PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONARY GEOGRAPHY IN JESUIT SPIRITUALITY AND THEIR IMPLEMENTATION IN JAPAN (16TH-17TH CENTURIES)

Résumé 0

"This article explains the importance of territorial management and organization in Jesuit spirituality, and namely in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Different levels of actions for the missionaries can be distinguished. The Constitutions pay more attention to the local scale of action and precise rules to establish a mission or to send Jesuits to a place. As Ignatius of Loyola wrote the Constitutions in the European context, the ques- tion of their implementation in an Asian country, and especially in Japan, should be raised. Moreover, missionaries in Japan had to face difficulties such as civil wars or political upheavals. These uncertainties could ruin their efforts to respect Loyola’s orders in the way of establishing a mission. Jesuits in Japan adapted the recom- mendations of the Constitutions to Japanese context. This determination to preserve the spirituality of the Constitutions also led them to superimpose their perception of the Japanese territories on geopolitics of the archipelago. The Jesuits created their own geography of Japan by dividing it in three areas of missions (Bungo, Shimo and Miyako) that had different characteristics."