Silence
Shusaku Endo
Words: James Emerson
For all of the vast importance attributed to God—He is who creates and sustains us, He is love, we should strive with all of our being to be at one with Him, etc., etc.—He dispenses precious little advice and encouragement. In moments of deep suffering or grief, when one turns to God for explanation or solace, there is no divine arm put on one’s shoulder, nor any detailed account given of how this pain fits into a grand plan of love and peace. What, then—if any—is God’s response to our pleas? This is the question with which Shusaku Endo concerns himself in his novel Silence.
Silence unfolds in seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is ruthlessly ferreting out the remnants of the native Christians and the clerics who minister to them. The novel follows a mission of Portuguese priests who travel to Japan to investigate a report that their old teacher has apostatized under torture. The young fathers cannot believe that a man who dedicated himself body, mind, and spirit to God’s priesthood, assuming all of the burdens and responsibilities of such a life, would recant what he held so closely to his heart and trample upon the fumie, an image of the Virgin and Child that Japanese officials used in their questioning of Christians.
What follows is a masterful psychological portrait of a man who is grasping onto his faith in God while so unsure of whether the ensuing effort expended, the sweat shed, the loneliness endured, and the blood—particularly that of others—spilt is worthwhile or not. Endo captures the searing pain that results from that first pang of doubt in what we used to hold as a conviction, from that dizzying void of what used to be certainty. The once enthusiastic Father Rodrigues stumbles through the Japanese countryside—exhausted in both body and spirit—cupping his ear to hear the God who once parted the clouds to speak and to hear His reassurances that, Yes, your trials are good and will be rewarded. Instead, each moment passes without so much as a whisper from the heavens until Rodrigues’s faith is punctured and deflated—for faith is not depleted incrementally, nor does one lose strength bit by bit, as long as suffering continues, but as soon as doubt takes hold it is given free rein in one’s soul, which becomes a battlefield—and no matter which side wins a battle, there will be causalities. Endo perfectly depicts this back-and-forth between gnawing uncertainty and fresh resolutions of faith: in one paragraph, Rodrigues will be sure of his mission and of God, and several later he will despair of it all. Those readers who have grappled with doubt will see themselves in Endo’s work.
Not that Silence is pure content without style. Endo creates a photograph in this passage:
“The white rays of the sun beat down dazzlingly on the open courtyard. Beneath its merciless rays there lay on the ground the black dye which was the blood from the body of the […] man.
“Just as before, the cicada kept on singing their song, dry and hoarse. There was not a breath of wind. Just as before, a fly kept buzzing around the priest’s face. In the world outside there was no change. A man had died; but there was no change.”
The stillness of a hot summer’s day, with its dust kicked up by feet and the hypnotic chanting of the cicadas, becomes palpable in the mind of the reader. Yet aesthetical flourishes are clearly subordinate to the complex ideas, feelings, and states of being with which this novel is concerned. The motif of silence, for example, soon loses any subtlety. But this is the sort of book Silence is: one pauses not because of beautifully-wrought phrases, but because of the profound truths one is reading.
Martin Scorsese has taken up the task of adapting Silence into a film. The intensely personal and psychological character of the novel will make this a difficult undertaking: the descriptions of Rodrigues’s interior life that give the novel so much of its power do not seem suited to the sound and sight of the cinema. Still, if any director can recreate the essence of Silence it is Scorsese, whose deeply-held Catholic faith infuses his work. Furthermore, the rumored cast of Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro, and Gael García Bernal can only bode well for the picture.
The knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal says, “To believe is to suffer. It is like loving someone in the dark who never answers.” Silence is most certainly a novel for the thoughtful believer—and if one truly looks at the world and within oneself, it is difficult not to be thoughtful. But it is not only for struggling theists. Silence starkly depicts the profound existential disorientation one feels after a loss of faith—whether in God, an idea, or a person. Does anyone wait for us in that darkness? And even should the silence be broken, what word will confront us in our pain?
Silence was published in 1969 by Monumenta Nipponica. This English translation by William Johnston was published in 1969 by the same.
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