Introduction

1

This article focuses on how Jesuit missionaries to Japan during the sixteenth century recurred on notions of the devil as their primary enemy. They took these notions from contemporary late medieval and early modern Catholic demonology and configured them according to the local circumstances they found themselves in, reconfiguring the concept of the devil to make sense of their environments. When European Jesuit missionaries first established missions among non-Christian peoples outside Europe, they reacted to their new environments not only socially but also conceptually and theologically. Similar developments as in Japan took place in the contemporary Jesuit mission fields of South America, but yielded slightly different results. As different ways to conceptually reframe the devil were directly connected to the question of his presence in the everyday world—was he a transcendent or an imminent force of evil, and how did he manifest himself and make use of his respective attributes?—this research is guided by the analytical concepts of transcendence and immanence.

2

The sources I am examining are internal Jesuit communications taken from the edited source collections produced by the order. My main aim in doing so is to detail the discourses within which the Jesuits in Japan settled for a terminology to refer to the devil in their internal writings and to the conceptual implications this terminology bore in the circumstances of the time. This begets the entangled question whether the results obtained provide useful insights for the historical analysis of the missionary processes. While the terminological developments I am trying to track resulted from and within an interreligious contact situation, they are not part of an interreligious discourse. The Japanese side, while providing the starting point and backdrop for the terminological developments among the Jesuit missionaries in Japan, had no active share in these discussions and is thus only considered where contextually relevant. All the translations in this article are mine, as are all their shortcomings. I therefore provide the exact quotes in footnotes for each translated item.

First Contacts

3

In August 1549 Francisco de Xavier SJ (1506–1552), accompanied by two other professed Jesuits, some lay brothers, and other companions, arrived at Kagoshima in southern Japan on board of a Chinese junk. Xavier was the highest-ranking Jesuit in Asia at the time, provincial of the first and only Asian province of the order, India, which had been founded in 1542 upon the request of the Portuguese king João III (1502–1557) whether this new order could not help in providing spiritual care for the Portuguese possessions on the Indian coast. Soon after his arrival in India however, Javier had, on his own account, extended the Jesuit order’s sphere of activities far beyond this commission, as he followed Portuguese soldiers and merchants throughout southeast and east Asia. Having heard favourable reports about Japan, which had been irregularly frequented by a few Portuguese merchants since 1543, and impressed by the accounts presented to him by some Japanese who had converted to Catholicism while traveling abroad, Javier single-handedly chose to extend the Jesuit mission to this country and embarked on the expedition which would take him, two fellow Jesuits, and some equipage aboard a Chinese junk to Kagoshima in 1549.

4

As Javier reflected upon the journey shortly after arrival in a large letter, the Carta Grande, to be circulated in manuscript throughout all the Jesuit order, he recalled various occasions on which he had encountered the power of evil during his travels. Already in the description of his crossing to Japan he saw himself and his companions—because after boarding the Chinese junk they were travelling on a heathen vessel—“in the fates of the demons and the power of their slaves and servants” (Xavier [1549b] 1990, 138).¹ They luckily escaped a cruel fate because, as Xavier said, it did not please God to hand them over to “the Enemy (inimigo), the causer of such wizardries and heathen doings” ([1549b] 1990, 139), and ultimately they arrived safely in a “way neither the Demon (el demonio) nor his servants could hinder our travel” ([1549b] 1990, 142).² He reported to his fellow Jesuits in Goa, capital of the Portuguese estado da Índia, organizational centre of the Jesuit order for all of Asia in 1549, to constantly live “in much fear of Lucifer using his many deceptions turning into an angel of light to disturb some of you”³ ([1549b] 1990, 152), while he imagined himself now to venture to Japan “to free those souls who for more than 1,500 years have been in the captivity of Lucifer, making them adore him as God on earth” ([1549b] 1990, 164),⁴ namely, the Japanese themselves. Obviously, Xavier had at his disposal quite a differentiated vocabulary to describe the devil and his evil machinations. But why should we care today how a particular Catholic cleric worded his observations on evil in the middle of the sixteenth century?

5

Xavier’s handling of the terms relating to the devil, as that of the other Jesuits in Japan, provides a window unto the development of a discourse which was only just in the making at the time: that of European demonology. Already in late Antiquity it had been established in Christian theology that non-Christian gods were demons, with Lucifer as their master (Hödl 2002, 478), a view propagated not only by the apostles but also by Church Fathers such as Athanasius and Origenes (Borgeaud 2010, 85). The medieval Catholic church had acknowledged the existence of the devil and demons but had not cared very much about the topic theologically. Belief in both the devil as a major and demons as minor fallen spirits of evil had been officially sanctioned by the Catholic church at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but the issue had been only at the margins of the council’s discussions (Russel 1988, 136). This disinterest was also shared by the prime exponents of scholastic theology. Although Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) acknowledged the existence of the devil, he did not dwell extensively on this topic (López Meraz 2008, 135). In popular medieval media such as mystery plays, a multitude of demons with sometimes quite specific attributes was common, serving as the infernal host of wicked agents to interfere on earth at the command of a devil imprisoned in hell (Dupras 2015, 253). The fourteenth and fifteenth century had seen a slow increase in interest in demonic matters by the church (Nobis 2021). Fears of diabolic influences had been on the rise since the fourteenth century and had permeated social life at large (López Meraz 2008, 136). At the end of the fifteenth century scholastic as well as popular demonology had taken an upsurge, leading to new publications and intensified preoccupation with the topic (Vorgrimler 2013), but only towards the end of the sixteenth century had demonology become a science of its own (Machielsen 2015, 211). In 1549, Xavier was writing at a time when terminological as well as theological matters regarding evil personified were anything but settled. The discursive processes among the Jesuits in Japan about how to name the devil and his demons thus provide a window into how demonology was negotiated by actors who considered it of direct practical importance in their daily work. As they were at the same time not detached from the scholarly theological discussions of their day in the field, this view may serve to complement those which have focused primarily on academic discourses on demonology.

6

The problem which Xavier and his fellow Jesuits faced in their self-imposed task of converting the Japanese to Catholicism was how to deal with people embracing a completely different kind of religious plurality and systems of belief than traditionally known to Europeans. This problem itself was not entirely new in 1549 however, at least not in general. The intensified engagement with overseas expansion of many European countries, foremost the two Iberian powers Spain and Portugal, since the end of the fifteenth century, had produced new missionary endeavours in its wake, most prominently the attempts to christianise the populations of the territories conquered in the Americas from the 1520s onwards. Especially during the Spanish expansion, the devil served as a hermeneutical key to decoding the unknown and to integrating it into existing systems of knowledge and belief (Léon Azcárate 2015, 198). The specific problems and challenges posed by each of the non-Christian peoples which now came into the focus of Europeans trying to convert them were yet new each time a new mission was initialised. In each of these cases the missionaries in question had to conceptually process the situation they found themselves in amongst people of different social and religious systems with whom they did not share any languages.

