Often
tests of human resilience are tests we put on ourselves. We ask ourselves: ‘Do
I have the energy to undertake this?’ ‘Do I have the ability to accomplish
this?’ ‘Can I endure the resistance I face?’ and even sometimes ‘Is this act
the right thing?’. However here is nothing more disheartening to our resilience
than futility. The sense that you are doing everything right and still you are
failing. That is the test that Father Sebastião
Rodrigues faces in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence and that it proves to be his breaking point speaks volumes
about the relationship between Catholicism and suffering.
Based
on the novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence follows two 17th-Centruy Jesuit
priests Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver). The two
receive word that their mentor, Father Cristóvão
Ferreira (Liam Neeson), the man who first took their confession, has committed
apostasy. He has performed Fumi-E, a
practice by which suspected Christians are made to trample on the image of
Christ. Reverend James Martin, who consulted on the film, wrote about the
significance of the act in the Jesuit magazine America.
“A Jesuit’s entire life is
centered on Jesus, whom he knows through the Gospels, through the sacraments,
through his ministry and through his prayer, especially through his experience
of the Spiritual Exercises, a series of extended meditations on the life of
Christ…Expecting the Jesuits simply to throw that relationship aside—to
apostatize—is wholly unrealistic.”
Indeed,
the notion seems unrealistic to Rodrigues and Garupe, who are convinced that
this news is merely a Japanese slander. To resolve this, they volunteer for a
mission to Japan, to seek out the ‘Hidden Christians’ driven underground. They
are to hide amongst them and provide spiritual guidance in secret and to seek
the truth of Father Ferreira. It is a journey which tests the resilience of both
Rodrigues’s faith and sheer will. He travels to a strange and foreign country,
with no knowledge of its culture or language, a country where he will be put to
death if he is discovered. He sees men tortured for the faith that he shares.
He sees people he believed faithful spit and stomp on the image of Christ. He
sees those that refuse given long and agonising deaths; crucified at sea,
drowned or beheaded.
Like many who witness such horrors Rodrigues
does begin to question his faith. At the beginning of the film we see his
relationship with Christ transcend the missional into personal. When he prays,
he sees the image of Christ before him; depicted by Scorsese using The Veil of
Saint Veronica by 16th Century artist El Greco. Yet in this foreign
country which has rejected Christ, Rodrigues finds God to be silent. God has
seemingly turned his back on those who suffer most for him. In spite the
horrors he witnesses and the apparent absence of God in the face of them,
Rodrigues’s faith remains resilient. When captured he vows to not abandon
Christ, remaining convinced that the doctrine of Christianity is immutable:
“…we
believe we brought you the truth, and the truth is universal…If a doctrine
weren’t as true in Japan as it is in Portugal, we couldn’t call it the truth.”
Rodrigues’s
conviction remains resilient not only in Christ but in the value of
Christianity. It is not only his faith but the true faith. As earnest as
Rodrigues’s intentions may be, he remains a Westerner who believes that his
religion is the only religion. I mention this lest anyone feel that Scorsese is
in any way portraying Rodrigues determination in an admirable light. Critics
have, understandably, read Silence as
a white saviour narrative. One in which we are asked to sympathise with the
virginal Western priest who suffers horribly in his quest to enlighten a savage
land. In this scene Scorsese exposes the arrogance of both Rodrigues and the
Catholic Church. As a Catholic himself the director proves himself a sharp
critic of its history.
It should come as no surprise that physical pain and threat
of death do not convince Rodrigues to apostatise. From its very inception
Catholicism has proved an inherently masochistic religion, founded in the name
of a Saviour who suffered an agonising death for the redemption of man. Catholic
saints Sabastian and Ignatius claimed to rejoice in suffering, believing it to
be trials from God. Many of them participated in the mortification of the flesh
through fasting and flagellation, a practise that was adopted by Lutherans and
other Christian sects. Self-flagellation continued to be practised right
through until the 1960s, allegedly by figures as recent as Pope John Paul II.
But to the Christian there is no form of bodily sacrifice greater than
martyrdom. To die for one’s belief is the ultimate demonstration of faith. In
Christianity, those killed for spreading the Gospel are venerated and elevated
to Sainthood.
During the time in which Silence
is set Japan found itself with no shortage of Christian Martyrs. Since the
arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549 the gospel of Christianity had spread slowly,
but strongly. The presence of Jesuit priests was tolerated, possibly because of
their ability to liaise between Japanese fuedel lords (known as daimyo) and Portuguese
traders. By the time Toyotomi Hideyoshi assumed power in 1585 there were
estimated to have been 130,000 converts in Japan including several daimyō.
It made Japan easily the largest Christian community outside of Europe.
Unfortunately, Hideyoshi viewed Christianity as a symbol of European colonisation
and outlawed its practise, beginning with the execution of twenty-six Christians
in 1597. These were the first martyrs in Japan and in 1862 Pope Pius IX
canonized the missionaries and converts, formally recognising them as Saints.
Throughout Silence Rodrigues romanticizes the
notion of martyring himself to an almost psychotic degree. He views his journey
into Japan as a mission from God and casts himself as its messianic figure.
