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In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms "translatability" and "cultural incommensurability" were yet to enter the European lexicon, but these questions were addressed implicitly through the translation choices employed in the mission field. For the early missionaries, translatability had immense ramifications for their missionary practice. One of the foremost challenges was how to communicate in Chinese the concept of "sanctity," which was central to Christian soteriology. There was a range of terms in Chinese intellectual and religious traditions that the Jesuits drew upon to translate sanctus such as shengren 聖人 zhenren 真人, and xian 仙, but each of these terms implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of human excellence. This paper will present a microhistory of early Jesuit attempts to translate sanctus in Chinese, and reflect upon the significance of these translation choices for the development of the Jesuits' missionary strategy.
Daniel Canaris (Fri,) studied this question.