7

The first spiritual or theological problem missionaries had to engage with was why their mission was necessary in the first place, that is, why the people in question were no Christians. The second problem, following from the first, was to determine why the people in question would choose not to become Christians although having been presented with the Gospel. Both problems became pressing for the Jesuits in Japan from the moment they first set foot on the archipelago. At this point, thinking about the devil became important. Xavier and his companions conceived of the devil as an important and malevolent spiritual entity, “exceptionally powerful and utterly antithetical in his will to God” (Raiswell and Dendle 2012, 545). This rather broad and not very precise characterization of the devil was, as I will argue in the following, conceptually fleshed out by the Jesuits in Japan in creative ways to make sense of the situations they encountered, which in turn prompted specific terminological changes in the vocabulary used to address and describe this evil entity.

8

From the resulting terminology as visible in the documents the Jesuits of the Japanese mission produced in the sixteenth century, those concepts of the devil may be reconstructed because of the special importance they attached to words. Elisonas already pointed to the fact that soon after arriving in Japan, already in 1551, Xavier had initiated his famous policy of terminological non-accommodation: Because of the imminent danger of misunderstandings, central Christian tenets would not be framed with Japanese words, but would remain untranslated, only transliterated (Lacouture 2009, 129).

9

This was due to the Jesuits’—understandably—slow processes of language learning and working through the Japanese religious systems. Only after having spent two years in the country Xavier began to realize that much of the information he had been supplied with about Japanese beliefs was faulty, and that having based his preachings on this information had caused him to proclaim things which ran counter to his intentions, for example equating the Christian god with Dainichi nyorai, a Japanese interpretation of the bodhisattva Mahāvairocana as venerated by the Shingon school of Buddhism (Elisonas 1991, 307). In consequence, Xavier decided, any linguistic adaptation of Japanese concepts for Christian messages was to be stopped. Words like “deusu” (deus) for god and “anjo” (angel) were the consequence (1991, 310). Xavier was quite probably acting with examples in mind, as similar problems had already occurred in the context of the conquista of Mesoamerica a few decades earlier.

10

That terminology was consequential in the context of encounters between European Christians and non-European people had already been established by the conquerors of New Spain. Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) had famously described the temples of Mayas and Aztecs as ‘mosques’ rather than as ‘pagodas,’ as would have been more common for non-monotheistic places of pagan worship, as the imagined similarity to Islam conjured up by that word allowed for a much more brutal treatment of places and actors labelled in this way (Delgado 1993, 259). In the years following the conquest of Mesoamerica, the Spaniards would pull down temples and pyramids, burn books, and generally forbid any worship of the pre-conquest deities in hopes for a quick and thorough conversion of the populace to Christianity.

11

This attitude towards non-Christian religions was grounded in the specific theological outlook which had developed on the Iberian peninsula during the reconquista and which also included a specific attitude towards the devil and demons. Demonology served in this context as an everyday phenomenon, a conceptual tool to articulate widespread fears (Cavallero 2015, 318), especially towards non-Christians. A certain propensity for accepting a multitude of minor demons with relatively little spiritual or magical powers especially in southern Spain might have been the result of long-time cultural contact with Muslims, as Islam does not entertain the concept of one primary devilish antagonist of God but acknowledges a broad range of good and evil spirits (Knutsen 2009, 40). In theological discussions Aquinas’s angelology served as the model upon which demonology was built, and his discussion of free will served as the blueprint for conceptualizing the leeway given by God to the devil (see Campagne 2004, 29). In general, Iberian theology was reluctant to ascribe material powers to the devil and stuck to the traditional viewpoint of the Catholic Church that he interfered with humans most of all psychically, by deception, rather than physically (Cavallero 2015, 306).

12

These Iberian theological developments grounded much of the missionary approaches of the early Jesuits because most of them actually came from Portugal or Spain or were of Spanish extraction and had been brought up and educated in this atmosphere. Of those quoted here, this applies not only to the order’s founder and first General Ignacio de Loyola (1491–1556), but also to José de Acosta (1539/40–1599/1600), José de Anchieta (1534–1597), Martin Antonio Delrio (1551–1608), Juan Fernández de Oviedo (1526–1567), Balthasar Gago (1518–c.1583), Manoel de Nobréga (1517–1570), Melchior Nunes Barreto (1519/21–1571), Simão Rodrigues (1510–1579), Cosme de Torres (c.1510–1570), Gaspar Vilela (1525–1572), and Francisco de Xavier himself.

13

These biographical backgrounds notwithstanding, it was not inevitable that for the Japanese mission a theological approach inflected by Iberian reconquista or conquista ideas would come to be applied. The Society of Jesus only witnessed missionary developments in the Americas from the outside during the 1550s and 1560s. Whereas Jesuits had operated in the Portuguese colonial sphere in Asia since 1542 and in Brazil since 1549, they were allowed to do missionary work in Spanish dominions only in 1556, and the order opened its first American mission in Peru in 1568 (Gaune Corradi 2019, 381). The missionary work in Spanish America was mainly carried out by other orders, first and foremost the Franciscans. But the Franciscans utilized the devil conceptually in much the same way to make sense of indigenous religions. They supposed that the devil was the founder of all American religions, which he created to fool native Americans into worshipping him (Campagne 2004, 24–26). Only towards the end of the sixteenth century—at roughly the same time when Martin Antonio Delrio systematized Catholic demonology in his Disquisitiones Magicae—would José de Acosta (1539/40–1599/1600), in his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, postulate that the social and political systems of pagan peoples were directly linked to how, and how much, such peoples revered the devil. The more uncivilised (from Acosta’s point of view), the more pronounced the devil worship, and vice versa (Imbruglia 2014, 304).

14

In places such as Japan where military conquest was completely impossible, missionaries could only try to implement coercive measures in baptizing, catechizing, or pastoral care similar to those in use in the Americas or in the colonial dominions of the Portuguese Estado da Índia with the help of the local Japanese authorities, if they could be converted—as the Jesuits did, with limited success, during the sixteenth century (see Fróis 1926, 59). But as Xavier and his companions met with varying degrees of opposition from Japanese elites most of the time instead, the only reliable way to induce people to baptism was their preaching, which made the choice of words a sensitive issue, especially in matters of theological importance.

