christianity to Chinese civilization lay not in the introduction of rationalism, but in the destabilization of the mechanisms that had long governed the diffusion, regulation, and reproduction of sacred power.

Seen from this perspective, the Jesuit engagement with City God worship exposes a fundamental tension between two competing modes of regulating the sacred rather than a trajectory of intellectual influence. By redefining the chenghuang as a created heavenly spirit whose authority derived solely from the Christian God, the Jesuits directly challenged the Confucian principle of shendao shejiao, which sought to domesticate popular religious forces by integrating them into the political order. This intervention did not merely concern ritual practice or terminological choice, but questioned the very locus of sovereignty over the unseen. Its significance lies in the late Ming context itself: the City God controversy rendered visible the limits of accommodation between Catholic monotheism and the Confucian management of sacred power, without presupposing any subsequent historical transmission or later doctrinal development.

5. Conclusions

Jesuit missionaries and Chinese Confucian literati, each grounded in comprehensive civilizational traditions, directly confronted the issue of the chenghuang in popular religion. This case illustrates how the transformation of popular practices in the little tradition serves as a lens for understanding the core logics of the great tradition of the civilization. The Chinese Confucian great tradition, through shendao shejiao, morally adapted popular beliefs to Confucian ethics, integrating them into official rituals and conferring ranks to harness mystical powers under secular authority. In contrast, the Catholic great tradition centralized and monopolized all mystical forces under the singular God, creating an institutionalized ecclesiastical authority capable of counterbalancing secular power.

The Jesuit reinterpretation of the City God did not result in the successful institutionalization of a new Chinese Catholic worldview. Yet this very failure is analytically significant precisely because it clarifies the limits of accommodation already exposed in the late Ming City God controversy. Rather than demonstrating the formation of an enduring alternative cosmology, the City God case reveals the precise moment at which a God-centered cosmology became legible—and therefore contestable—within the Confucian imperial order. Its subsequent rejection by literati and political authorities should thus be understood not as evidence of insignificance, but as a manifestation of a fundamental cosmological challenge. The City God case thus allows us to observe how Christian knowledge systems were transmitted into China not only through accommodation and translation, but also through contestation, shaping enduring debates over political theology and cosmological authority.