I Can Only Imagine: The Aborted Korean Ministry (1566–1571) of Father Gaspar Vilela, as Recounted by His Letter of 3 November 1571—An Illustration of Jesuit Attitudes on Notions of an Imagined Korea

Abstract

This article features an interdisciplinary analysis of the aborted Korean apostolate plan (1566–1571) described by the Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela (c. 1525–1572) in a letter dated 3 November 1571. This analysis’s foundation rests on Jesuit assumptions regarding the conception of an imagined Korea, a construct that Vilela discerned upon with a confidence that emanated from his awareness of the Jesuit order’s political power. The notion of an imagined Korea arguably drew from a creativity implied by the missionary imagination, an idea evidenced in thinking processes of perspective, positive/negative consubstantiality, radical self-assessment, and reduction advocated by anthropologists increasingly willing to engage with theology. Although Vilela’s plan seems far removed from the relativism of today’s more empathetic missionaries, the letter nonetheless emphasized a somewhat flexible mindset that contravened the ideas of more dogmatic Jesuit Europhiles. The 1571 Vilela letter captured the aspirational rhetoric of the Jesuits who dreamed about Korea, but these missionaries had not yet faced the adversities that would ultimately extinguish the missionary order’s already fragile hopes for a Korean ministry. This article focuses on the second half of the 1571 Vilela letter, while a future article will focus on the first half of the same letter.

1. Introduction: Sources and Historiography

In the academic community, the Jesuit Gaspar Vilela (c. 1525–1572) has not received anything near the scholarly attention paid to Jesuit luminaries like Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Francis Xavier (1506–1552), or Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Vilela chiefly devoted his missionary energies to an apostolate among the Japanese people, although an overall assessment of his significance among Jesuits active in Japan argues for his status as a facilitator rather than a trailblazer (Cieslik 1954; Ribeiro 2007). Jesuit records have little to say about Vilela’s life prior to his East Asian ministry, although Benedictine monks played a role in his early tutelage. In 1553, whether immediately after or sometime after his ordination as a priest, Vilela journeyed to Goa (India), where he seems to have officially entered the Society of Jesus as a missionary. He worked under the ecclesiastical oversight of Jesuit Cosme de Torres (c. 1510–1570), the superior general of the Japanese Jesuit mission from 1551 to 1570 (Ruiz-de-Medina 1990). At the time of his death in 1572, Vilela still had a series of ambitious plans for missionary endeavors, but these dreams would obviously remain unrealized, at least in his case (Grayson 2006).

Among Vilela’s surviving writings, there exists a letter in which he describes his abortive plans for a pastoral ministry among the Korean people. The letter, dated 3 November 1571, comments on how these plans began through Cosme de Torres’s decision to assign the Korean apostolate to Vilela in 1566, but these plans ultimately ended after five years. Given the absence of the relevant primary source testimony from Torres, the exact reasons for the initial Jesuit ambitions to go to the Korean peninsula remain somewhat shrouded in mystery today, but Vilela himself referred to a potential Korean mission as a steppingstone to China. Vilela almost certainly did not have any personal relationships with individual Koreans, for otherwise, he would have surely written about those relationships in 1571. That limitation notwithstanding, Vilela’s success at winning audiences among the Japanese daimyo probably led to his appointment from Torres. Over the past century, American, European, and Korean scholars have mentioned the Vilela letter, but these academics primarily focus on the letter’s status as the earliest surviving European plan to conduct missionary work in the peninsula (Buswell and Lee 2006; Choe 1992; Grayson 2002; Kim 1993; Moffett 2005; Rhinow 2013; Ruiz-de-Medina 1991; Yoo [1983] 2010).1 The outline of the Korea-related content of the 1571 Vilela letter easily invites a twofold division, with the first half focusing on an ethnographic description of the Korean people, and the second half focusing on Vilela’s proposed framework for evangelizing the Korean peninsula. In order to keep the focus of this article within reasonable limits, the author will concentrate on the second half of the 1571 Vilela letter. A forthcoming publication will offer an interdisciplinary reflection on the letter’s first half.

In this article on the 1571 Vilela letter, the author would like to argue for specific ways through which Vilela sought to create something of an imagined Korea in the Jesuit (and perhaps by extension European) consciousness. In this endeavor, the author intends to draw upon the increasingly interdisciplinary proclivities of Jesuit historiography. In Section 2 (“An Interdisciplinary Justification of the Missionary Imagination as the Basis for a Reflection on the 1571 Vilela Letter”), this article will offer (1) an overview of the evolving perceptions of the notion of the imagination alongside (2) a discussion of ways in which theologians and anthropologists have sought to use various theoretical frameworks to understand notions of the missionary imagination. In Section 3 (“The Dilemma of Joining Anthropology with Religious Studies and the 1571 Vilela Letter as a Potential Resolution to That Dilemma”), this article will attempt to minimize the concerns of scholars who might feel wary about the cross-pollination possibilities that exist between theology and anthropology. This concern would seem unwarranted, as the 1571 Vilela letter arguably exists as a testament to the Jesuit order’s political power, a notion that has attracted the attention of theologians and anthropologists alike. In Section 4 (“The 1571 Vilela Letter in the Context of Attitudes Regarding the Mission in East Asia as Those Attitudes Existed in 1571”), this article will explore the following three specific clues that Vilela left behind as the controlling assumptions of how a future Korean apostolate would have operated, namely, (1) Vilela’s hope to enter Korea by way of helpful letters of introduction; (2) Vilela’s hope to delicately appeal to the cultural sensibilities of the Korean people in terms intelligible to the Koreans; and (3) Vilela’s belief that his experience in a port city ministry (Sakai) would have allowed him to have a deeper appreciation of the economic realities understandable to the Koreans, in light of his decision to try to enter the Korean peninsula through Busan. This article will not serve as an exhaustive retelling of every nuance of Vilela’s East Asian (primarily Japanese) missionary adventures. Instead, this article will recast specific episodes of that time into precedents that arguably established his sentiments about what a Korean mission would look like. The letter’s timing also places Vilela in a fascinating position within the world of documents relating to early Korean Catholicism, since subsequent events (notably Hideyoshi’s “Limitation on the Propagation of Christianity” in 1587, the Imjin War of 1592–1598, and the Japanese ban on Catholicism in 1614, among others) would ultimately doom whatever faint hopes the Jesuits might have had about venturing into Korea. In this sense, the 1571 Vilela letter offers a metaphorical snapshot in time of the inexhaustible spirit of Jesuit missionaries who had almost every reason to believe that the Korean peninsula would become a beacon of hope for the faith.