15

To be able to communicate their religious concepts to the outside, in this case the Japanese, the Jesuits in a certain mission field—here, Japan—however needed to establish a consensus amongst themselves how to conceptualize contentious issues. This was but an unconscious and undirected process, emerging within the environment of an intense written communication. As this communication unfolded amongst members of the same clerical order, the participants were addressing each other on the basis of a groundwork of shared assumptions, literature, and general doctrinal outlook, so that explanations and openly stated theological arguments are almost completely missing from it. What I will be doing in the following is thus to point out the implicit underlying associations of sensitive terminology, in this case the terminology used to talk to fellow Jesuits about the devil(s) in foreign parts, focusing on Japan in particular.

16

Xavier had, as stipulated by his missionary instructions from the Jesuit General Ignacio de Loyola and by the regulations of the Jesuit Order, from the outset maintained a high frequency of letters reporting about his whereabouts and plans, the state of the mission, and other affairs both with the order’s headquarters in Rome and with his fellow missionaries in the field (Balsamo 1998, 162). As the order maintained a consciously crafted public engagement strategy designed to put these letters to use in advertising the Society of Jesus and its missionary activities throughout Europe by publishing such letters from the mission fields in print, internal Jesuit letters which their authors expected to be potentially used in this way began to differ from those communications which openly addressed the problems and shortcomings encountered in the mission fields (Ferro 1993, 140). The authors of the documents analysed below thus always needed to keep in mind that their writings might not only circulate throughout their order but also within a wider literate European and predominantly Catholic public. Both potential audiences constrained the discursive and terminological leeway the Jesuits in Japan had considerably: What they wrote needed to be understandable and acceptable to both. Innovation and invention were not deemed suitable in this communication, so that terminological developments did not happen intentionally but only piecemeal and unconsciously. How such processes shaped the terminology for addressing the devil is what I am going to unfold now.

Three Infernal Personae

17

Xavier’s vocabulary for the machinations of the underworld was obviously quite differentiated, as can be seen from his Carta Grande. In the quotations given above, Xavier related to three different perspectives an early modern Catholic Christian might take on Satan. Those perspectives may be seen as three different infernal personae, three different conceptual roles for the devil as a spiritual being within a Christian cosmos. The first, inimigo, the “Enemy,” describes the devil primarily in terms of an eternal antagonist of God and His creation; the second, demonio, the “Demon,” primarily describes the active spiritual nature of an agent of evil, either as the devil himself or as one of many smaller evil spirits, the devils; and the third, Lucifer, refers primarily to the fallen angel whom the power of the Lord had banished to hell, to the inferno, where the souls of those who died with false beliefs would go after their death (Xavier [1549c] 1990, 184), as was seen as totally inevitable (Schatz 2005, 100). The firm conviction in the existence and spiritual importance of hell was an element of belief Xavier shared with other contemporary Jesuits working in similar circumstances, as José de Anchieta in sixteenth-century Brazil, who wrote a catechism which explicitly told the indigenous Brazilian tribe of the Tupinambá that the only way not to go to hell was to be baptized (Cressoni 2014, 581).

18

Following Xavier’s lead, in the following I will disambiguate the three infernal personae he referred to as the Enemy devil, the Demon devil, and the Lucifer devil to see how exactly these terms were to be used in the context of mission in Japan and which conceptual modifications this entailed.

19

In doing so I will refrain from using ‘devil’ and ‘demon’ as interchangeable terms, something quite current in respective research. Sánchez Conicet has explicitly done so in his study of José de Acosta’s demonological terminology for describing sixteenth-century New Spain (2002), and Cressoni implicitly in describing Jesuit accounts of sixteenth-century Portuguese Brazil (2014, 590–91). They are in good company, as many such studies indiscriminately use all the devil’s names to refer to the same conceptual entity (Caro Baroja 1978; Clark 1997). Yet Sánchez Conicet had indeed found that José de Acosta used both demonio and diablo to account for the workings of evil, and did so indiscriminately (2002, 11)—although he much more frequently used demonio in his writings (Léon Azcárate 2015, 200)—so with respect to sixteenth-century South America, this approach to the terms of evil seems to be grounded in the sources. This begs the analogous question of how Xavier’s three infernal personae may be conceived to have terminologically worked out for the Jesuits in sixteenth-century Japan: Were they interchangeable, did they describe coexisting yet separate spiritual beings, or were they indicative of individually distinct manifestations of evil?

20

Elisonas has reasonably demonstrated that after encountering sixteenth-century Japan, the Jesuit missionaries genuinely believed that “[b]asically, there was nothing wrong with the Japanese except that they were in the clutches of the devil” (2001, 4)—and that they, following Xavier, had been in his clutches for over one-and-a-half millennia, I might add. In the light of Xavier’s three infernal personae, I would now like to ask: Yes, but in the clutches of which kind of devil exactly?

21

As belief in the devil and demonic powers was a vital element of the missionary teachings of the Jesuits in sixteenth-century Japan—after all, conversion was depicted as, quite literally, a question of heaven or hell—it should be telling to have a closer look at how the missionaries dealt with those evil presence(s) which they feared to be constantly at work against themselves. The conceptual representations they formed to express these fears may then figure as “iterations of the devil that can be read not just as an expression of particular social irritations and anxieties at specific temporal moments, but as diagnostic of their perceived force and intensity within a given community” (Raiswell and Dendle 2012, 538).

Working with Terminology

22

The Jesuits in Japan, few as they were, could not ignore the cultural landscape within which they moved and needed to take the Japanese conceptions of spiritual forces and beings into account. That it would prove difficult to align the two lines of thinking present in this encounter, Jesuit (predominantly Iberian) Catholic Christianity and Japanese Buddhist-Shintoist-Confucianist syncretism, became apparent early on, although it took the Jesuits in Japan more than a decade until, in the early 1560s, they were able to explain Buddhist terms using correct Christian analogies (see Kishino 2009, 58–59). A manual detailing how to refute Buddhists in debate was commissioned in 1570 but only completed in 1578 (López-Gay SJ, Michel SJ, and Wicki SJ 2001, 2710–1). In this situation, not only was talking with Japanese Buddhists about spiritual matters complicated, but so was representing Buddhist spiritual matters and the spiritual entities supposedly connected to them to fellow Jesuits.

23

The most prominent record of the extent of some of these difficulties is to be found in two letters, one written by Cosme de Torres and the other by Juan Fernández de Oviedo reporting about ‘discussions’ the two Jesuits held with local Buddhist monks in the Southern Japanese port city of Yamaguchi in 1551. This event has met with some attention already (see Lacouture 2002, 2009, I:125–128; Schurhammer 1973, 299–309), as most scholarship on the topic so far framed it as a first interreligious dialogue, a first step towards a better understanding. This interpretation becomes problematic once one takes into account that the Buddhist monks which had gathered at the spot obviously formed no homogenous audience with shared questions but rather small individual groups, each of which posed to the two Europeans the handful of questions they were most interested in and then retreated again (Winnerling 2014, 305–8).

