The God of Silence
Cavanaugh, William T.
J THE GOD OF SILENCE Shusaku Endo's reading of the Passion William T . Cavanaugh A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity,...
...You will be hated by all because of my name...
...There he recalls how Christ sought out even the most unattractive and despised of people, those whom no one else could love...
...Rodrigues finds it imLOYOLA HOUSE Guelph Centre of Spirituality RETREAT DIRECTORS' WORKSHOP July 7-19, 1998 Cost: $840 (Cdn) $660 (US) This is the basic and foundational workshop for those who desire to learn spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition...
...Rodrigues is motivated by a missionary concern for peasant Christians who have persevered in their faith in a clandestine church without priests...
...Ah yes, we think, this is the paradox of the cross...
...Rodrigues writes: Everything our Lord does is for our good...
...No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening...
...In the following years priests and ordinary Christians were ruthlessly suppressed...
...The same choice now faces Rodrigues...
...Ferreira puts the argument to Rodrigues: "A priest ought to live in imitation of Christ....Certainly Christ would have apostatized for [these peasants...
...The pope includes an examination of martyrdom in his encyclical, with the implication that it is only because certain moral truths cannot be compromised--regardless of the circumstances--that Christians would be willing to go to their deaths to defend them...
...More than half of Silence takes place in prison...
...In Silence, Endo provocatively pushes basic Christian logic, already paradoxical, to a more extreme conclusion...
...But in the agonizing dilemma which sets up the climax of the novel, Endo turns even this paradox inside out...
...In Silence, Endo's fictional Ferreira serves as a goad to Ro drigues's pride, ft is Rodrigues's pride, hidden behind his self-abnegating journey toward martyrdom, that sets up the climactic scene in the novel...
...The Jesuit seeks physical martyrdom as a prize...
...It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross...
...Silence is a meditation on the Incarnation, not a manual of morals...
...This goes to the heart of Rodrigues's questions about God's silence...
...Still, no missionary apostatized until 1632...
...Though Kichijiro denies being a Christian, gradually we learn his secret: he, too, is an apostate...
...Could one sacrifice not only one's body, but one's very moral integrity for the sake of others...
...The deeper issue here is suffering for the sake of Christ...
...More over, I think Endo would argue that this wound is not one created by the writer, but belongs to the one who returned to his disciples after the Resurrection, asking his disciples to probe his unhealed wounds...
...However, the unification of Japan under a central governing power in the late sixteenth century was accompanied by an increasing suspicion toward foreigners...
...Rodrigues is haunted, and feels himself pulled toward Japan, by a vivid vision of the face of Christ...
...God has spoken to the suffering of the world in giving the Word, Jesus Christ, made incarnate to suffer the pain of humanity...
...I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward...
...Endo hints that the peasants in the pit have already apostatized, but will not be saved unless Rodrigues follows suit...
...However, rather than soothe his doubts, Rodrigues finds the simple faith of the peasants a further irritant...
...The dilemma is remarkably simple...
...Why has our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants...
...they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name...
...Suppressing disgust, he gives Kichijiro absolution, then hurriedly retreats to his bed...
...Ignatius under personal direction...
...But the novelist subtly lets Rodrigues overplay his courage until it touches on pride...
...and they will put some of you to death...
...On the other hand, Endo suggests that Rodrigues does indeed hear God break the silence...
...Christ comes not to solve the world's problems, but to redeem it...
...As he sets his face toward Japan, Rodrigues writes in dread-filled yet fascinated tones of the perils that await him...
...January, May and October...
...The dilemma itself may be simple, but the questions it raises are not...
...As Jesus says in Luke, "They will arrest you and persecute you...
...Cammmzweal | ~1 March 1,3, 1998...
...If it is true, as many Christian martyrs have affirmed, that for the Christian, the body is as nothing when compared to the eternity of the soul, then is the crucifixion of the soul a martyrdom which makes other martyrdoms pale in comparison...
...It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world...
...Rodrigues again sees the face of Christ, and he is filled with shame...
...Rodrigues watches as two Christian peasants are tied to stakes and left for the ocean's waves to bring a slow, merciless death...
...Ignatius three times a year...
...Endo is not interested in deciding if Rodrigues did the right thing...
...The Christian imperative is to love even that which is poor and despised in the world's eyes...
...Francis Xavier had brought Christianity to Japan in 1549...
...He wants to atone for the sin of Ferreira and share in a martyr's glorious triumph over sin and death...