As a contribution to the scholarly discussion on the global missionary passion of the Jesuit order, this article will offer an argument that depends on an anthropological, historical, and theological dissection of the 1571 Vilela letter, even if such a dissection will ultimately reveal more about Gaspar Vilela and his fellow Jesuit missionaries and less about the Korean peninsula as that peninsula existed in 1571. The 1571 Vilela letter arguably exists as (1) a testament to a Jesuit enthusiasm for cross-cultural encounters blessed by the sanction of a Christian God perceived as infinitely generous by the Jesuit order and (2) a product of the Jesuit order’s European political influence, an influence that the Jesuits would feverishly attempt to replicate in Asia. A proper way of understanding these two characterizations would involve their unification within a mindset of the missionary imagination, a concept that emboldened Vilela to view his successes in the Japanese mission as precedents for how a hypothetical Korean mission would operate. Although theologians and anthropologists have invoked the construct of the missionary imagination to justify the relativistic attitudes of certain twenty-first-century Christian missionaries who truly embrace the uniqueness and diversity of other cultures today, the construct of the missionary imagination for Vilela and his fellow Jesuits existed in a far more primitive form, as amply demonstrated by the 1571 Vilela letter and Vilela’s occasional denunciations of the seemingly heathen proclivities of East Asian cultures. On the other hand, the primitive nature of Vilela’s attempt to understand Korean culture in no way diminishes his accomplishment as a missionary who invoked the missionary imagination. For Vilela, the notion of the missionary imagination (1) fixed his lifetime destiny of presiding over the conversions of non‑Christians and (2) guided his interactions with foreigners in ways inaccessible to certain Jesuits (notably Francisco Cabral, 1529–1609) who felt disinclined to flexibly act upon the imperative of spreading the Gospel in lands that lacked Christian backgrounds.

2. An Interdisciplinary Justification of the Missionary Imagination as the Basis for a Reflection on the 1571 Vilela Letter

For Gaspar Vilela and his like-minded contemporary Jesuits, the notion of the missionary imagination depends on both a general understanding of the phenomenon of human imagination and Jesuit attitudes on the role of imagination in missionary work. A sampling of philosophical attempts to dissect the general phenomenon of imagination can begin to define the concept of the missionary imagination, which presumably exists as just one branch of many types of imagination. The philosophers Shen-yi Liao and Tamar Szabó Gendler define imagination as the act of creating an impression of a certain phenomenon according to the wishes and prerogatives of the individual performing the imagining action, regardless of the actual nature or actual characteristics of the thing under the imagining person’s figurative gaze (Liao and Gendler 2020). This definition arrives at the heart of imagination’s divergence from objective reality, but imagination can sometimes veer into fantasy, a phenomenon known for a complete divorce from that same objective reality. Like other good Jesuits of his time, Vilela would have never allowed himself to consciously wander into fantasy in the epistolary world. As the scholar Joan-Pau Rubiés notes, Jesuit epistolary testimonies needed a degree of embellishment and creative imagination in order to elicit desired reactions from readers, but those same readers would have scoffed at outright fabrications (Rubiés 2012). When the professor of psychology Marjorie Taylor speaks of imagination as an ability dependent on one’s proclivities in rising above the temporal considerations of time and space, she effectively places Vilela in a world of individuals never content with remaining shackled to the limitations of earthly and visible realities (Taylor 2013). Of course, a poorly formed imagination sometimes entailed deleterious effects that potentially undermined the spiritual health of Christians. In a letter dated 22 June 1549, Ignatius specifically cited the scriptural pronouncement regarding a young man’s evil tendencies (Genesis 8:21) as the lesser products of a frail human imagination (Ignatius of Loyola 1549). Later on, in a letter addressed to the nobleman Jerome Vines in 1556, Ignatius of Loyola counseled the aristocrat to “[do] away with that troublesome imagination” that had led Vines to despair, despite the high regard that Ignatius held for Vines’s potential as someone who could gather many rewards in heaven (Ignatius of Loyola 1556). The frailties of an overly fanciful or outright sinful imagination notwithstanding, the Jesuits seemed broadly inclined to believe in the powerful resonance of the missionary imagination. Historian Camilla Russell has commented on the vast increase in Italian Jesuits opting for overseas mission work in East Asia under the spiritual stewardship of Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615), the fifth superior general of the Jesuits from 1581 to 1615. This rapid proliferation has allowed scholars to study the ways in which the Italian Jesuit applicants viewed East Asia through an imaginative lens, since the applicants had never actually ventured into East Asia before (Russell 2011). In his work Imagined Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter, historian Roger Hart studies the Jesuit missionary imagination by asking questions regarding the ways in which Jesuits imagined both China and Europe and how the Jesuits massaged those imaginative reflections in order to further the salvific (and when necessary, political) imperatives of the Society of Jesus (Hart 2013). The fact that virtually all of the Jesuit overseas missions happened through the imagination of the various architects of those missions naturally affirms the justification for studying the 1571 Vilela letter through the lens of the missionary imagination.

Of course, the task of detecting the presence of the missionary imagination within the Jesuit order (and by extension within Gaspar Vilela himself) should necessarily transition into the process of dissecting the nuances of that form of imagination. The process of uncovering those nuances has fallen to anthropologists, theologians, and missiologists, thereby testifying to the interdisciplinary ambit of Jesuit epistolary studies. For the purposes of this article, the author will present various parts of the 1571 Vilela letter as examples of the missionary imagination at work, and these examples collectively intersect with mentalities or attitudes raised primarily by the anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) in Patterns of Culture (1934), the literary theorist Kenneth Duva Burke (1897–1993) in A Grammar of Motives (1945), and the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) in Nuer Religion (1956). Philip John Chmielewski, a scholar of the discipline of ethics, consulted these works to create the term “missionary imagination” in an anthropological, ethnographic, missiological, and theological context. He then described the missionary imagination as an idea that involves four specific strategies of “reduction, perspective, representation, and drama” (Chmielewski 2003). For the purposes of this study, the author will alternatively utilize and diverge from these nomenclatures because Chmielewski wrote on the perspectives of present-day missionaries endowed with enlightened and deeply relativistic mindsets about non-Christians across the globe—such as the Catholic Maryknoll lay missionary order, which explicitly welcomes non-Catholic applicants, or the Taizé Community, which fervently espouses friendships between Muslims and Christians (Maryknoll Lay Missioners 2024; Taizé Community 2024). Such a decision would seem necessitated by the reality of having to transport Chmielewski’s framework to the world of sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary spirituality, a spirituality revolutionary for the time of early modern Europe but ultimately far less endowed with the grace of the twenty-first-century mindsets discussed by Chmielewski. In certain instances, Chmielewski’s dependence on so-called classical anthropologists results in a lack of meaningful contributions from anthropologists from times closer to the present; this article will therefore attempt to supplement Chmielewski’s reliance on the likes of Benedict, Burke, and Evans-Pritchard with the thoughts of other scholars.