24

The Japanese participants were not so much interested in discussing as in satisfying their curiosity, as it seems from the records de Torres and Fernández have left us, which of course are written with both a clear perspective and purpose. One of these purposes was to inform their fellow Jesuits all over the known world of the events in Japan, as the order circulated such letters internally far and wide. Inner-Jesuit interest in this remote mission field was great, so that the documents almost immediately met with much success (De Torres [1551] 1990, 206). De Torres and Fernández had anticipated this possibility and also knew that their letters would be read by the order’s high ranks, including the Jesuit General, which meant that they would be careful not to present themselves as presenting theses to their potential converts which might be considered out of the line of the order’s spirituality.

25

This in turn means that, although one should be very careful in trying to figure out from these letters what really was spoken about in Yamaguchi, it is possible to see from these documents which ways of presenting Christian concepts to an audience of intelligent heathens were acceptable for a sixteenth-century Jesuit audience. What is to be found there thus can be taken as very basically expressed understandings of their own terms and of the teachings the Jesuits in Japan—as represented by these two members of the order—held in 1551. Of special interest here is that the Yamaguchi letters indeed describe some groups of Japanese monks as asking questions about the devil. A closer look at these descriptions should provide a better understanding of how de Torres and Fernández themselves thought about the things which they reported to have explained to their presumptive Japanese audience.

26

The first such group of Japanese monks mentioning the devil that Cosme de Torres reported was, unfortunately, portrayed in a way not very conducive to such a line of inquiry:

27

There were others who worshipped the Sun and the Moon, saying that the Sun and the Moon were gods. And as they worshipped all things, they worshipped the Demon, too, because they said that the Demon was also a god as he was His creature. They were very ignorant […].⁵ (De Torres [1551] 1990, 214)

28

The only clear statement made here is that the Demon devil is obviously not equal to God but an inferior type of spiritual being, but this hardly comes as a surprise and also does not tell very much about what type of spiritual being it actually is, then. But fortunately Cosme de Torres is not the only source for this event. The—much longer—letter of Juan Fernández in comparison contains some more detailed passages dealing with diabolic matters which provide ample material for an inquiry into the precise nature of the terms used (Fernández de Oviedo and Ruiz-de-Medina SJ [1551] 1990).

29

For the discussion of the following quotes it must however be kept in mind that the original manuscript of Fernández’ letter is considered lost, and that the six extant contemporary manuscript copies occasionally diverge a little from each other ([1551] 1990, 239–40). In some cases, this allows us to corroborate Fernández’ writings with the interpretation(s) of his copyist(s). When a party of Japanese monks first asked de Torres and Fernández where God resided, and then what the devil actually was, the answer was:

30

They asked what kind of thing the Demon (el demonio) is. We told them how Lucifer and many other angels were chased out of paradise for being proud and seeking to be equal to the Creator (al criador). They asked why the Demon does evil to the people. We answered them that because the people are created for the glory which he lost because of his pride, he envies them and works at deceiving them to ruin them.⁶ ([1551] 1990, 249)

31

In this quotation the Demon devil and the Lucifer devil obviously were taken as two infernal personae which shared many, but not all, features by de Torres and Fernández. It was not the Lucifer persona whom they accused of ruining people, it was the Demon persona. This fits well with the use that Xavier had made of Lucifer as a designator for the devil in his Carta Grande. The instances I referred to above were both identified by Juan Ruiz-de-Medina SJ as exegetical allusions, one to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignacio de Loyola, and the other to Scripture (1990, 152, 164).

32

Obviously, the Lucifer devil was something from the past—in Xavier’s case, a distinctly remote past, since he had established his grip on the Japanese more than 1,500 years ago, that is, from Xavier’s vantage point of 1549, around the time of the incarnation of Christ. Most probably Xavier meant to refer to a time even before the incarnation. Although the Lucifer devil and the Demon devil thus both referred to the same spiritual entity, the two personae were not coextensive because they were temporally separated from each other by the Fall (Russel 1988, 148). The Lucifer persona was thus portrayed as resembling an essentially transcendent entity, a diabolus absconditus who had initially induced the peoples of the new worlds to paganism, told them how to worship him, but from then on no longer actively interfered in their affairs. At the other end of the European reach over the world, Jose de Acosta seems to have followed a quite similar approach, as he always switched to the past tense when writing of the Lucifer devil (Sánchez Conicet 2002, 24). This does not mean that the Jesuits in Japan or Peru considered devilish interventions to have ceased in their own times; they just located their origin in another diabolic persona.

33

While the Lucifer devil could be still invoked as a metaphor to denigrate opponents, as Gaspar Vilela did in 1559 when he wrote about the monks of the Buddhist temple mountain of Hiezan—“I add, dearest ones, that I assure you that they are a Lucifer in pride” (Vilela [1559] 1995, 150)⁷—it did not carry the implications of an immediate threat to be responded to but that of an evil long established. When Vilela, only a few lines later, mused over the devilish threats he perceived as imminent to the situation, he wrote about demons plaguing him:

34

Ponder, my dearest ones, in meditation, what will become of me among so many demons, which places will I introduce myself to, and how much virtue is required of me, none of which I have.⁸ (Vilela [1559] 1995, 150)

35

The actual opponent the missionaries, as exemplified by Gaspar Vilela in this quote, saw themselves as pitted against was not the Lucifer devil of biblical history, but someone else: the Demon devil, as Fernández wrote.

Differentiating Infernal Personae

36

This, in turn, might also be indicative of a kind of conceptual logic at work behind separating the devil’s different personae. In the paragraph directly following their discussion of Lucifer’s fall and the Demon’s machinations, de Torres and Fernández had to deal with the question why a merciful god who created men destined for salvation would order the devil to do evil unto them, a question that Sansom has already deemed one of those that puzzled the Japanese most of all (1970, 121).

37

We answered that the [minor] Demon had no power against man but only to stir the memory of evildoing. And that men had knowledge of good and evil and the freedom to do as they wanted to.⁹ (Fernández de Oviedo and Ruiz-de-Medina SJ [1551] 1990, 249)

38

The unknown copyist of manuscript 1 of Fernández’ letter had inserted a qualification in front of the term for the Demon devil which thus changed it from “the Demon” (el demonio) to “the minor demon” (el menor demonio). This obviously was not in the original, as the other copies do not have it, but seemed either necessary—if it was added consciously—or obvious—if it was an unconscious slippage—to the copyist, a Jesuit as Fernández himself. Such differentiation between a and the demon or devil was an early modern development, prompted by the use of the vernacular, a distinction which had usually not been made within medieval Latin (Raiswell 2012, 24). With this distinction, the Demon devil in question suddenly shrank to a demon devil, one of the minor minions of evil, a lesser diabolic spirit. The scribe probably did not want to downplay the Demon devil’s powers on the one hand and could thus refer to the demonic host on the other hand, the demonios whom Xavier had feared when he boarded a heathen ship to take him to Japan.

