"It Is [Un]Finished": Endō, Kafka, and the Crucifixion of Meaning

 

"For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts...As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our iniquities from us." 

(Is 55:9; Ps 102:12)

I read Shūsaku Endō's Silence about twenty years ago, and it made an unsettling but lasting impression on me that to this day lingers like a specter in the shadowy crevices of my rock of faith. This was years before Martin Scorsese did his 2016 film adaptation (which I refused to watch) of the novel. Some left-of-center reviewers praised the film, traditionalists predictably condemned it, neo-conservative academics thoughtfully took a pass, while Fr. James Martin offered his trademark wily interpretation screened through the lens of heterodoxy. 

Endō was a Japanese Catholic (which seems like a misnomer of sorts,), who wrote Silence in 1966. His faith was one born in doubt, and his Catholicism a religion which was like that of an "an ill-fitting suit" at odds with his Japanese heritage, a faith and religion he always wanted to throw off, but never could. This theme of doubt (if one might call it that) weaves its way like a loose thread in the tapestry of Silence, which is a historical novel about the persecution of the Japanese Christians during the reign of the third Tokugawa and following the Shimabara Rebellion of the early to mid 17th century. It also centers around the life and faith of the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries there who are tortured both physically and psycho-spiritually, alongside their flock. 

The Japanese were savagely effective at inducing physical suffering in one way by hanging Christians upside down in a pit of excrement, slashing the forehead to vent the blood flow, and leaving them (sometimes for days or weeks) until they recanted their faith. But worse for the missionaries was the psychological torture of being bobbed the carrot of recantation in front of their face while their captors used the other Christians as a bargaining chip: Apostatize by simply stepping on the fumi-e (the image of Christ) and those whom you formed in the faith, these innocent people, will be freed. It would be an act of Christian charity to step, since one would save their flock. Or so the reasoning went in the dark night of temptation. And the young and fervent Jesuit protagonist, Sebastian Rodrigues, does just that, following in the footsteps of his predecessor Christovao Ferreira.

There is not only an existential, but a faint absurdist motif in the novel as well--extreme suffering in conviction can be born if the faith and its promises of eternal life are true. But what if it isn't? And what is "truth?" How can anyone sacrifice himself for for a false faith? the priest asks himself incredulously. In this dark night, the sophomoric religious fantasy of glorious martyrdom has given way to a far crueler and muted doubt--that the whole ordeal is simply absurd:

"This was a frightening fancy. . . .What an absurd drama become the lives of [the martyrs] Mokichi and Ichizo, bound to the stake and washed by the waves. And the missionaries who spent three years crossing the sea to arrive at this country – what an illusion was theirs. Myself, too, wandering here over the desolate mountains – what an absurd situation!"

Whereas Christianity may try to baptize itself in the broody waters of Existentialism where l'existence précède l'essence, Absurdism affords no such opportunity. Kafka--despite writing his entire life--never finished a novel, and even insisted his work be burned unread upon his death at age 40. The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) is pointless--and that is the point. Camus, who was indebted to and greatly influenced by Kafka's work, said that there were only two feasible choices in the face of the philosophical problem of a pointless existence: suicide or rebellion. The Absurd hero must create their own meaning in the face of ultimate meaninglessness.

As far as the East is from the West is the Christian mind from that of the Absurdist. For Christianity, fully imbibed with a reason for being and on which it pins its hopes. It depends on meaning and purpose in order to hold, which is why novels like Silence are so unsettling--they touch a hidden part of our otherwise orthodox selves that we have stuffed to the back corner of a closet: what if all this is a sham? What if it's not true? We sometimes compensate by attributing to the external Devil these seeds of doubt when in fact the more horrifying prospect is that they come somewhere deep inside of us, needing no power of suggestion from outside the self. That we see those we know and those we love defecting and apostatizing all around us today touches a nerve, sends a shiver down our spines--if them, why not me?  

Endō spent much of his life trying to bridge this divide between two seemingly incongruent worlds--Japanese culture and his Catholic faith--but at some point I imagine it may have felt like the futility inherent in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. And there is a kind of absurdism in the crucifixion when it is divorced from any meaning or purpose behind it. That is why the Resurrection is so crucial for Paul, for without it, everything else about Christianity is preached in vain (1 Cor 15:14). Without it, the center cannot hold.

In some ways, we are living through an almost Absurdist period in the Church where we are coming upon not a crisis of doctrine, but a crisis of meaning. For the priest, the missionary, the modern disciple, the orthodox believer it becomes--why am I laboring out here for souls when nothing I do seems to matter, when everything is undermined and obfuscated by the absurdism coming out of Rome? What is the point? We double down publicly with rally cries for martyrdom, and even in our prayer lives we sink deeper into the comforting silence of God, refusing to believe that our hope is in vain, that our faith is absurd. Of course that is how the world sees us, but we are not of the world. Right? Right?

For the three days of silence between the crucifixion and the resurrection, the disciples of Christ hoped and prayed that there's was not an absurd and misplaced faith. But did it have that guarantee? Or did they, too, struggle with what it all meant, what it all was for, even if it was only for a flash moment that was not acknowledged but lurked and circled like a fox in the shadowy recesses of their consciousness? 

For the Christian, our faith in Christ is as much a faith in the meaning of his death as it is the purpose of his life--that this death was not pointless, not futile, not suicidal--not absurd. And, by extension, that ours will not be either. We are hemmed in by doctrine and fortified by dogma, yes, but now we are living through a period in which the walls of this doctrinal certainty seem to be bowing out under the weight of the nonsensical utterings of the Pope, the throwing under the bus and hanging out to dry of the faithful (like Cardinal Zen), and the ecclesiastical apostates who justify their lack of faith and are not content to be alone in their damnation.

In the final pages of Silence, Ferreira is living comfortably in an magistrate's palace after his apostasy and is found by a priest, who "recalls his sadness." 

"In the course of their conversation, Ferreira had said not one word about the poor Japanese martyrs. Of course he had deliberately avoided this issue; he had tried to avoid any thought of people who were stronger than himself, people who had heroically endured torture and the pit. Ferreira was trying to increase, even by one, the number of weaklings like himself--to share with others his cowardice and loneliness."