An overview of the basic claims of the abovementioned anthropological publications will allow for a fuller understanding of the foundations and nomenclatures of the various missionary imagination strategies contained within this article’s treatment of the 1571 Vilela letter. In Patterns of Culture, Benedict writes about the ways in which individual and unique cultures occupy specific portions of the spectrum of possible human behaviors. According to Benedict, this specific portion of the spectrum of possible human behaviors has the name of the so-called personality of a culture. A close study of a culture’s behaviors allows a careful observer to arrive at fairly reasonable suppositions regarding a culture’s personality. In a sense, the MBTI personality spectrum test that seems anecdotally popular in twenty-first-century Korea exists as a faint mirror of Benedict’s definition of a culture’s personality, since the MBTI personality spectrum test allows for sixteen different permutations that define sixteen distinct personality types. Of course, Benedict would argue for a veritable infinitude of personalities of cultures, given the unique identities within all cultures of the past, present, and future. As this article will soon demonstrate, Benedict arguably calls for radical self-assessment as a viable means of understanding another culture (Benedict 1960). In A Grammar of Motives, Burke concerns himself with questions regarding the underlying nuances and motivations of a person’s activities and the reasons for those activities. He comments on fundamental ways (whether profound or seemingly inconsequential in nature) in which human thought can arise. Burke speaks of two proclivities in thought among people discerning the motives of others (particularly others from different cultures), namely, reduction and consubstantiality. In reduction, humans deal with complicated phenomena by understanding those phenomena in simplified terms, and in the phenomenon of consubstantiality, humans unconsciously or consciously arrive at shared understandings (or shared disinclinations) for certain ideas (Burke 1945). In Nuer Religion, Evans-Pritchard speaks of religion as a subject deserving of study purely on the merits of the field. Just as the discipline of legal jurisprudence has a lexicon of ideas and values specific to the field, so too does religion possess a unique vocabulary separate from other fields. In 1956, Evans-Pritchard believed that anthropologists merely treated the study of religion as a subdivision of scholarly reflections on rituals, but he also envisioned a future in which anthropologists would view religious studies as a separate discipline unto itself. Evans-Pritchard later commented on a phenomenon known as perspective, in which an observer attempts to describe a foreign culture in terms coherent for the observer’s home audience (usually Europeans of Western Protestant Christian or Catholic Christian persuasions) (Evans-Pritchard 1956). As this manuscript will soon demonstrate, the 1571 Vilela letter certainly contains evidence of notions of radical self-assessment, reduction, consubstantiality, and perspective in an imagined future Korean mission, even if Vilela lacked any scholarly familiarity with anthropological norms.

3. The Dilemma of Joining Anthropology with Religious Studies and the 1571 Vilela Letter as a Potential Resolution to That Dilemma

As luminaries of the anthropological discipline, Benedict, Burke, and Evans-Pritchard offer insightful ways of reflecting upon the mindsets through which Vilela envisioned a Korean mission, but the legitimacy of these mindsets depends on one’s acceptance of a growing if imperfect union between anthropology and religious studies. To his credit, Evans-Pritchard anticipated this close relationship even during that union’s most formative stages, and his academic successors have keenly discerned the rewards of this cross-fertilization of academic disciplines. On the anthropological side of the equation, Joel Robbins has written about a growing openness among anthropologists in utilizing the insights of theologians in new ways. As Robbins argues, anthropologists of a bygone age would have merely regarded the thoughts of theologians as gentle reminders to adjust certain nuances of anthropological research methodologies. By way of contrast, today’s anthropologists have begun to embrace the possibility of completely revising those research methodologies in the midst of theological insights that can seem superior to anthropological insights in understanding the nature of humankind (Robbins 2006). Among scholars who have more sobering views of this discussion, the anthropologist (and theologian) Douglas James Davies points out two basic realities, namely, (1) the fact that theologians cannot exist without God, while anthropologists do not really need God; and (2) the fact that theologians seem to enjoy the academic company of anthropologists, if not necessarily the other way around (Davies 2002). The theologians Eve-Marie Becker, Jan Dietrich, and Bo Kristian Holm perhaps aptly summarized the discussion by referencing theology’s status as a field that vacillates from collaboration to friction with anthropology. The sense of friction would perhaps seem inevitable. Theologians have proclivities in proclaiming evolving but ultimately authoritative narratives about the nature of humankind, even as those authoritative narratives have come under strain from the advances of the biological sciences and conflicts among cultural anthropologists over the body’s role in socioeconomic discussions (Becker et al. 2016). For the purposes of this article, the author will clearly assume a middle position in this debate. Gaspar Vilela clearly operated in the grand Jesuit traditions of having immense ambitions for the propagation of the Christian faith overseas, but to merely analyze his 1571 letter as an isolated episode in Jesuit history would do an injustice to the letter’s status as a specimen of an imagined cross-cultural encounter between two civilizations (a European one and a Korean one) that still had not yet met face-to-face. The techniques of the missionary imagination arguably illustrate the ways in which Vilela offered a clear if primitive and not yet fully developed mindset on how to traverse the metaphorical space that existed between Europeans and Koreans. As long as one judiciously utilizes the imaginative frameworks heretofore discussed by anthropologists in a balanced discussion of the 1571 Vilela letter, then neither theologians nor anthropologists should fear the prospect of unwarranted intrusions into the controlling assumptions of both fields.

In the context of an interdisciplinary reflection on the 1571 Vilela letter, a potential way to resolve this dilemma of reconciling theology with anthropology would involve an understanding of the document as an exercise in political power. As a Catholic Christian missionary order founded upon the notion of obedience to the pontiff, the Jesuits could legitimately channel the prestige of a supranational church that commanded the attention of people high and low across Europe. Of course, by the time of the 1571 Vilela letter, the Catholic Church’s political influence had arguably quivered in the centuries since the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy that resulted in a monarch’s display of penance before the pope and the fragmentation of the Catholic Church’s spiritual resonance during the post-Reformation period. On the other hand, as the scholar Carlos Zeron points out, the politically astute Jesuits who worked outside Europe depended not on discerning the proper relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities (as in the case of an early modern Europe overrun by Protestants), but rather on the ways in which the Jesuits could ingratiate themselves into foreign kingdoms that could then join the fellowship of Catholic nations (Zeron 2019). For the Jesuits, the arguably diminished political reach of the sixteenth-century Catholic Church (relative to the Catholic Church’s power during the Middle Ages) did not necessarily pose insurmountable problems.

Having internalized the notion of the political significance of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits ardently believed in the success of any potential mission. When Vilela wrote of a Korean peninsula where spiritual fruit would arise in the eventuality of missionaries dispatched there, Vilela had reasons for confidence. In the next section, the author will more closely examine Vilela’s epistolary reference to the daimyo potentially responsible for facilitating the introduction of Jesuit missionaries to the Koreans, but for now, one should recognize Vilela’s confidence in the power of Jesuit networking skills. If the Jesuits had so much success in cultivating useful relationships with Europeans in positions of authority, then such a circumstance might have encouraged Vilela’s hopes in nurturing politically fruitful connections in the Korean peninsula. Various scholars have explored the linkage between political power and religious power, with Robert Wuthnow, a scholar in the sociology of religion, calling attention to the common phenomenon of the former emanating from the latter (Wuthnow 2023). As the 1571 Vilela letter clearly shows, Vilela had two hopes, namely, (1) a political hope for cultivating his daimyo network and (2) a religious hope to harness that network for the sake of spreading the Gospel in Korea; both of these hopes gave him a sense of purpose because he felt that his missionary successes firmly depended on God’s intervention. As the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) would say, political power existed as evidence for God’s ability to bring together a European person and an Asian person of vastly distinct backgrounds. Through that political influence, Vilela could hope to display the power of Jesus Christ in bringing the gospel to faraway lands, thereby introducing the faith, hope, and love of the kingdom of God (Pannenberg 1985). Scholars have also touched upon the intersections that exist between political power and anthropology. For anthropologist Ted Lewellen, the linkage between political power residing in a religious institution and anthropology becomes clear when one clearly identifies the type of institution that one studies. In the world of religion, Lewellen describes four categories of “preindustrial political systems”, the fourth of which describes a centralized religion that exists within a state. This centralized religion has a dedicated group of ecclesiastics who confer legitimacy on the majesty and divine origins of a government (Lewellen 2003). The politically powerful organization that Vilela represented would have arguably fallen within this fourth category. Since the abovementioned scholars have demonstrated clear linkages between (1) political power and theology and (2) political power and anthropology, one may coherently validate the characterization of the 1571 Vilela letter as an exercise in political power. In other words, political power serves as the connective tissue that allows for the unity of the theological and anthropological disciplines into a coherent analytical methodology that one may apply to the 1571 Vilela letter.

4. The 1571 Vilela Letter in the Context of Attitudes Regarding the Mission in East Asia as Those Attitudes Existed in 1571

Of course, despite all of Vilela’s forays into the missionary imagination, he probably realized that there existed a gap between his current knowledge of the Korean peninsula and the potential status of his future knowledge of the Korean peninsula. He certainly believed in his ability to reduce that gap, given his strong desire to realize the goal of traveling to the Korean peninsula. In his 1571 letter, Vilela wrote about the possibility of traveling to the peninsula through help obtained from various Japanese daimyo.2 Vilela referred to one unnamed daimyo apparently familiar with the Korean peninsula, thereby facilitating Jesuit plans for the potential apostolate through letters of introduction.3 Vilela then proposed the idea of entering the Korean peninsula through a port that scholar Pak Cheol has explicitly labeled as the port city of Busan. From Busan, Vilela could then visit Beijing, the city that Vilela described as the residence of the Chinese emperor (Pak 1989).4 Vilela’s letter offers a glimpse into his strategy of presenting his cause to the political forces and institutions that would determine the legal basis for his entry into the Korean peninsula. In the 1571 letter, Vilela arguably implied a skeletal framework for working with the Koreans. A careful reading of that letter allows for a breakdown of that framework into several concrete aspects, namely, an appeal to the epistolary sensibilities of the Korean people (i.e., through his hope to enter the peninsula through letters of introduction from Japanese daimyo, though Vilela also surely hoped for letters of introduction from the Koreans themselves), an attempt to delicately appeal to the cultural sensitivities of the Koreans (i.e., through his belief in the civilized nature of Koreans capable of conversion, as long as Vilela outwardly showed deference to the majesty of Korean civilization), and an appeal to the economic interests of the Korean people (i.e., through his hope to enter the peninsula via a port city). An investigation of each of these three ideas will allow for a deeper reading of Vilela’s missionary imagination dreams for Korea.

4.1. Vilela’s Hope to Enter Korea by Way of Helpful Letters of Introduction

Vilela definitely knew that his presence in Asia depended on his ability to stay within the good graces of people in authority, and since the Japanese authorities generally shared statuses of belonging to the literate aristocracy, letters would play a significant role in that regard. In a situation of inaccessible authority figures, a letter from any Japanese individual would offer more hope than nothing. After encountering difficulties in setting up a ministry at the bottom of Mount Hiei (near Kyoto) in the autumn of 1559, Vilela and his friends decided to venture elsewhere in search of a more receptive missionary audience. This decision to relocate would have normally required a difficult search for a temporary shelter where Vilela’s team could dream of a new apostolate. Fortunately for Vilela, a sympathetic Japanese woman of the cloistered persuasion wrote a reference letter that allowed him and his companions to stay at a Japanese man’s home. In exchange, Vilela’s group had to quietly stay in a highly inconspicuous and neglected part of the Japanese person’s residence, presumably to avoid the suspicions of curious neighbors and/or hostile officials (Cieslik 1954). Since the reference letter writer came from the ranks of Buddhist nuns, and since both pro-accommodationist and anti-accommodationist Jesuits in Japan harbored suspicions about the theological aspects of Japanese Buddhism, this event signified something of a slightly uncommon occurrence in the world of sixteenth-century Jesuit interactions with Buddhists. Of course, for Vilela, the necessity of finding a place to live superseded whatever qualms he might have had about the Buddhist religion. On the other side of the equation, a Buddhist nun clearly allowed her concern for another human being’s safety and shelter to supersede whatever misgivings she might have had about helping a foreigner (Vilela) with a strange physical appearance (to her, anyway).

This entire episode of 1559 arguably had some impact on Vilela’s mind because the act of transcending one’s default mechanisms of fear, suspicion, and frustration in the presence of total strangers (Japanese people, in Vilela’s eyes) certainly required a good deal of courage. Over the short term, this courage allowed Vilela and his companions to accept the hospitality made possible through a nun’s recommendation letter. Over the long term, this courage gave Vilela the confidence to believe that if he could apply the creative mindset of the missionary imagination to the Korean peninsula, then he could think about ways of obtaining reference letters (from both Japanese and Korean people) to guide him in his future travels in the peninsula. This thinking process exists as an exercise in the creative missionary imagination, and the abovementioned anthropologist Ruth Benedict described this exercise as an intensely edifying one. According to Benedict, the characteristics of a foreign group fall into two categories, namely, characteristics peculiar to that group, and characteristics shared by everyone around the world (Benedict 1960). According to the principles of the missionary imagination, one may describe Benedict’s study process as a form of radical self-assessment, but the thoughts of a more present-day anthropologist like Robert Tonkinson can help in providing a fuller picture of this radical self-assessment. When Tonkinson argues for how Christian missionary endeavors and anthropological fieldwork (i.e., the careful observation of indigenous groups) share the imperative of embracing the challenges involved in considering the consequences of those activities, he effectively admonishes Christian missionaries to no longer view missionary efforts as dependent solely on the willingness of non-Christians to change (Tonkinson 2007). Although one could describe Vilela’s use of the Japanese Buddhist nun’s letter of recommendation as a choice dictated by necessity, one can also apply Benedict’s anthropological lens and determine that Vilela successfully distinguished between a Japanese Buddhist nun’s proclivity of sympathetic compassion (a proclivity universal to mankind) from that same nun’s Buddhist theology, a theology for which he had deep reservations. In this action, Vilela, through his study of Japanese culture, had also achieved something that any anti-accommodationist Jesuit (viz., Francisco Cabral and Cabral’s sympathizers) would have loathed, namely, a radical self-assessment of the European civilization. As the scholar Linda Zampol D’Ortia argues, Vilela had long internalized the desire to behave with humility, sweetness, modesty, and charity in order to appeal to the enlightened proclivities of the Japanese people, thereby psychologically preparing himself for the long struggle to propagate the gospel in Japan. By way of contrast, Francisco Cabral had failed to reassess any of the controlling assumptions that he had prior to embarking on the Japanese mission. Cabral remained a prisoner of those assumptions, so much so that he would wind up begging for the chance to leave the position of serving as Vilela’s immediate superior, since the pro-accommodationist Jesuit parties found Cabral’s presence a drain on the viability of the Japanese mission (D’Ortia 2024). In other words, Vilela consciously made the choice to evangelize in Japan, and by extension, Korea. Vilela could have written to his Jesuit superiors and begged for the chance at a reassignment (as Cabral did). The fact that Vilela did not follow Cabral in this regard clearly shows the profile of a man determined to essentially (if only occasionally) set aside a Jesuit distrust of a non-Christian religion (in this case, Japanese Buddhism) and render that distrust subservient to the larger imperatives of spreading the Christian faith in less confrontational ways.

Through a missionary imagination strategy of radical self-assessment as outlined by Benedict and elaborated upon by Tonkinson, Vilela had, at least to a limited degree, successfully diverged from the racist European mentality of existing as some heroic vessel for the salvation of hopelessly barbaric and lost souls. In other words, as Benedict would argue, Vilela had reassessed the most representative aspects of his European background with respect to the overseas missionary enterprise, and this reassessment had occurred in an objective manner because Vilela had (at least partially) disenthralled himself from the metaphorical shackles of his own controlling assumptions about the superiority of Western Christianity in comparison to East Asia (Benedict 1960). Of course, Vilela’s writings abound with derogatory remarks on (1) the Japanese Buddhist monks determined to diminish the influence of the foreign Jesuit missionaries as well as (2) the Japanese animal-worshippers of the Shinto faith, and these proclivities confirm the Jesuit historiography’s modern assessments regarding the early Jesuits as people who anticipated pluralistic ideals but did not yet embody those ideals in a mature way (Abé 2011; Boxer 1967; Lach 1965; Tuttle 2010). This obvious qualification aside, one clear point remains, namely, the idea of Vilela embracing the notion of letters of introduction as helpful for missionary work. In this idea, Vilela had performed one of the most difficult initiatives of the missionary imagination, namely, the ability to look at one’s own controlling assumptions from within and make readjustments to those assumptions for the sake of missionary success. Put in another way, this 1559 episode of Vilela’s use of the nun’s letter illustrates what the ethnohistorian Bruce Graham Trigger (1937–2006) would describe as the Jesuit missionary’s highly relativistic ideas on matters that did not impinge on the sanctity of Catholic theology (Trigger 1986). Matters that did not trample upon the prerogatives of the Catholic Christian faith would have included Vilela’s radical self-assessment for the sake of the missionary imagination, as demonstrated by his openness to a Buddhist nun’s epistolary charity. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and especially given the fact that Vilela himself referred to letters of introduction in his plans for a Korean apostolate, one may reasonably surmise that Vilela would have viewed reference letters as indispensable elements in a missionary future among the Korean people.

4.2. Vilela’s Hope to Delicately Appeal to the Cultural Sensibilities of the Korean People in Terms Intelligible to the Koreans

Given Vilela’s clear desire to work within the standards of Japanese epistolary charity in a way that anticipated his hope to benefit from that same channel of helpfulness in Korea, Vilela probably felt that the Korean people could listen to the Jesuits, as long as Vilela carefully appealed to the sensitivities of the Koreans. In his 1571 letter, Vilela explicitly acknowledged the friendliness of the Koreans, and since Vilela clearly believed that certain Japanese people had responded favorably to his efforts at kindness and sincerity, Vilela almost certainly thought that the Koreans would behave similarly.5 Through his ministry with the Japanese people, Vilela arguably gave clues regarding the kind of missionary ethos that he wished to pursue in the Korean peninsula. The Jesuit chronicler Luis Frois (1532–1597) provides testimony on the way in which Vilela ingratiated himself in the presence of Ashikaga Yoshiteru (1536–1565), the thirteenth Muromachi shogun, prior to Vilela’s reception of the shogun’s approval to do missionary work. According to Frois, for the sake of the 1559 meeting with the shogun, Vilela wore a Japanese kimono and a Portuguese mantel. The Portuguese mantel showed clear signs of usage. Vilela also had a red cap, and his hands carried a book (Cieslik 1954). The Portuguese mantel, having presumably undergone years of usage without suitable repairs (for Vilela surely had more important things to worry about besides a few loose strings on European garments), would have almost certainly looked aesthetically inferior to the kimono that Vilela specifically prepared for this occasion.

In terms of a discussion of the missionary imagination in the context of Vilela’s dreams to go to the Korean peninsula, Vilela’s decision to wear a Portuguese mantel reveals much about Vilela’s improvisational brilliance. Vilela’s sartorial creativity in his 1559 meeting with the shogun showed the Portuguese missionary’s intense desire to communicate some sense of ecclesiastical authority on par with that of the Buddhists in Japan, and clothing would have had a role in that indispensable notion. Various scholars have indicated that since the perpetually indigent Jesuits could not hope to match the financial prowess of the entrenched Japanese Buddhist clerics, a Jesuit in Japan clearly had to resort to some improvised creativity to at least look the part of a missionary deserving of a Japanese individual’s deference (Basu and Miroshnik 2021; Curvelo 2018; Oka 2021; Parker 1999). In the anthropological interpretation of Vilela’s missionary imagination, Vilela’s decision to put on a Portuguese garment (in the absence of a more refined, more expensive, and more particularly Japanese substitute) seemed emblematic of a lone non-Buddhist’s courageous dash into the Buddhist-dominated Japanese world. Cultural anthropologists studying the subtext of Jesuit missionary accounts would almost certainly notice, as Micah True does in his study of The Jesuit Relations (1632–1673), that Jesuit missionaries who traveled to foreign lands showed bravery in the purest form deemed honorable and virtuous in the eyes of God (since the prospect of a martyr’s death on the high seas loomed as a sobering eventuality), and Vilela ethnographically belonged to this school of Jesuit thought (True 2015). Vilela knew that he did not remotely enjoy access to the political and financial power of the Japanese monks, but he nonetheless persisted in believing that subsequent events would somehow favor him. Since Vilela did not have the advantage of working in an environment that had a preexisting Catholic Christian or Protestant Christian heritage (i.e., the post-Reformation German principalities), he knew that any favor shown to him by the shogun would not have arisen from such a circumstance. Of course, for Vilela, God’s providence alone accounted for the favorable reception eventually given to Vilela’s group, a group that eventually succeeded in obtaining permission to do missionary work. Far from existing as an isolated curiosity in the missionary chronicles, Vilela’s adoption of a Portuguese mantel alongside a kimono had a hugely important role in a display of fashion diplomacy that featured representatives of Christian Europe meeting with representatives of East Asia, and Vilela probably had similar feelings about an anticipated trip to the Korean peninsula. In his letter, Vilela also explicitly acknowledged the consolation of knowing that even if he came ill-prepared to the Korean peninsula, he could count on the helpfulness of sympathetic Japanese merchants who could bring in whatever the Jesuits would have needed.6 One can therefore reasonably surmise that Vilela trusted in the possibility of helpers who would have provided suitable apparel for Vilela’s self-introduction to the Koreans.

Given Vilela’s success in winning an audience with the thirteenth Muromachi shogun in a non-Christian nation, Vilela surely understood the fact that God’s grace can become manifest in simple (i.e., devoid of miracles on the scale of Jesus Christ’s resurrection) ways, and indeed, the mundane simplicity through which God acts in the missionary imagination can serve as a motivation for missionaries. As the abovementioned literary theorist Kenneth Burke would say, the action of two parties of vastly different backgrounds (in this case, the missionary Vilela and the missionary audience of the shogun and the shogun’s retainers) somehow coming together exists as a phenomenon that Burke defines as “consubstantiality”. According to the core assumptions of the phenomenon of consubstantiality as defined by the missionary imagination, the concept of a family purely originated as a parental bloodline construct, with two people regarding each other as members of the same family if and only if the two people shared the exact same biological parents. Over time, the notion of family began to assume more varied meanings, with individuals unifying over shared nationalities or values in de facto family structures. Vilela knew that he biologically hailed from two parents, but he felt an arguably more profound kinship with the missionaries of the Jesuit order. By befriending other Jesuits, Vilela proclaimed the consubstantiality that existed between himself and his fellow missionaries. In the audience with the shogun in 1559, Vilela would have remained motivated by the reality of how the phenomenon of consubstantiality could transcend national borders, even if Vilela merely viewed the meeting as an example of fellowship between a priest and a shogun (and not as some anthropologically defined construct). As Burke argues, the power of consubstantiality in the missionary imagination clearly arises in cross-cultural contexts, but if and only if the missionary recognizes the fundamental points of dissimilarity between himself and the missionary audience. In the phenomenon of consubstantiality, even if different members of the same family arrive at some consensus on an issue, the family members will not agree with each other for the exact same reasons. This situation arises because of the intrinsic differences that exist between two individuals, even if those two individuals come from the same family (Burke 1945). The intensely theoretical (or overly convoluted, depending on one’s perspective) language of consubstantiality as explained by Burke would seem to discourage a proliferation of accessible scholarly elaborations on the topic. On the other hand, although the theologian Peter Cho Phan does not actually use the term “consubstantiality”, he lucidly (if unknowingly) elaborates on the term by emphasizing the necessity of diminishing reasons for mutual animosity between Christians and non-Christians, since animosity hinders the potential of a mutually edifying and transparent dialogue (Phan 2017). In 1560, Vilela would have certainly plunged into an abyss of abject stupidity if he told his Jesuit superiors that the Japanese authorities had granted him permission for missionary work because of the exact same motivations that inspired Vilela’s wish to join the Jesuit order. Vilela’s awareness of the potential of official Japanese approval for his missionary activities remained pregnant with the controlling assumption of his acknowledgement of differences between the Christian lands of Europe and the non-Christian lands of Japan. If the Japanese people ever became followers of Christ, then the pathways to that belief would have inevitably differed from the path that stirred Vilela’s heart. According to Phan’s elaboration of Burke’s consubstantiality phenomenon of the missionary imagination, Japanese pathways to the acceptance of the Christian faith would have also involved the disappearance of mutual hatred in the Christian-pagan divide between the Jesuits and the Japanese people. These ideas profoundly influenced the ways in which Vilela pursued an East Asian ministry distinct from the apostolate that he might have pursued in a European continent that had enjoyed a Christian heritage since the days of the Roman Empire. As implied by the context and subtext of his 1571 letter, the phenomenon of consubstantiality would have surely motivated Vilela to believe in the possibility of fellowship with the authorities of the Korean peninsula.

4.3. Vilela’s Belief That His Experience in a Port City Ministry (Sakai) Would Have Allowed Him to Have a Deeper Appreciation of Economic Realities Understandable to the Koreans, in Light of His Decision to Try to Enter the Korean Peninsula Through Busan

As implied by the content of the 1571 Vilela letter, the prerogatives of radical self-assessment and consubstantiality for Korea would converge in an environment in which the Jesuit missionaries and East Asian missionary audiences would unambiguously coexist, and Vilela had various precedents in Japan to justify a supreme confidence in the power of his missionary imagination. In some ways, Vilela’s implied designation of the port city of Busan as the starting point for a future Korean mission arguably offers profound insights into the Portuguese missionary’s outlook. In 1571, the goal of a permanent Chinese mission had still eluded the Jesuits (Francis Xavier’s abortive 1552 landing in China’s Shangchuan Island hardly counts in this regard), so Vilela’s specific note on Busan’s proximity to Beijing would have arguably served to justify the selection of Korea as a future missionary land. The 1571 Vilela letter also contained a reference to an inevitable phenomenon of advantages that the Jesuits would enjoy as a result of traveling to Korea, thereby highlighting Vilela’s deliberate selection of the Korean peninsula as a worthwhile endeavor that could inspire his creative energies.7 Vilela almost surely understood the indispensable nature of port cities in the Portuguese empire. As the historian Laura Fernández-González points out, no less a political luminary than Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) acknowledged the port city of Lisbon as a commercial and cultural jewel of Europe, with the Iberian Peninsula’s lengthy Tagus River playing a significant role in the maintenance of that marvel (Fernández-González 2021). If a European monarch recognized the vitality of Lisbon, then the port city’s unquestioned status as the lynchpin of the Portuguese empire would have existed as public knowledge among Portuguese missionaries like Gaspar Vilela.

Although Vilela’s background as a constituent of the maritime Portuguese empire probably had some role in influencing his decision to see a Korean mission as contingent upon entering the peninsula through a port city, an arguably more significant motivation had to do with the missionary imagination. The missionary imagination would have served to profoundly motivate his thoughts on port cities as geographic vessels for the dissemination of the Christian faith. In a study of the Japanese ministry of Gaspar Vilela, Madalena Ribeiro calls attention to the fact that contemporary Jesuit missionaries regarded Sakai as the “Venice of Japan” (“Veneza do Japão”) (Ribeiro 2007). This description perfectly illustrates Burke’s abovementioned reductionist missionary imagination strategy (Burke 1945). The act of labeling Sakai as a city equal with Venice in splendor also existed as an illustration of the abovementioned missionary imagination’s technique of perspective (Chmielewski 2003; Evans-Pritchard 1956). In Vilela’s openness to viewing Sakai as a Japanese Venice, there clearly existed the notion of cultivating European sentiments of familiarity with Sakai; Europeans would not necessarily view Sakai as some far-flung and exotic place outside the realm of human understanding. In this technique of the missionary imagination, Vilela sought to present the port city of Sakai as essentially co-equal in opulence and cultural splendor to Venice, thereby minimizing the potential difficulties that Europeans would face in comprehending the environment of Sakai. By way of analogy, if Vilela could enter Busan and describe that city as roughly equivalent to some European port city already embedded in the collective European consciousness, then the task of presenting Korean culture to a European audience would not have posed a superabundance of difficulties. In short, one cannot deny the intuitively satisfying attraction of the reductionist and perspective missionary imagination strategies that arguably turned the Jesuit East Asian mission into a less imposing endeavor for the Jesuit missionaries and the European financial patrons of those missionaries.

