Abstract
Catholic missionaries were required to use the language of their audience to spread their faith. How could they convey concepts that were originally absent from their audience’s culture and language? And how could they use language to describe phenomena that did not exist in the phenomenal world? These were the dilemmas faced by missionaries in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and they remain challenges for cross-cultural translation. This article analyzes the translation of anima to examine how the Chinese Catholic community addressed these two issues and discusses how the audience acquired new Catholic concepts through translations.
The missionaries used a series of terms related to ling 靈 to translate anima, as they are related to either vitality or the state of existence after death. The most common rendering was linghun 靈魂, with others including hunshen 魂神, xing 性, jingshen 精神, jingling 精靈, lingming 靈明, xingling 性靈, lingxing 靈性, lingxin 靈心, and lingcai 靈才. Regardless of which was selected, the missionaries hollowed out the original meaning of the Chinese signifiers and filled them with the content of the Catholic anima. This translation, while seemingly Chinese, departs from the original cultural and linguistic contexts, and thus had to be relearned. The Catholic community at that time used question-and-answer sessions to constantly practice the meaning of these terms, and with the help of visual aids, the missionaries’ audience gradually learned the new meaning of linghun as the Catholic anima; furthermore, through the daily prayers and ritual texts, they grasped the essence of the theory of the soul: God gives life and provides human beings with the goal of pursuing good; the anima uses its intellect to understand the world, employs its will to act, reveres God, and returns to His embrace in heaven. The translation of anima thus provided a new view of the immortal soul combined with the mortal body, and also qualified Catholicism as a teaching (jiao 教), competing with the other three Chinese teachings and folk beliefs.
Keywords
anima; translation; Catholicism; Jesuits; concept of man
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