39

The Demon devil thus had the advantage of conceptual ambiguity. It could be used to designate an infernal persona which was not of predominantly historic interest—that of Lucifer after his fall, after his transformation from the archangel of light into the archenemy of creation—and also to describe the infernal host of fallen angels which had accompanied him and now served as his very imminent agents of evil in this world. Perhaps the emendation was prompted by the passage about “many other angels” (otros muchos ángeles) who were cast out of Heaven alongside Lucifer in the preceding paragraph.

40

Most likely this was a standard phrasing being reproduced. The influential Fortalitium Fidei of the Spanish theologian Alonso de Espina (c.1412–c.1464) had likewise elaborated on the creation of the demonic host “[…] when vanquished Lucifer with his followers fell miserably from heaven because he had so gravely sinned against his creator. And so those have fallen as so many demons”¹⁰ (Espina 1525, 352r.). So the conceptual transfer to the infernal host of minor demons into which these fallen angels were supposed to have been transformed may have come easily to a writer, a Jesuit at that, who presumably had been brought up with the concept of countless minor demons constantly at work to plague mankind. This was a common belief amongst early sixteenth-century Spaniards who were ready to see demonic interferences by “diablillo[s]” occurring frequently in everyday life (Caro Baroja 1978, 64–66), and who were used to the concept of the devil at work in the world (Léon Azcárate 2015, 199).

41

Even the founding fathers of the Society of Jesus themselves thought to have experienced such minor demonic presences in Rome in the late 1530s, when they unknowingly took up residence in a house “in which no one wanted to live, for it had a bad reputation among the people for ghosts and nocturnal specters” (Rodrigues SJ 2004, 74), and where they had to put up with several such apparitions. As Simão Rodrigues, long-time secretary to the order’s founder and first General, Ignacio de Loyola, remembered in his 1577 recollections, “the vile spirit knocked on the doors of the rooms, but when they opened no one was there” and “sometimes also the devil lifted a mat hanging at the doorway, and, sticking in his head, seemed to look around at what was going on inside” (2004, 75).

42

Those Jesuits took such European beliefs with them when they travelled to other parts of the world. Manoel de Nobréga, among the first Jesuits to sail to Brazil and a central figure for establishing the Jesuit presence in this Portuguese colony, reported very similar things when writing back to the Jesuits of the order’s university at Coímbra, calling for help because “we are few and the land is huge, the demons are many, and there is very little mercy” (Cressoni 2014, 580).¹¹ What Nobréga omitted in this passage was that mercy might indeed have been lacking in the Brazilian mission due to the fact that the local Jesuits were considering forceful conversions as probably the best way to deal with what they perceived as obstinate natives (Alden 1992, 214–15).

43

The problem related to this, and what so much puzzled the Japanese dialogue partners of de Torres and Fernández, was that of the possibility of a benevolent creator creating a being with an evil will. Following the reasoning of Aquinas, whose writings were officially regarded as the cornerstones of Jesuit theology, free will indeed does imply the possibility of evildoing, but not because of logical necessity; there are wills, such as that of God himself or of the Blessed, who are free but who do not imply that these agents may do something evil (Echavarría 2012, 536). Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033–1109) had already proposed a solution in a substantial treatise, so Aquinas had no necessity to elaborate on it any further: Following Anselm, the unconditioned nature of any free will, without which it could not really be called free, presupposes that this will may be used for evil choices if God permitted this possibility in creating the will (Russel 1988, 131).

44

Both Anselm’s and Aquinas’s reasoning about free will, however, could be formed into a two-pronged argument: On the one hand it made punishment by eternal damnation intelligible as a retort against those who use their free will to do evil without necessity, as the Lucifer devil had done; and on the other hand it could also serve to highlight that evil is only a relational category—something is evil for someone or something else, not in itself (Baumann 2015, 14–15)—and, however bad it may be, any evil within creation is ultimately conducive to a greater good.

45

As Aquinas himself pointed out in his Summa contra gentiles, one of the few books the first Jesuits travelling to Japan took with them (Anon [1554] 1990, 485), there were things such as “the patience of the persecuted” and “the punishing justice” which are good but which would not come about without some evil to cause them (Aquinas 2009, 305). The distinction between the Lucifer and the Demon devil personae fits in very well with such a reasoning, assigning the damnation to Lucifer and the evil workings in the world to the Demon devil, which in turn in itself allowed for this conceptual ambiguity in another way, too—it allowed for both transcendence and imminence, depending on which one wanted to stress.

46

That this ambiguity was already inherent even in Fernández’ Yamaguchi letter becomes clear from a later paragraph detailing the physics of demonology:

47

They asked in which way the Demon could come to the world to tempt and to deceive the peoples if God had created hell to punish the Demon in it and if it was located in the centre of the earth. We answered them that there are demons who are very subtle [=immaterial] coming with the air […].¹² (Fernández de Oviedo and Ruiz-de-Medina SJ [1551] 1990, 252)

48

The ambiguity thus resulted from the Demon devil being himself—as an infernal persona—imprisoned in hell, a transcendent being trapped in a supernatural (and sub-natural) realm, and at the same time immanently present in this world, interfering with man through his servants, the minor demons, who could rise through cracks and fissures in the earth to do their evil work as his agents. In stating the nature of minor demons as such, the two Jesuits were in line with mainstream European demonology as it began to develop contemporarily, which held that demons had retained many of the angelic properties they had before their fall, including an ethereal nature (Clark 1997, 161).

49

According to their report, Fernández and de Torres even returned to that point once more in discussing with the same group of Japanese monks, perhaps because their former answer had not been clear enough, this time stating the same to apply to the Demon devil as well:

50

“They asked if the Demon (el demonio) was below in the earth, in hell, how and by which ways he comes to and goes from this world. We answered that because he was incorporeal and a spirit, and that as the souls of the wicked, when they die, go to hell, so could the Demon come and go here and there.”¹³ (Fernández de Oviedo and Ruiz-de-Medina SJ [1551] 1990, 254)

51

The Demon devil served as a flexible conceptual tool in the way the Jesuits in Japan thought with demons, to once more paraphrase Clark’s title. He could come and go everywhere, he was invisible, and he had a host of minions at his command which he could send to earth to tempt and torment humans to ultimately draw them away from God and to himself, and thus lead them to damnation. The unclear distinction between phenomena caused by lesser evil spirits and by the Demon devil meant that events could be interpreted as was best suited to the way they were to be presented. If the challenge could be overcome or should be framed as of minor importance, it could be attributed to a menor demonio, and otherwise to the Demon devil himself, as one could always assume that he not only directed the ways of his servants but could also take their place as easily.