On the other hand, the thoughts of anthropologically trained missiologists like Scott William Sunquist serve as reminders of how the Jesuits fell far short of any sense of cultural relativism recognizable to twenty-first-century missionaries who genuinely cherish the sanctity and peculiar uniqueness of non-Christian traditions. Sunquist argues for how the notion of mission transcends the mere aspirations of churches. The true meaning of mission entails nothing less than a complete re-orientation of one’s soul to the will of God and the concomitant need to acquiesce to that will, come what may (Sunquist 2013). In other words, if God’s will should lead a missionary to believe that he or she cannot plant a church or turn a thousand non-Christians into Christians, then the missionary’s only reasonable reply arises in obedience to that will. Of course, according to the 1571 Vilela letter, the Portuguese missionary said that fighting among Japanese warriors stopped him from physically coming to the Korean peninsula, and Vilela seems to have offered nothing but sincere congratulations to the future missionary (not Vilela) who would “deserve” (in Vilela’s words) the chance to go to Korea; outwardly, such a gesture seemed like an ideal acquiescence to the Lord’s will.8 On the other hand, the notion of Vilela showing a totally evenhanded and non-judgmental outlook on Japanese Buddhist culture (for such an outlook would have given him the foundation for a more objective assessment of Sakai) did not exist. Vilela’s central purpose in Japan (and, one may surmise, his purpose in a future missionary voyage to Korea) rested solely in the conversion of non-Christian souls. His missionary imagination strategies of perspective and reduction, while helpful in arguably giving him confidence in his vocation, paradoxically stopped him from entering the realm of a cultural relativism familiar to certain twenty-first-century missionaries who truly cherish the rights of non-Christians to stay forever outside the bounds of Christian belief.

As for the actual Japanese residents living in Sakai, the surviving primary source documentation provides a portrait of individuals whom Vilela could reasonably view as potential converts within his imaginatively creative proclivities. This portrait further testifies to the reality of how Vilela saw port city residents as protagonists in a salvific landscape that he arguably sought to replicate in Busan, the port city that would have served as Vilela’s implied point of entry into the Korean peninsula. In another letter (17 August 1561), Vilela identified several of Japan’s key players in Sakai as influential merchants, merchants who must have preferred the easy and predictable income of peacetime trade over the frenzied unpredictability of interminable conflicts with neighboring daimyo (Vilela 1561). The Japanese merchants likely knew that Jesuit missionaries did not just figuratively live in the world of heavenly abstractions. In the practical world, these missionaries could facilitate cross-cultural discourse between the European and Japanese peoples. In such an environment, the indispensable Jesuits navigated between the earthly vocation of foreign language interpretation and the heavenly vocation of preaching the gospel, depending on the circumstances. Of course, not all of this outwardly cross-cultural discourse happened for completely benign motives. Various scholars have described the sixteenth-century Japanese people as individuals who only put up with the Jesuits as long as the missionaries translated for the Portuguese merchants, who in turn provided exotic items and firearms to Japanese daimyo looking for the most lethal ways of dispensing with opponents (Black 1975; Russell 1922). In 1571, Vilela wrote of the Japanese people as individuals who carefully listened to the soundness of Jesuit arguments regarding the legitimacy of the Christian faith prior to baptism declarations.9 On the other hand, Vilela also understood the ways in which the bellicose proclivities of the warring Japanese people could override his impressions. As the historian George Sansom notes, not long after Vilela left the care of the Sakai apostolate to Luis Frois, Frois managed to assemble soldiers from warring Japanese armies into a Christmas Day celebration in 1567, only to watch helplessly as the soldiers continued to fight it out the next day (Sansom 1963).

In this Sakai port city environment full of individuals with differing motives (the Jesuits who desired the salvation of human souls, the Portuguese merchants who desired both salvation and profit margins, and the Japanese people who desired Christianity while conveniently forgetting the faith’s pacifistic tendencies in times of war with other Japanese people), Vilela must have had constant reminders of how less than ideal considerations could inspire the faith of certain Japanese Christians. This reality notwithstanding, the principles of the missionary imagination arguably still had a powerful relevance to Vilela’s ministry in Sakai. According to the principles of the missionary imagination, this constellation of unidealistic motives exists as a variation (or corruption, if one prefers) of Burke’s abovementioned notion of consubstantiality. As noted earlier, when Vilela managed to receive the shogun’s authorization to do missionary work in 1560, this process unfolded as a result of consubstantiality defined as an imaginative framework through which two very different parties (one Jesuit, one Japanese) managed to transcend cultural differences and come together to agree on the permissibility of Vilela’s work, even if the Jesuit and the Japanese authorities had very different motivations for participating in this event. For lack of a better term, the author of this article would like to characterize this form of consubstantiality as “positive consubstantiality”. Vilela and the Japanese people of Sakai initially came together on various issues, such as the necessity of profitable commercial endeavors, the helpful nature of Jesuit linguists, and the significance of military participation in certain Christian rituals (a Christmas celebration, for instance). On the other hand, one can argue that this version of consubstantiality existed more as a consensus based on a shared distaste for disorder. The Jesuits in Sakai did not want to find themselves kicked out and sent packing to Goa, the Portuguese merchants in Sakai did not want to lose money or the hope of heaven, and the Japanese soldiers of Sakai needed European guns in order to not lose battles in disgrace. Burke would describe this form of consubstantiality as an expression of “diverse groups unified by the sharing of a single opponent” in a missionary imagination for which “their consubstantiality [is] thus being defined dialectically, by reference to a contrary term”, but this highly dense prose should arguably yield to a simpler nomenclature that the author of this article would like to describe as a form of “negative consubstantiality” (Burke 1945). A shared (one could even say nakedly self-interested) distaste for negative outcomes had led Vilela, the Portuguese merchants, and the Japanese people of Sakai to have something of an awkward union that would only survive at the hands of shoguns who would continue to tolerate foreigners. The hypothetical Korean ministry that Vilela envisioned in his 1571 letter similarly had elements of radical self-assessment and consubstantiality (positive and negative).

