Silence by Shusaku Endo

It is a testament to Endo’s devastating, yet spare prose that the most complex argument against Christianity is boiled down to a simple realization: the silence of God.

At the beginning of Silence, a Portuguese priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, travels to Japan at the height of Christian persecution in the 17th Century. He knows that Christians are being tortured and put to death by the local officials and samurai. He knows that his predecessor, the highly-respected missionary Ferreria, apostatized, supposedly renouncing his religious beliefs after undergoing the torture of the pit. Yet, Rodrigues is secure in his religious piety. As a colleague of his states prior to landing on Japanese soil, “Someone must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.” Unfortunately, this righteousness makes Rodrigues blind not only to the social realities of Japan but to the flaws in the purpose of his mission.

As the story unfolds, Rodrigues is put through the religious wringer, forced to question how a loving God could allow his poorest, most wretched citizens to suffer, and ultimately, whether or not this soul-saving quest is indeed fool’s errand. After all, as the despicable character Kichijiro teaches the priest, “all men are not saints and heroes.” Unable to see the gray areas of humanity, where most people of faith are still sinners, Rodrigues ultimately falters in his duty to Kichijiro (who plays the role of Judas in the novel) and the poor peasants who are mercilessly tortured by the samurai. Following Rodrigues example, the peasants refuse to renounce their faith by stepping on an image of Christ and the Virgin Mary. It is political stance that comes with dire consequences. In an important meeting later on in the novel, Rodrigues is told by an ex-believer that “For love Christ would have apostatized.” “Even if it meant giving up everything he had.” It is a grim moral dilemma that Rodrigues was never prepared to face by the relatively easy questioning of the seminary.

The genius of Endo’s writing is that he is never heavy handed, never over-reaching in his arguments. If anything, he is stunning in his ability to condense these complex arguments of God and religion into simple examples that drive nail after nail into the beliefs of organized Christianity. The writing is devastating in its accuracy and poetic in its flow. Even more interestingly, Endo had faith. He was not an atheist. While denouncing European Christianity (and its relation to Imperialism), Endo retained his belief in God. While some may accuse him of being cruel to Father Rodrigues, you can see the writer sympathized with his protagonist’s shortcomings. What Rodrigues discovers at the end (without spoiling it too much) is that his God may not be in Japanese hearts, but A God is. The bigger question Endo leaves unanswered, is whether or not Christians can live with that.