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.
Shiyu Wang (Thu,) studied this question.