Silence is a good, perhaps even great, book, yet it remains difficult to recommend on account of its elusive yet immanent oppressiveness. It is a work that confronts face-to-face the invisibility of the promise of faith, trembling with the existential fear that the exchange of temporal pain and eternal peace is a calculus doomed to fruitlessness. It looks intently at the pained face of a blood-soaked Messiah, disfigured beyond human semblance, and then turns to face the Devil sitting on one’s shoulder whispering that He will not rise again. Silence weighs with bated breath and sanguine perspiration the dregs of human agony to tell, for better or worse, whether they shall overmatch the end of hope.

Ostensibly, the book revolves around a central question of God’s eponymous silence in the midst of grotesque, crushing suffering characteristic of man’s combined depths of depravity and heights of ingenuity. In actual fact, it may be even better understood as a story not of God’s silence, but of the Devil’s prolificity. It is not a cheap dismantling of the Tempter’s lies, either, but a sober and sorrowful acknowledgement of the thick tangle of reality in which the promise of faithlessness finds a venomous plausibility. It is, in that way, also a story about the existential potency of pain and its contribution to human weakness.

This story is envisaged in the fraught journey of a naïve Portuguese missionary, Rodrigues, smuggled into Japan during its historic period of bitter and vitriolic persecution against Christianity where he must confront the immensity of unjust torment as well as the rumor’s of his mentor’s apostasy. Endo’s plaintive drama is melancholy to its very bones, from the opening sea voyage’s endless mishaps — including the portentous illness of one of Rodrigues’ traveling companions and its ominous reminiscence of Cormac McCarthy’s salient line about bad luck — to his dismal Japan of black and lifeless soil, listless fog, suffocating poverty, and the ceaseless, vain indifference of an ocean which swallows the ashes of martyrs without the slightest sign of perturbation. Against that black canvas, Endo slowly snuffs out one patch of color, one glimmer of hope after another, seeming even to wonder on the page himself if any light will remain when the story is over. He looks daringly into the oceanic volume of despair, diving into the belly of the earth to see if those ashes of martyrdom are utterly lost after all.

The moral fulcrum of the book is rendered in the device of the historic Japanese usage of the fumie, an image of Christ or Mary that the Japanese authorities of the era used as the litmus test for faithful Christians. Desecration of the fumie meant religious apostasy and therefore civil absolution. Refusal meant torture and death.

In the end Rodrigues, motivated by pity for those suffering grievously on the pretense of his liberatory apostasy, on the promise that their torture will end, comes to agree with his former mentor that the accomplished relief of suffering takes precedence over the comparatively ostentatious and obstinate adherence to dogma. It is a pragmatic election of ends over means, a sensibly diplomatic handshake with evil. Rodrigues accepts the terms of torture, capitulating for the sake of releasing others and thereby tacitly conceding the lie that his former moral fortitude rather than the depravity of his opponent was the source of their pain. Here, in the suggestion that apostasy is his most Christlike option, Endo most challenges the reader to discern whose voice has been ringing in Rodrigues’ mind. Has God been silent, or has the Devil simply been noisy?

Perhaps the last remaining pinhole of light in Endo’s twilight scene is the true breaking of the silence. As Rodrigues fatefully presses his foot against the fumie, the author speaks morality into the scene with the allusive crowing of the cock. From thenceforward, it is Rodrigues’ conscience which testifies against him, the years-long agitation of his soul with which Endo defiantly holds out a hopeful, if forlorn, notion of an actual goodness, even if it can only be seen in the negative. But perhaps that is the most potent way that Endo can escape the pit of despair as he’s imagined it. It is precisely in the negative, in the horrible reality of suffering, that the reality of goodness becomes most necessary. If there is no final good, how could Rodrigues be oriented in any way to perceive that the events unfolding before him are in fact evil? Of its nature, evil cannot be ultimate truth.

So it is that the voice of God is, I think, depicted as truly still and small, a spirit inhabiting the unfolding of events, sanctifying and redeeming the excruciating pain of the martyrs who, nonetheless, wait under the throne of God crying out for vindication. The voice of God is not confined to the fallible imagination of the protagonist, speaking in tritely audible words of affirmation. In this sense, Rodrigues is a man whose religious imaginary fails to accommodate a more deeply embodied sense of Providence as he encounters it, and in that incapacity he finds himself rather widdling down his sense of the Divine to the size of his comprehension. This does not make Rodrigues — or for that matter Kichijiro, his verminous and unreliable companion and perpetual apostate — any less sympathetic. Though Rodrigues’ faith is in this regard immature and inadequate to his circumstance, the extremity of his struggle is more than adequate to even garner pity for Judas.

