Silence (now showing in our cinemas) is Martin Scorsese’s masterful cinematic rendering of Shusaku Endo’s great 1966 controversial Catholic novel bearing the same title. This is probably the first film that I enjoyed watching even though I had read the book.
I experienced a diametrically opposite effect, for example, when I recently watched The Fugitive (1947), John Ford’s film based on another excellent Catholic novel, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (more on this later). That film was a disaster as it miserably failed to grasp the depth and greatness of Greene’s opus. Scorsese, on the other hand, successfully communicated the profoundness of Endo’s work.
The Italian director and the Japanese writer, both Catholics, give us a work of art wherein one finds more questions than answers; and the few answers that are hinted at or given are generally troubling and puzzling.
Silence is about heroism and human fragility; about God’s silence and absence, as well as about God’s presence through those who believe in Him. It shows both martyrdom and apostasy in a good light. Silence is about suffering and redemption, nature and grace. The oeuvre confronts the ecclesial institution with the choices of one’s personal conscience.
The story centres on two Jesuit priests, Sebastião Rodriguez and Francisco Garrpe, who go on a mission to 17th-century Japan to find the Jesuit provincial who was their former master, Fr Cristóvão Ferreira. It was reported that he had apostatised during the persecution. The guide of the young Jesuits is a certain Kichijiro, a sake-soaked apostate, who is more like a St Peter figure than a Judas figure. Kichijiro, unlike Judas but like Peter, repented, though he apostatised and repented over and over again.
The novel/film is controversial as it presents a very unconventional Christ who tells Rodriguez that he can trample on his icon as a sign of apostasy. Christ tells the priest that he came into the world to suffer and to be trampled on. Endo gives us a kenotic or self-emptying and self-sacrificing Christ, not a triumphant one.
This unconventionality of Christ is probably what attracted Scorsese. In The Last Temptation of Christ he had presented another very unconventional Christ; a doubting Christ who is a reluctant messiah. As amply manifest in Endo’s The Life of Christ, the unconventional Christ presented in Silence is influenced by the Japanese preference for a warm-hearted mother instead of a stern father. According to a Japanese traditional saying, the four most dreadful things on earth are fires, earthquakes, thunderbolts and fathers!
Endo’s Christ is one who suffers with us and allows for our weaknesses. Similarly presented are other characters in his other novels whom one can describe as Christ figures. I particularly like Fr Otsu of Deep River. He is cast away by his confrères because of his doubts and unconventionality. Like Christ he carries a cross, though not a wooden one. He carries the corpses of poor Indians who die on the streets abandoned by all. Like Christ, Otsu suffers at the hands of those he loves and serves, but his sacrificial love – like Christ’s – is not in vain.
Rodriquez discovers that he is Christ’s word to those around him. The realisation is awesome
Rodriguez, like Otsu, is devastated by the suffering of others. Through his apostasy he bears grief and sorrows so others are freed from them. Like Otsu he is separated from the Church, but is he separated from Christ, asks the film/novel? He then lives with a Japanese wife showing no public signs of Christian living but hints are dropped that he perpetuates some Christian presence.
Two scenes are very telling. The first one is the confession scene, which strongly evokes the confession scene in Greene’s The Power and the Glory. In both cases the priests are not a paragon of conventionally good Christian living: one is an apostate, the other is a drunkard who fathers a child.
Rodriquez is now living in comfort on a government’s pension. Green’s whisky priest had managed to escape to a state where there was no persecution. Their peace is disturbed. Kichijiro, who had betrayed Rodriquez several times, asks for confession as Rodriquez is the last remaining priest in Japan. A half-caste tells the Mexican whisky priest that an American outlaw who is dying in a nearby state wants to confess.
Both priests know they could be betrayed. Both priests feel that they could not refuse confession and take the risk. Both give absolution.
The priest in Greene’s book was trapped and martyred. Rodriquez, following that absolution, finds an answer to the question that has constantly tormented him: Christ’s apparent passivity or, worse, impotence, in front of our suffering and unwillingness or inability to answer our prayers. Rodriquez discovers that Christ is not absent. He suffers with us and speaks through our actions. Rodriquez discovers that he is Christ’s word to those around him. The realisation is awesome.
Such scenes clearly manifest that there so much truth in the statement that once a priest always a priest!
The opening and the concluding scenes of the film give us a key to the interpretation of the film. The opening scenes show Christ’s presence through the strength and determination of those who lay down their lives for his love. The concluding scene shows Rodriquez in his coffin holding in his hand a small crucifix put their furtively by his wife, who probably risked her life doing so. That small crucifix was given to the priest by a peasant who was then martyred.
Martyrs and apostates are unified. Both loved Him the way they could.
The final shot is the crucified Christ – the alpha and omega of the film as well as the alpha and omega of all human history; the alpha and omega of those who love him though their strength or through weaknesses.
Endo is so right not only to depict the scrawny man on the cross as a person who lived for love and still more love, but also as the one whose sacrificial love always triumphs in the end.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt