Explanations on the Incarnation of God and the Inculturation of Catholic Spiritual Practice in 17th-Century China

Through deep intertextual analysis of Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie (Explanations on the Incarnation of God, hereafter, Jingjie), a late Ming Dynasty work by Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni, this paper explores three levels at which the text creatively interprets Confucian and Daoist thought in the inculturation of Catholic spirituality in China, also drawing implications of Aleni’s historical inculturation for the contemporary inculturation of Christianity in China today. At the Christological level, Jingjie’s opening hymn champions the “Cosmic Christ” as a universal sage-king who creates all things with benevolence, thereby establishing an ontological foundation for its spiritual theory. At the spiritual level, Jingjie’s discourse on “proclaiming benevolence for the universal edification” characterizes the “Cosmic Christ” as a sage-king or “person of ren” (仁人), thereby acculturating the moral focus of Christian “imitatio Christi” within the Chinese tradition of spiritual cultivation. And at the level of praxis, Jingjie employs the “Dao-Vessel” distinction from the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes) and the “spiritual wandering” concept from the Zhuangzi to interpret the practice of “contemplating images” (观像) as a path of “proceeding from the traces below-form to explore the spirit above-form,” transcending the pictorial medium to attain a state of “wandering with creation.” Jingjie is therefore not only a richly illustrated narrative work but also a deeply practical spiritual guide that systematically interprets Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia Spiritualia through the lens of Chinese heart–mind cultivation, offering a valuable historical case study for the profound integration of Catholic theology and Chinese culture in contemporary China.