Opting for Infernal Personae

52

But what about the third infernal persona, the Enemy devil? The early mission documents produced by the Jesuits in Japan are comparatively silent on this issue; they rarely used the term. From Xavier’s usage of the term in his Carta Grande, one could draw the tentative conclusion that the devil’s Enemy persona had more in common with the Demon persona than with the Lucifer persona. Both the Enemy devil and the Demon devil were portrayed as active agents of evil planning mischief against the servants of the Lord. Were they perhaps the same? Xavier’s letter already contains some passages which hint at this.

53

The sum of all the remedies in such times is to put up a very great spirit against the Enemy, totally distrusting man as such and trusting heavily in God, gathering all [one’s] powers and hopes in Him, and with such a great defender and protector keeping man from displaying cowardice, without doubting to become the victor. […] And as the Demon cannot do more evil than God gives him room to, in times as these a distrust in God is more to be feared than the fear of the Enemy.¹⁴ (Xavier [1549b] 1990, 139)

54

The remark made by de Torres and Fernandes that the Demon devil was jealous of the possibility for men to achieve salvation and thus tried to ruin them points in the same direction. Other letters by Xavier show the same pattern: The Demon devil and the Enemy devil are referred to close to each other, seeming interchangeable.

55

Two things will help those of us who are on this journey to overcome the many obstacles that the Demon (o demónio) puts in our way. The first is to see that God knows our intentions. The second is to see that all creatures depend on the will of God, and that they cannot do anything without God’s permission. Even the demons (os demónios) are at God’s obedience. Because the enemy (o inimigo) asked God’s permission when he wanted to harm Job.¹⁵ (Xavier [1549a] 1990, 123)

56

It might well be that as the conceptual ambiguity the term “demon” carried was to its advantage, the conceptual ambiguity inherent in the term “enemy” might have caused the inverse, as it made it problematic to use. For the range of potential enemies of the mission—at least those the Jesuits perceived as such—was vast and included not only infernal personae but a lot of human persons as well: all those who were not very fond of the idea that a foreign creed should enter the land and convert their followers or subjects, all of whom were supposed by the Jesuits to be incited to think so by demonic influences. Xavier himself had taken recourse to wordings which were ambivalent in this way, best captured in one paragraph of the Carta Grande:

57

And for this reason God has shown us a very great and special grace in bringing us to these lands of the unbelievers, so that we will not waste ourselves. For this land is full of idolatry and enemies of Christ, and we have nothing in which we can trust or hope except in God, because here we have no relatives, friends or acquaintances, nor any Christian piety, but all are enemies of Him who made heaven and earth. And for this reason we are forced to put all our faith, hope and trust in Christ our Lord and not in living beings, since by their unfaithfulness they are all enemies of God.¹⁶ (Xavier [1549b] 1990, 158)

58

Here the inimigos de Dios clearly were not Demons themselves but those men whom Xavier took to believe in the devil, only that he did not make it clear at this point which devil, which infernal persona, he was addressing. Some paragraphs later in the same letter he variated the appeal to put all faith in Christ only slightly, and this time again coined it on the Enemy devil.

59

May God our Lord, by his great mercy, allow the Enemy to put so many fears, works and dangers before us in order to humble us and bring us down, so that we may never trust in our own strength and power, but only in Him and in those who share in His goodness.¹⁷ (Xavier [1549b] 1990, 163)

60

The conceptual relation thus suggested between the Enemy devil (el inimigo) and his supposed terrestrial servants, the Japanese feudal lords and the Buddhist and Shintoist priests (los inimigos), would be analogous to the relation between the Demon devil (el demónio) and his infernal minions (los demónios)—but this comparison was flawed as both parts were not really equal. While the relation between Enemy devil and enemies comprised spiritual as well as human beings, the relation between the Demon devil and the demons only included spiritual beings. And although humans could, according to contemporary European demonology, be instrumented and even possessed by demons, they were of course no demons. To make matters even more complicated, the Demon devil did not carry out his work on earth through his demons but through humans who were instigated by those demons, so that the relation Demon devil/minor demons/humans included three elements, and that between the Enemy devil and the lesser enemies of God only two.

61

Some of the other Jesuits in Japan in the first half of the 1550s did take recourse to the Enemy devil in much the same way as Xavier had done, paralleling it with the Demon devil. So did, for instance, Balthasar Gago in his description of the Japanese noblemen to the Jesuits of Portugal in 1555:

62

The lords of the land do not become [Christians] because they are well persuaded by the Demon, and are most attached to their life, for they have nothing more than this world. And given that when hearing, understanding the opposite, they cling to the Enemy and to the world, the reason being that these people on the contrary value it over their souls.¹⁸ (Gago [1555a] 1990, 547–48)

63

But the greater conceptual flexibility and unambiguity in describing this relation between the devil and the Japanese offered by phrasing it in terms of the Demon devil took hold in the second half of the 1550s. When Ōuchi Yoshinaga (+1557), the Christian lord of Yamaguchi in southern Japan, died in September 1557 and his domains were about to fall under the sway of the more powerful daimyō Mōri Motonari (1497–1571), who was fervently anti-Christian, the subsequent developments were framed accordingly by Cosme de Torres:

64

After my arrival in Amanguchi [=Yamaguchi] by order of our most blessed Master Francisco, the Demon, seeing the fruit that could be obtained from the word of God spread in the hearts of men, mounted his defences with wars of the king’s vassals against the king himself, so that twenty days after my stay in Amanguchi the king and his sons were killed, as I have already reported to your Paternity.¹⁹ (De Torres [1557] 1990, 730–31)

65

De Torres did not use “enemy” as a designator for the devil here but instead referred to the devil’s Demon persona. As such, de Torres accused the Demon to have turned Yoshinaga’s vassals against him to prevent Christianity from spreading further. In this situation de Torres imagined himself to face two kinds of enemies, the Demon devil and Japanese lords and warriors, both acting against the Society of Jesus. When primarily faced with terrestrial, human enemies, de Torres had no reservations to use this term, as in his description of the burning of Yamaguchi:

66

And with this understanding, when twenty or thirty days had passed since the burning of the city, and the enemies were a league or a league and a half away from it, the Christians would beg me with more urgency to come. So it also seemed to me that, when the business of the enemies was over, I should return so that the Christians would be more courageous in taking charge of the things of God on my return.²⁰ (De Torres [1557] 1990, 727)

67

Had “enemy” persisted in use as a common designator for the devil, how should the Japanese temporal lords or the clerics and monks of Japan’s many schools have been labelled when they turned against the missionaries, which frequently happened? This would have rendered accurate reports about the state of the mission in relation to the political and social environment unnecessarily difficult. So when Melchior Nunes Barreto reported back to the Province of Portugal in 1558, he described the workings of the devil in hindering the mission in almost the same way as Xavier had done, only that he attributed it to the Demon devil, not the Enemy devil.