...Rodrigues regards him with a mixture of annoyance, contempt, and pity...
...In the end, the Jesuit risks violating the church's stern admonition that a Catholic must never seek martyrdom...
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...Eventually, however, the magistrates Commonweal | 0 March 13, 1998 hit upon a sinister torture designed to change the public spectacle from one of a heroic acceptance of death to an ignominious public renunciation of faith...
...Persecution erupted periodically, culminating in an edict of expulsion for all foreign missionaries in 1614...
...Christian peasants had been hung in the pit, and Ferreira was told that they would not be released until he denied his faith...
...And much worse still, their faith now appears as a cruel burden laid on them by a God who refuses to speak...
...A small incision made on the victim's forehead allowed blood to drain, thus intensifying the agony...
...Kichijiro is a cringing, lying, cowardly drunkard, a thoroughly untrustworthy character who sports the expression of a beaten dog, yet with a hint of cunning...
...Ferreira's apostasy is a historical fact...
...The more the peasants suffer for their faith, the more Rodrigues seems to recoil from the whole missionary enterprise...
...In a mere thirty years a community of 150,000 Christians was flourishing...
...There the pope is at great pains to stem a tide of proportionalist Catholic moral theology that appears to measure the consequences of an act before determining if it is evil...
...You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends...
...Endo was seared by the terrible homelessness of being a Christian in Japan, and most corn mentary on his work focuses on the awkward encounter of Christianity and Japanese culture...
...His entire family had been brought before the magistrates and given the customary chance to apostatize by treading on an image of Christ's face called a fltmie...
...If only he had died before the persecution began, Kichijiro whimpers, he would have gone to heaven as a good Christian...
...Father, have you never thought qf the difference in the soil, the difference in the water...
...The martyrdom he has read about in his native Portugal is a glorious thing, a triumphant ascension to paradise accompanied by the sound of angels blowing their trumpets...
...Why has God made him weak, then set him in such an awful time of persecution...
...Rodrigues is betrayed by Kichijiro for a few silver pieces, but then Kichijiro visits him in jail and confesses his weakness and apostasy...
...yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with all the pain of a sharp needle...
...It is precisely in this apparent silence, in this self-emptying, that salvation unfolds...
...For Endo, the only consolation for the continuing torment of human beings is the strange drama of a homeless God who suffers with us...
...Otherwise martyrdom makes no sense...
...The silence of God...
...For descriptive flyers or information contact: Secretary, Loyola House, PO Box 245, Guelph, ON N1H 6J9 Tel: (519)824-1250 [ext.266] Fax: (519)767-0994 Commonweal | | March 13, 1998 possible even to identify the strength and beauty of evil in the filthy and foul smelling Kichijiro...
...It is this God who refuses to close the wound...
...A deep moral ambiguity suffuses the story and opens a wound that endures long after the reader puts the book down...
...Here I want to examine Endo's theological search in his novel Silence and invite other Christian voices--including that of John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis splendor--into the novel's strange moral universe...
...Jesus makes clear in the Gospels that his followers must take up their cross...
...many commentators considered apostasy to be the "sin against the Holy Spirit" that in Matthew 12:32 Jesus says cannot be forgiven...
...Rodrigues imagines he hears the voice of Christ speaking from the flunie: "Trample...
...The novelist gently inflates Rodrigues's pride precisely to raise this question...
...But the martyrdom he witnesses in Japan is a miserable and squalid affair...
...It is this Jesus who haunts Father Sebastian Rodrigues, the main character of Silence...
...The early Christians regarded murder, adultery, and apostasy as the three most heinous crimes...
...he antithesis of Rodrigues is Kichijiro, the Japanese who serves as his guide...
...But when Cristovao Ferreira, leader of the mission in Japan, did so under torture, the blow to the remaining Christians was devastating...
...But he has a more personal motivation as well...
...Endo drops hints that Rodrigues is tempted to apostatize to save the peasants, precisely because he believes God will not save them...
...Ferreira appears, in the employ of the Japanese magistrates, and reveals the reason for his apostasy...
...In effect, Silence asks if there is only one kind of martyrdom...
...And while the voices of the peasants cry out in anguish, "'God remains with folded arms, silent...
...Certain acts, in other words, are evil "always and per se...quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances...
...Endo's work can be read as a profound exploration of the twisted logic of the Incarnation--the journey of God from heaven to be emptied into earthly flesh and the assumption of weakness by omnipotence...
...Rodrigues is a Portuguese Jesuit...
