I must declare a current conflict of interest, since Fr Ucerler and I are now both Fellows of Campion Hall, Oxford. Nevertheless, this was not the case when I first encountered the substance of the volume under review, as the Martin D'Arcy Memorial Lectures hosted by Campion in 2006. Now, much revised and expanded, they have become a book of high importance in studies of the global Counter-Reformation, lavishly illustrated, and presenting some remarkable manuscript discoveries. Seventy years ago the great British historian Charles Boxer published The Christian century in Japan (Berkeley, Ca 1951) and laid out an enduring Anglophone narrative of that extraordinary adventure in Christian mission from its small beginnings in 1549. Ucerler does not seek to retell the tale in linear form, but brings his own exceptional knowledge of the archives to study the intellectual, political and organisational problems posed by the Jesuit enterprise in Japan. It is a formidable task that underlines the worldwide scale and vision of the Society. Analysing the story requires the same linguistic skills that the early Jesuits commanded – Latin and Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese – and exploration of archives spread across Europe, America and Japan. Ucerler emphasises how profoundly unsettling Japan proved to Francis Xavier and his companions after their arrival in 1549. Initially, none of them spoke more than a few words of Japanese and found it dauntingly difficult to enter a thought-world and language system on which European culture had no previous purchase. Yet just as unexpected and intimidating for Europeans was their honest admiration for Japanese culture: they quickly esteemed it the equal of classical civilisation in the ancient Mediterranean. The polities that Iberians were in the process of wrecking in the New World had not inspired Europeans in the same way; and as yet, Christians had not encountered the full splendour, sophistication and political effectiveness of cultures in China or the Indian subcontinent.
Japan therefore provided a pleasurable new problem. What did Christianity mean in this alien world? The Jesuit answers came from first-class minds with an equally first-class humanist education and training in classical rhetoric. Just as the first followers of Jesus had taken a Gospel message to Graeco-Roman society which was constructed on very different philosophical assumptions to those of Judaism, so Jesuits must find ways of making their message newly urgent and effective in Japan. To begin with, political turbulence in Japan's ‘Warring States’ period helped the enterprise gain its footing, but the missionaries never gained decisive official backing such as they enjoyed in, for instance, Portuguese Goa or the Spanish Philippines; essentially, they needed to persuade the Japanese that Christianity was for them. In only fifty years, the success was spectacular, with around three hundred thousand converts at all levels of society in a total population of perhaps twelve million.
The first part of Ucerler's work demonstrates how Jesuits used their rhetorical training to undertake a process of inventio, the ‘discovery’ of language that would appeal to their audience's minds and emotions: in a fashion almost unprecedented amid the inward-looking assumptions of Western Christendom, they turned the best-selling humanist jeu d'esprit of Thomas More's Utopia into a thought-experiment in cultural relativism and practical mission. One hero of this enterprise was Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), aided by a fruitful relationship with one robustly articulate local lord (daimyo), Ōtomo Sōrin, who was frank in his contempt for the cultural clumsiness of the first missionaries. Accordingly, Valignano inspired a network of education for both Europeans and Japanese intending to preach in the islands. From the 1590s, they faced competition from Franciscans unsympathetic to their project of ‘reinventing’ Christianity. Between 1593 and 1596, this prompted a team led by Valignano's assistant Pedro Gómez to create first a Latin introduction to Western intellectual systems, and then an interestingly varied Japanese translation. The Latin original was only rediscovered in the Vatican in 1949, and then spectacularly enriched by Ucerler's unearthing its Japanese translation in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1995.
The Gómez undertaking had only a quarter-century of life in the Christian community before the destruction of public Christianity and the expulsion of all missionaries by the triumphant Tokugawa dynasty. The first major hostile moves against Christians had already taken place in 1587, and it is unsurprising that one of the preoccupations of the Gómez compendium was to provide appropriate casuistry for Christians constrained to conform to Shinto and Buddhist rites. This reflected the increasing political and military pressures; for instance, should the Society accept Ōmura Sumitada's gift of the city of Nagasaki as a defensive stronghold? Canon law forbade religious orders from exercising secular jurisdiction, particularly criminal justice (though tell that to imperial monasteries in the Holy Roman Empire); direct administration of Nagasaki by the Society would include the administration of capital punishment, characteristic of Japanese even more than Western justice. On a further issue of force and violence, what should be done about the maverick but alarmingly persuasive Jesuit Alonso Sánchez? He was convinced that the Spanish monarchy could do in China what it had done in the New World, using Spanish military might to subdue the Chinese Empire, and then go on to use the same blueprint for Japan. Many of his colleagues were appalled at the likely effect of such bombast on already suspicious Japanese noblemen – but Sánchez was not alone in his opinions, and he made a puzzling amount of headway both in Rome and in Spanish government circles. Ucerler is inclined to take Sánchez more seriously than previous commentators, and he places his apparently unrealistic schemes firmly in the midst of Jesuit debates on the use of coercion in Christian mission, as well as amid the Society's carefully-nuanced general stand against becoming involved in politics. We hear much in this book about another troubled theatre of Jesuit mission, the kingdom of England, but it is a pity that Ucerler did not compare the more analogous circumstances of Jesuit mission in Christian Ethiopia, whence the Society was expelled only a couple of decades after the Tokugawa ejected them from Japan. The Jesuits’ notable lack of sympathy for native Ethiopian Christianity and its so-called ‘Judaizing’ proved the Society's downfall there. Ethiopia provides a significant contrast with Ucerler's account of the intricate and imaginative Jesuit discussion of ‘reinvention’ of the faith amid Asian religions; heretical Christians were much worse than ‘pagans’.
Ucerler usefully reminds us that the Society of Jesus was not an intellectual monolith; not surprisingly, in a grouping of exceptionally talented individuals undertaking an unprecedented enterprise. Personality could trump tribal loyalties, including in Jesuit relations with other institutions in the Catholic world, such as the Dominican or Franciscan orders, despite the confrontations that culminated in the ‘Chinese Rites’ controversy. Ucerler affords us the luxury of watching Jesuit leaders placing themselves on a world stage, aware of often irreconcilable tensions between their potential patrons in Madrid, Lisbon, Rome and beyond. He does not take many prisoners in his text, and non-specialists may find themselves thumbing back and forth to make sure that they have correctly distinguished one daimyo from another. Yet this is a hugely impressive addition to our knowledge of the Counter-Reformation, and it makes a convincing claim that clandestine Christian survival in Japan down to the nineteenth century had a firm intellectual foundation in the rich pioneering literature produced by the Society in the century after 1549.