But, in his struggle to adequately perceive the voice of God lies one of the striking ironies of the story. Rodrigues’ fallen mentor Ferreira rationalizes his religious assimilation under duress in part through an assertion that the Japanese never had and never could truly conceptualize the Christian God. This assertion, however, reveals a lack of cultural self-awareness on Ferreira’s part, as if he assumes that the average Portuguese, even clergy like himself notwithstanding, actually does have an adequate conception of God.

This matter intersects with another theme present in the work: that of multiculturalism and Christianity, examined not-too-anachronistically through a perspective on the milieu of early modernity that rather resembles that of the twenty-first century in a number of useful and salient ways, not least in that the padres’ rationale is distinctly evocative of liberal Christianity’ palliative arrangement with modernity. Both accept that Christianity is fundamentally a cultural-historic expression rather than a truth that transcends culture, and therefore navigate the multiplicity of competing truth claims which becomes unignorably with their collision in the global paradigm by embracing a flimsier, more porous conception of truth. This for the priests as for liberal theology results in the locus of the faith shifting from its truth propositions to its applied ethics. These displaced fathers thus allegorize, or psychologize, this historic shift similarly engendered as the material barriers which once insulated communities of varied faiths disintegrated through modern innovations. For Endo’s priests, this looks like a supervaluing of the compassionate outcome over the propriety of fidelity and an acceptance of Buddhism and Christianity’s moral commonalities as adequately compensatory for their theological incompatibilities. 

But, as for the priests, so for the present-day liberal-theologian, this shift is finally self-defeating. The priority of ethical outcomes over metaphysical structure results in the dissolution of both. Without solidity in fundamental, exclusive claims such as the deity of Christ, the moral injunctions that flow therefrom are deprived of their telos. Without an end, they have no beginning. “We love because He first loved us.” The behavior cannot be sustained without its own rationale. Orthopraxy dies on the vine when the root of orthodoxy is torn up. Without a cause, the mission disintegrates. Endo, I think, understands this. Otherwise, the outcome of Rodrigues’ choice would be sufficient to soothe his conscience. Instead, he is haunted by the bargain he has made with the devil, accused by his awareness that his ethical sensibilities are left precariously vacuous as his life devolves into a hollow and flaccid tool of Inoue’s agenda — just as the surrender of propositional objectivity turns liberal Christianity into, so far from an equal, a puppet of secularism.

Again, it seems that Rodrigues’, and Endo’s, struggle is more with the devil than it is with God. Rodrigues believes that he is only trampling on one master and is unaware that in so doing he is bending the knee to another. In accepting the logic of an exclusively private sanctity of faith, he concedes dominion to the worldly powers persecuting him. So he may tell himself that the sanctuary of his own heart remains pure and undefiled in the eyes of God, but he cannot escape the indelible association of the internal and external worlds of faith: “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” The Devil gives Rodrigues what he promised, but in the cheap peace of surrender to the powers of the world with all its verbose self-soothing is the silence of God truly most painfully apparent.

Silence tells an awful story drenched in the darkness of Gethsemane. It is topical enough to be relevant to contemporary social issues and universal enough to touch the fundamental torment of the fact of consciousness. To be human is to know pain, and Endo understands that to be Christian is not to be exempt from pain or immune to it. The question of how the Christian finds the sanctity of Christ in the suffering, the paradox of consciousness finding meaning not in spite of pain but because of it, looms in Endo’s haunting portrait of human vitriol, cosmic indifference, and the tireless diabolic assault on hope.

However, in all its bleak world-weariness, I think that Endo’s creation ultimately depicts a God who is not as silent as He may seem. It would not be a worthwhile book — would, frankly, be an evil book — if it did not seem to have a sense of God as the one who dwells in thick darkness, whose stillness and quietude do not constitute apathy or passivity. Rodrigues in his lack of self-awareness commits the sin of which he hears the Japanese accused, of mistaking his conceptual image of God for the actual God, mistaking the moon and the finger that points to it. The voice in his mind becomes an idol, the God of Israel crudely and blasphemously rendered as a golden calf, blinding him to the speech of God as His movement in events.

But no sanctimony is appropriate in rendering a judgement on Endo’s pitiful priest, for indeed the faith which can apprehend the reward across the threshold of pain, injustice and death is as arduous as it is virtuous. And just as the faintest notion of hope, the last sliver of goodness nestled uncomfortably like a wooden splinter in the finale of Endo’s story may be enough to redeem the troubled path to glory.

You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel… — 1 Corinthians 15:36-37