68

The fruit of Japan is very great and the divine goodness has manifested its mercy in that land, according to the strength and subtle tricks with which the Demon counteracts our faith in Japan! For great are the evils which resist the grace that works.²¹ (Nunes Barreto [1558] 1995, 94)

69

Of course, the devil was seen as an enemy of the missions, but its distinguishing characteristic compared to the mission’s other opponents was that he was not a human but a demonic enemy. This was important as it clearly demarcated his powers and pointed to how one could overturn them, as Xavier had also pointed out early:

70

All this Demon’s commission to the end of disconsolating, deeply disturbing you, will not bear fruit in your souls nor in those of the ones next to you in these parts wherein you find yourself now, if you do not waste time to understand your surroundings.²² (Xavier [1549b] 1990, 139)

71

Juan Fernández similarly recorded as part of an answer of what the Demon devil’s providential function actually was that he was needed, in a very Thomistic way, as a touchstone for men’s quality: “For if men would not be tempted by the Demon, they would not come to know their virtues nor would the good become known from among the bad” (Fernández de Oviedo and Ruiz-de-Medina SJ [1551] 1990, 254).²³ This finally translated into the proper Jesuit attitude in facing the machinations of the evil one propagated by the missionaries in Japan. When Balthasar Gago recorded an incident in travelling aboard a junk with a non-Christian crew in 1562 which got into distress at sea during the journey, he reported to have responded to the events in much the same way as Xavier had done 13 years earlier: praying and standing firm.

72

They [the crew] replied that at night they would seek their counsel, which was to cast lots and call on the devil [diablo] all night long. I prayed to God our Lord not to allow our sins to bring us to an end according to the will of the Demon [demónio]. For it seemed to me that we should not abandon the ship and all seek our own until we could do nothing else.²⁴ (Gago [1562] 1995, 587)

73

The conflation of the spiritual properties of the devil’s Demon persona and its Enemy persona as well as the possibility to avoid confusion favoured ceasing to refer to the devil as the Enemy devil in sixteenth-century Japan. Moreover, Gago here exemplified once more the propensity to use the term diab(l)o when reporting on indigenous terminology. The crew of the ship cast their lots to divine the will of an Asian deity, which Gago accordingly translated as a generic devil (diablo). His own perspective of the situation was that the ship was clearly in the claws of the Demon devil (demónio). Whereas Xavier had used both “Enemy” (inimgo) and Demon (demónio) to designate the evil at work in his description of the analogous situation he had encountered during his first travel to Japan in 1549, Gago had already dropped the Enemy devil and stuck consistently to the Demon devil instead.

74

What becomes visible here is an implicit partition of the temporal and spiritual dimensions in Jesuit writings about the situation of the mission in Japan. Obstacles in the way of the mission which were seen as belonging to the social world of politics, economics, and human beings in general could be labelled as “enemies,” whereas for adverse circumstances thought to mainly derive from the agency of malevolent spiritual beings the terms “demon” and “(minor) demons” were applicable. While the devil of course still was seen as the primal and pivotal enemy of the mission, he was less frequently referred to as the Enemy devil.

How Not to Address the Devil in Foreign Parts

75

Terminological consistency was thus achieved by reducing the vocabulary. This not only applies to the devil’s Enemy persona, however. There were quite a number of other possible designators of the devil the Jesuits in Japan usually did not use: first, proper names which could be linked to him (apart from Lucifer), like “Satan,” “Belial,” “Baal,” or “Beelzebub”; and second, “devil.” When the term “devil” (diab(l)o) did appear for once in a letter of Cosme de Torres, it was in an account of the standard catechetical procedure used in Japan for introducing potential converts to Christian dogma, and it was accompanied directly by the more familiar “demon,” just as in Gago’s 1562 remark quoted above:

76

Then it is shown to them how God created Adam in the terrestrial paradise, and the commandment that He made, and the causes why and how for breaking God’s commandment for the deceit of the devil (el diablo) [Adam] was made subject to the Demon (el demonio) and all the punishments we still suffer today; […].²⁵ (De Torres [1557] 1990)

77

Gaspar Vilela turned out to be more flexible, sometimes using the word diabo but once also referring to the devil not by a designator but by one of his proper names:

78

There have been this Lent some very conscientious married people and some young men who wish to make a vow of chastity, but we have not consented to them because of the danger into which Satan could then bring them. But we urge them to chastity and perfect life.²⁶ (Vilela [1557] 1990, 691)

79

In the same document Vilela also described Japanese society for the Jesuits in Portugal, and in doing so, he made a quite characteristic use of the term diabo—where he used it, he primarily did so to mark reported speech.

80

There are three kinds of people among them, scilicet noblemen who have their levies, and bonzes, who are their priests and servants of the devil who also have many levies, and farmers, who are almost slaves to all.²⁷ (Vilela [1557] 1990, 705)

81

He had done so earlier already, in 1554, when he quite similarly had described the social standing of Japanese peasants: “And this they do because there is no justice, saying that they [the peasants] are the devil’s people for being poor” (Vilela [1554] 1990, 433).²⁸ Vilela exemplified the same use of the plain word “devil” as just seen in the discussion of Balthasar Gago’s remarks in 1562. The generic term “devil” (diab(l)o) had, in the letters of the Jesuits of the Japanese mission, become relegated to the description of Japanese views on the personification of evil. This made sense in at least two ways: First of all, considering the patchy Jesuit knowledge of Japanese religion and the non-standardized teachings of Japanese folk belief, how could it have reliably been determined which kind of infernal persona would have been meant by the utterance in question? And second, on a more implicit level, the devil’s personae were always relational terms relative to the Jesuits themselves, prioritizing their point of view. The Lucifer devil personified the evil spirit of times they considered as bygone history, and the Demon devil actively worked against their mission in their own days. The terminologically more precise and efficient infernal personae of the Lucifer devil and the Demon devil thus came to be primarily used as designators expressing the views of the Jesuits themselves.

82

The terminological question how to address the devil in foreign parts, at least for the Jesuits in sixteenth-century Japan, had been solved after roughly a decade of missionary work. They had tacitly agreed that the infernal persona they had to deal with was the conceptually ambiguous Demon devil, oscillating between transcendence and immanence. The term demonio occurs so often in their writings that Juan Ruiz-de-Medina SJ used it in his edition of the Jesuit documents relating to Japan as the index term for all matters diabolical (1990, 769, 1995, 715).