...At first, Christians were publicly executed, but the blood of such martyrs, to paraphrase Tertullian, proved to be the seed of the church's persistence...
...Thus Endo weaves together the spiritual anguish of his characters with an embattled and paradoxically orthodox theology...
...Against his will, he begins to struggle with the idea that faith is a mere escape from reality...
...Can a Christian let others suffer for his beliefs...
...He has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity...
...Equally intriguing is the problem of squaring Rodrigues's apostasy with John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis splendor...
...But Endo suggests that a deeper martyrdom may await Rodrigues--the death of his very self as a Christian and as a moral person...
...In condemning proportionalism, John Paul puts forth the traditional doctrine of "intrinsic evils...
...The Japanese magistrates believe that the key to choking off the Christian communities is to target the priests...
...This suggests that the standard concept of heroic virtue is radically effaced by the logic of God's kenosis, by God's self-emptying to take the form of a slave, as Paul puts it in Philippians...
...What is remarkable about the novel is the way in which, as Rodrigues and Kichijiro move through the countryside eluding capture, Endo begins to blur the sharp moral line which separates them...
...As Kichijiro, Rodrigues, and the reader look to God for some relief from the unrelenting suffering, Endo allows the Jesuit to articulate the theological problem which gives the novel its name...
...One thinks of precedents in Christian history...
...Presumably apostasy would be an intrinsically evil act...
...What Endo was really after, I think, was nothing less than a glimpse of a homeless God...
...For example, the martyr Perpetua refused to deny Christ, even though her infant son would thereby never know his mother...
...William T. Cavanaugh is assista~t professor of theology at the University of Sai~t Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota...
...Rodrigues goes to Japan to face probable martyrdom, in part to discover the truth about Ferreira, and in part to offer himself as atonement for the unspeakable affront of apostasy...
...And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of the last stammering words of Kichijiro on the morning of his departure: "Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering on us...
...worse, he is haunted by the dim awareness that the suffering of the peasants is increased because of his own presence...
...A t this point in the novel, the Christian reader is still in a recognizable moral universe...
...Three peasants hang in the pit moaning piteously...
...At its height, the Japanese Christian community numbered 300,000...
...How can God sit and do nothing, arms folded, while innocent and simple people not only die, but die in God's name...
...End o compels us to admire the Jesuit's willingness to face up to any torture for the sake of the gospel, and we have no doubt that be has the strength to die for Christ...
...Could Jesus himself have apostatized, that is, denied himself, as Rodrigues imagines he is told to do...
...It presumes that participants have made the Spiritual Exercises of St...
...Those who look for tidy endings should not read Silence...
...Can the peasants be made to suffer for Rodrigues's faith...
...He risks his life by going to Japan at a time when the small Japanese Christian minority is being fiercely persecuted...
...Suffering, sacrifice, and God's own silence lie at the heart of the novel...
...As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign con ntly its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears...
...he has Iost his faith in God to save...
...Unless Rodrigues tramples on the fumie, on the face of Christ that he has loved for so long, the peasants will die a slow- and terrible death...
...The torture, called the m~a-tsurushi, consisted of hanging the victim upside down in a pit...
...Rodrigues's growing doubts stand against the backdrop of the enduring faith of the peasants...
...However, Endo is misunderstood if this struggle is limited to a Japanese context...
...Why does God not speak in the face of so much human agony...
...This is an in-depth experience of prayer for those in a time of renewal or for those making decisions during a period of transition...
...Kichijiro was the only one to submit...
...Rodrigues's presence, much like that of Graham Greene's whisky priest, brings terrible suffering and death to the faithful who harbor him...
...He later watched his brothers and sisters being burned at the stake...
...Endo's personal struggle as a Christian in Japan was the setting for his investigation of the paradox central to the lives of all Christians: the paradox of a crucified God...
...As perhaps only a novel can, Silence probes the strangeness of the Incarnation and death of Christ, the mystery of a God who does not simply wipe away the world's suffering, but chooses to share in it...
...Shusaku Endo's Silence he difference in the soil, the difference in the water, are what haunt the life and writings of Shusaku Endo, the great Japanese novelist who died in 1996...
...Lean and spare, the prose of Silence captures the most harrowing anguish with a stark restraint...
...Thanks be to God...
...His Jesuit mentor, the great provincial Cristovao Ferreira, the man who imbued Rodrigues with a fiery passion to spread the gospel in the face of every danger, has apostatized under torture...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
