The Enemy, the Demon, Lucifer: Jesuits Coming to Terms with the Devil in Sixteenth-Century Japan

Abstract

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 local circumstances, reconfiguring the concept of the devil to make sense of their environments. 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.