83

When the “Summary of Errors” (Sumario de los Errores) was drawn up in 1556 to serve as a primer for the rest of the Jesuit order, most of all for those who were to come to Japan, on the false beliefs the Japanese were accused to hold by the missionaries, it attributed almost all of these errors to the devil. To put it more precisely, as the demonological terminology had been straightened out in the meantime, it attributed them all to the Demon devil, most prominently those of the Buddhist schools of thought:

84

The padres (i.e., the Jesuits) declare this to be the Sect of the Demon among the Japanese (seita do demónio) for beginning in this way with their commandments:

85

1. The first, that the Demon, to establish being adored while he being invisible, to be adored in the shape of animals demanded that they neither kill nor eat them, but pay them homage.²⁹ (Anon [1556] 1990, 657)

86

The conception of the binary opposition between righteous and wicked souls, metaphorically termed the Church of God and the Church of the Devil, evolved during the sixteenth century in Spain into the notion that the Church of the Devil had manifested itself on earth as an inversion and perverted mockery of the true Church of God and had been imposed upon his followers by the devil (Caro Baroja 1978, 53). Church Father Lactantius had already in late Antiquity termed this the imitatio diabolica (Borgeaud 2010, 88). Martín de Castañega OFM (1511–1551) had popularized the idea among the learned already in 1529 (Ferber 2013, 576), and the Franciscan order based its interpretations of native American cultures and religions on this model (Campagne 2004, 11). It became a popular topic up to the seventeenth century (Raiswell 2012, 41). The Sumario de los Errores hinted at similar perceptions when the habits of Buddhist monks were portrayed as similar to those of the Franciscans and Dominicans, and their vigils and hymns described (Ruiz-de-Medina SJ 1990, 660).

87

In doing so the Jesuits in Japan responded to their environment in much the same way as their brethren in Peru at the same time responded to the pre-conquest belief in Viracocha, the almighty creator-deity of the Inca. Indigenous concepts which were deemed too similar to the Jesuits’ own beliefs or practices had to be an invention of the devil (Albó 1966, 425–26). The contemporary Franciscan friar Jéronimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) depicted Mexican indigenous spirituality in the same way (López Meraz 2008, 142–43), while the conquistador Pedro Cieza de León (1520–1554) had done so for Peru (see @ Léon Azcárate 2015, 209). That Jesuit interpretations of non-Christian religions yet were by no means stable at this time becomes visible when José de Acosta put forward his concept of the connection between indigenous cults and the devil as a counterpoint to the idea of imitatio diabolica a few decades later (Imbruglia 2014, 305). As pointed out above, Acosta claimed that the more barbarous and idolatric, that is, the more unlikely to organized Christian worship (from Acosta’s point of view) an indigenous cult was, the more pronounced was the Devil’s influence on it.

Outlook

88

A last question is now whether the attitude shown by sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Japan in conceptually dealing with the devil is indicative of a historical trend. Cressoni has brought forward the claim that throughout all the Portuguese territories, regardless whether in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean, the Jesuits, or rather “the Ignacianists” (os inacianos), as he put it, all spoke the same conceptual language, that of an imperialism trying to subdue the other by transforming it into exercising the Jesuit orthopraxis (2014, 601). The parallel processes of a standardized differentiation between the devil’s Lucifer persona and Demon persona in Japan and South America might exemplify traces of such an imperial project. This would match up perfectly with the notion that early modern Europeans tried to assure themselves of their superiority towards the peoples of the new worlds by singling out attributes or properties that could be ascribed to their local counterparts which would disqualify them from the same status as Europeans were entitled to in European eyes, be it that they were depicted as brute, savage, uncivilized, or heathen (Burghartz 2006, 316–18).

89

But is the establishment of a particular view of the devil and its diabolic intents and abilities in relation to a certain region something conducive to an imperial project, even if it only consisted of a spiritual imperialism as in Japan, where any outright colonial endeavour would have been doomed to failure? Perhaps the discourses within which the Jesuits in Japan came to terms with evil are more indicative of Jesuit cosmology still being as much in the making in the sixteenth century as demonology was. A specific Jesuit model of interpretation for non-European cultures and religions only stabilised towards the end of the sixteenth century (Imbruglia 2014, 306–7).

90

To put the developments within the Japanese mission of the 1550s and 1560s into a larger perspective it would be necessary to compare a broader sample of texts than examined here, across orders and secular clergy and, if possible, even denominations to see how exactly contemporary Europeans came to terms with the devil in other, similar circumstances. And such circumstances were not confined to the extra-European missions of the Society of Jesus but could also be found in the Jesuits’ inner mission fields within Europe, for example in the sixteenth-century kingdom of Naples, where the spiritual situation they faced posed similar challenges to the Jesuits as circumstances in Brazil and Japan did (see Selwyn 2016, 50–53). But while a closer inspection of the global dimension of the terminology for evil within the Society of Jesus remains beyond the scope of this contribution, the impact of this terminology for the early mission in Japan seems quite clear.

91

The net effect of opting for the Demon devil persona as the conceptual frame for everything diabolic in Japan was that the Jesuits operating there in the early sixteenth century not only were able to avoid having to choose whether the devil and its workings were transcendent or immanent phenomena—they could easily be both—but that they also could transfer a technical terminology and demonological discourse they were already familiar with from Europe to these parts, and thus operationalize the same practices connected to this terminology and discourse they were used to in Europe, regardless of whether they made sense in a Japanese environment and to Japanese proselytes or not.

92

A fine example for such a transfer of practices conceptually connected to demonology is offered by the exorcisms performed by the Jesuits in Japan. When they encountered cases of what they took to be demonic possession, they exorcised and banned these devils exactly as they would have done in Europe, by “speaking the words ‘Jesus Maria’ and ‘St. Michael’” during constant prayer from the local believers, so that “she [=the possessed individual] was never vexed by the demon again” (Gago [1555b] 1990, 568),³⁰ and the bystanders, “seeing that she was free from the demon, all gave thanks to God” (Silva [1555] 1990, 529).³¹ Both the prayer and the exorcism were performed in Latin, in accordance with the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, so that neither the supposed—Japanese—victim of the demonic possession nor the—Japanese—audience would have understood any of the words.

93

This application of pre-formulated European concepts, transformed into a special kind of sixteenth-century Jesuit terminological orthopraxis in calling the devil names, led to the somewhat awkward situation—at least from a hindsight perspective—that however topsy-turvy the Japanese and Japan might appear to these Jesuit missionaries, at least one being they thought to have encountered in this strange land was an old acquaintance they knew how to face: the devil. El demonio, the Demon devil, to put it precisely.