Likening himself to Christ and other persecuted Christians. On their arrival
Garupe remarks on their decision to take the fallen Christian Kichijiro (Yōsuke
Kubozuka) as their guide. “We ‘ve trusted that man with our lives.” He says
with scepticism, to which Rodrigues replies; “Jesus trusted even worse.” When
leading mass under the cover of night he likens himself to the earliest
Christians, practising in catacombs under persecution from the Roman Empire.
While on the run he stumbles, sick and exhausted, onto a pool and sees the face
of Christ in his reflection. His messiah complex at its most blatant. So, when
he finally is captured Rodrigues shows no fear of death. In fact he outright dares
the Japanese to execute him so that his blood may be the seed of Christianity
in Japan.
He is not killed though because Inquisitor Inoue knows the
danger of a Christian Martyr. According to University of San Francisco
Professor Antoni Ucerler; “[The Japanese] realized that the Christians were
emboldened by this example of people dying for their faith…What would really
break the Christian community?’ they thought. ‘Well, if we could get not only
the Christians but also the Jesuits to renounce their own faith, then that
would really demoralize the Christians.” That became their approach.” So, Inoue
sets about getting Rodrigues to renounce, first by reasoning with him, bringing the highest figures of authority before
Rodrigues to patiently explain that Christianity is of no use to Japan and that
its continued existence presents a danger to Japanese society. In private he tries
to civilly explain the connection between Christianity and the Christian
nations which would try to destroy Japan. The, when the time for civility is
over Inoue saps at Rodrigues’s will.
Rodrigues is taken to
the beach where his fellow Jesuit Garupe is marched to sea with a flock of
apostatised Christians. Even though they have recanted they are taken out to
the water and drowned, and Rodrigues is forced to watch as Garupe dies,
desperately trying to save them. He sees people die, not for their faith but
for the priest that led them. In Garupe he loses the closest allay he has had
in this strange land and sees the consequences of refusing to apostatize. The
weight of it drives Rodrigues mad and so when he is at his lowest moment Inoue
takes him to see Ferreira.
Little is known of the real Cristóvão Ferreira, only that he was a Portuguese
Catholic Priest who travelled to Japan in around 1609. He ministered in the
country for over twenty years, under the watchful eye of the Tokugawa Shogunate
which inherited much of Hideyoshi’s suspicions about Christianity. In 1633
Ferreira was captured and
forced to endure five hours of Tsurushi
or ‘The Pit’. A practise in which Christians are suspended upside-down
in a five-foot deep hole, with an incision in their neck to allow the blood to
drain slowly. It results in a long and painful death and after five hours
Ferreira apostatised. He subsequently took a Japanese name and wife and wrote
several books on natural law before his death.
In Silence this fictional version of
Ferreira is broken, but not by the torment he endures. Rather it is the
realisation that the torment, the pain and labour was pointless. The Japanese who ‘converted’ never fully
understood the doctrine he preached. The language barrier caused them to
distort the image of the Christian god into one that suited their culture. When
Francis Xavier first landed in Japan, he used the term ‘Deus’, the Latin word
for God to refer to Jesus Christ. The Japanese mistook this for ‘Dainichi’,
their word for the Great Sun Buddha. While the Japanese believed Christianity
to be a form of Sun worship, similar to their own Xavier in turn believe
Dainichi to be a creator god analogous to Christ. While Xavier would discover
his error and aggressively preach Deus as the word of God the Japanese
distortion of Christianity had already begun. The depth of that distortion was
enough to convince this Ferreira that the Japanese converts were not true
Christians.
Silence is not subtle about Japan’s form of
Christianity only being a distortion. When Rodrigues and Garupe first arrive in
Japan they find the hidden Christians believing themselves guided by ‘Jiisima’,
an obvious mistranslation of ‘Jesus’. When they baptise a Japanese infant, the
parents believe that they will immediately enter paradise, not realising that
it is the Christian afterlife, rather than part of the physical realm. A
conversation between Rodrigues and his Interpreter (Asano Tadanobu) highlights
this cultural divide. The Japanese worship the Buddha, a thing that they
believe men can become. In the West they worship Christ, an aspect of God which
descended to become a man. The film comes down to the point that this cultural
divide is, for the most part, too great for East and West to cross. So, with
the thought of innocent people suffering and dying, not for God but for his own
stubbornness, Rodrigues apostatises.
You may then ask if his faith was resilient in the end. As
mentioned, for one who has dedicated their life to Christ, it would be
unthinkable to commit Fumi-E, to
trample. But Rodrigues only tramples when he finally hears God’s voice granting
him permission. The remainder of the film shows him living in captivity in
Japan, forced to take a Japanese wife, to apostatise regularly and write vows
of renunciation. He is said to never acknowledge the Christian God, by word of
symbol, even until his dying day. Yet when his body is cremated, we see
Rodrigues clutching a tiny wooden cross, a handmade gift from one of his
Japanese disciples.
The question then is why does Rodrigues remain faithful, even
when continuing his faith is a futile act? The Japanese can never truly be
converted and attempting to maintain even their parody of Christianity brings
swift punishment, as we see enacted on Kichijiro late in the film. This is
because Rodrigues’s faith is no longer for the Japanese. In contrast to his
egotistical defiance seen earlier his Christianity is something exclusively for
him to take guidance from. He is not baptising infants or offering confession
to sinners. He is not spreading a Western doctrine in a culture that has no
interest or understanding of it. His faith is a personal one and in that form
it can remain resilient to the end.
