Abstract
My study examines the intellectual confluences in Father Alessandro Valignano’s policies and guidelines for the Jesuit mission in Japan in the sixteenth century, with a focus on the traditions of scholastic philosophy and rhetoric—two foundational disciplines in the training and worldview of every Jesuit—as he understood them. I examine how these traditions were articulated by Valignano in practices, respectively, of catechism and accommodation—the rhetorical principle of adapting one’s message to audience needs for the purpose of persuasion. My study focuses on two dimensions of the Jesuit–Japanese encounter. First, the Western traditions of philosophy and rhetoric had long been associated in European thought with cultivation, freedom, and reason. This helps explain why rhetorical accommodation and scholastic theology rooted in Aristotelian philosophy were Valignano’s preferred modes of ministry in Japan, given his appraisal of the Japanese as uniquely free, cultured, and rational among the pagan peoples discovered. Second, the opposition of philosophy and rhetoric has been an accepted premise in Western thinking since antiquity, yet philosophy and eloquence constituted for the Jesuits two aspects of a single metaphysics and epistemology. These two intellectual traditions together, as I will show, mediated the gap between Christian truth and human fallibility, contributing to a single and coherent cosmology.