5. Conclusions

In his reflections on a Korean apostolate that never materialized in his lifetime, Gaspar Vilela had an unwavering faith in a Christian Lord who blessed the Portuguese missionary’s desire for missionary work in Korea. This unwavering faith undoubtedly also grew from Vilela’s awareness of the profoundly global political power of the Jesuit order, and these two notions became unified within the missionary imagination, which fueled Vilela’s belief in how he could replicate his Japanese missionary successes in Korea. Although the concept of the missionary imagination has emerged as a way to explore the attitudes of present-day missionaries who respect the faith choices of non-Christians, the concept of the missionary imagination for Vilela entailed nothing less than a firm belief in conversion as the ideal outcome of Jesuit work and a degree of flexibility in dealing with non-Christians.

In order to properly discern the intricacies of the various forms of the missionary imagination that arose in Vilela’s mind during his discernment on the Korean mission, the interdisciplinary scholar of Jesuit studies ought to take note of various anthropological frameworks. The anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict, the literary theorist Kenneth Duva Burke, and the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard offer ideas of perspective, positive/negative consubstantiality, radical self-assessment, and reduction as names for the mental processes that individuals utilize for the sake of understanding different cultures, but more modern scholarship on these issues has refined scholarly understandings of these mental processes. Although anthropologists of a bygone age might have regarded the notion of collaboration with theologians as a somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable prospect, newer generations of thinkers on both sides of the divide have found ways to offer enlightened and interdisciplinary commentary on various issues. The notion of the 1571 Vilela letter as an exercise in political power arguably serves as the basis for the unity of the theological and anthropological disciplines into a methodological framework for understanding Vilela’s words in the context of the missionary imagination.

Despite Vilela’s overly idealistic hopes for coming to the Korean peninsula, he commented objectively on one reality preventing him from fulfilling his dreams, namely, the incessant Japanese civil wars that hindered his dreams of a safe passage to Korea. In his belief in cultivating helpful alliances with Japanese daimyo as a way to travel to the Korean peninsula, Vilela found himself at odds with some Jesuits (notably Francisco Cabral) on the need to accommodate the Japanese people. These undeniable difficulties notwithstanding, Vilela still outlined a coherent Korean mission plan. This mission plan entailed the following three notions: (1) an appeal to the epistolary delicacy of the Korean people in the form of helpful letters of introduction/recommendation, (2) an appeal to the nobler instincts of a Korean civilization presumably receptive to the Jesuits, and (3) an appeal to the economic interests of the Korean people through Vilela’s hope to enter Korea via Busan, where he could presumably massage his mercantile connections to helpfully promote commerce in the area.

Vilela’s hope to stay within the good graces of the people who mattered (local authorities) anchored his missionary efforts in Japan, and such a hope also anchored his desire for an apostolate in Korea. In 1559, the fact that Vilela and his companions harnessed the power of a kind Japanese Buddhist nun’s letter of recommendation revealed, albeit in a primitive way, the desire for cross-cultural discourse between a European person and a Japanese person, both of whom had to metaphorically traverse long spaces of the unknown in order to meet each other. According to the missionary imagination, this kind of behavior typified a kind of radical self-assessment explored by Benedict. By moving away from the rigid condemnations of pagan (Buddhist, in this case) traditions that might have impregnated his European mindset long before his entry into Asia, Vilela could see beauty and charity in the woman who risked her own welfare to protect the Jesuit and his fellow travelers. By way of contrast, Francisco Cabral and his allies largely failed to reassess anything about European civilization, causing friction and awkwardness with Vilela and other missionaries who had more experience with East Asian affairs.

In his 1571 letter, Vilela also hoped that the Koreans would listen to the efforts of the Jesuit missionaries, and certain favorable events in Japan probably offered him some encouragement in this regard. In his 1559 meeting with the thirteenth Muromachi shogun, Vilela wore a Japanese kimono alongside a Portuguese mantel. Through these sartorial choices, Vilela arguably internalized the spirit of the Ignatian exhortation for Jesuit missionaries to pay attention to both external and internal realities in the world of everyday interactions. On the other hand, Vilela’s prostration in front of the shogun comes across as a foreigner’s decision to willingly (and without fear) enter a world of unknowns and uncertainties. According to the standards of the missionary imagination, the fact that Vilela succeeded in his desire for the shogun’s protection clearly existed as an example of Burke’s notion of consubstantiality, in which people of vastly divergent backgrounds somehow come together on issues of shared priorities, attachments, or cultural ideas. Such a phenomenon would have buttressed Vilela’s hopes for similar developments in the Korean peninsula.

Favorable events that existed as examples of the missionary imagination’s proclivities of radical self-assessment and consubstantiality arguably gave Vilela a measure of confidence in his hope to enter the Korean peninsula through the port city of Busan. An illustration of the missionary imagination technique of perspective became manifest in Vilela’s attempts to describe the Japanese port city of Sakai as functionally equivalent to Venice, thereby lessening Vilela’s difficulties in presenting Busan to curious European audiences who would not necessarily view Sakai (and by extension Busan) as some city on the incomprehensible fringes of European perception. Vilela’s desire to cultivate the gospel among the actual inhabitants of Sakai existed according to the norms of the missionary imagination’s notion of consubstantiality, but not a consubstantiality of the positive kind. Given the harsh realities of how merchants in Sakai seem to have mostly tolerated the Jesuits for the Jesuit ability to act as translators for Portuguese merchants who would provide wealth and guns to the Japanese, it would seem that the missionary imagination’s construct of negative consubstantiality has more relevance here, since all parties in Sakai shared not so much a resonant cultural affinity for something, but rather a shared distaste for adverse outcomes. In any event, Vilela would have likely accepted the possibilities of both positive consubstantiality and negative consubstantiality as valid pathways for the dissemination of the gospel, not just in Sakai, but also in Busan.

This article, a manuscript within a series on the 1571 Vilela letter, offers an overview of the Korean missionary landscape as that landscape existed in the Jesuit imagination in 1571. In many ways, the laconic nature of Vilela’s letter poses obvious limitations on the extent to which one can properly discern the precise nuances of Vilela’s imaginative proclivities. Fortunately for the interventions of disciplines such as anthropology, history, missiology, and theology, scholars can come closer to the truth on this matter, even if that truth remains understandably provisional and based in some respects on a degree of reasonable speculation, since Vilela never physically ventured into the Korean peninsula. On the other side of the cultural discourse implied by this study, the Korean people can feel a sense of pardonable satisfaction over the phenomenon of growing scholarly interest in the various episodes through which Europeans sought to interact with Koreans, even if the earliest versions of these episodes mostly traversed the space of the Jesuit missionary consciousness. Future publications of this series should offer scholarly treatments on the 1571 Vilela letter’s ethnographic discussion of the so-called Korean race (for such a construct does not exist in the biological sciences) and the letter’s status as an illustration (the laconic nature of the letter notwithstanding) of Jesuit epistolary standards. In the specific case of the 1571 Vilela letter in the context of sixteenth-century Korean Catholicism, this scholarly intervention seems long overdue.