MF CASR lunch with Arden Chao

On the Term Shensheng 神聖: Divine Power, Sagely Virtue, and the Making of the "Sacred" in China

This talk examines the Chinese compound shensheng 神聖 — conventionally translated as "the sacred" — as a site where two competing political-theological projects are lexically conjoined but never resolved: shen 神 (ungovernable numinous power) and sheng 聖 (rationalizing moral order). Drawing on late-Qing constitutional debates, classical sources, and early-twentieth-century periodical corpora, I argue that the compound's internal structure made possible forms of analytical decomposition and political manipulation that monomorphemic Western equivalents such as Latin sacer or German heilig do not afford.