Shusaku Endo's "Silence"

I was in the shower, and I knew I wanted to read Shusaku Endo's Silence. Just like that. Suddenly, after all this time. I've learned by now not to disobey these mysterious promptings, when they come, so I went out to purchase a copy shortly thereafter, but I was confronted as I left the house with two psychological obstacles to doing so. First was that I'd never wanted to read this novel before, despite having been vaguely aware of its existence and content since teenager-hood. The reason, I suppose, was that -- like all true sectarians -- my adolescent self shied away from reading any other sect's martyrology. I was only too happy to read about the socialist martyrs. The communist martyrs. The Unitarians and the heretics and the infidels burned at the stake, and so on. But Christian martyrs filled me with unease. I was far more comfortable seeing the Church as the persecutors rather than the victims.

This attitude dated back at least as far as a moment in childhood, when on the playground one of my classmates had told me, in deadly earnest, "I want to be tortured to death for my religion." (He was an evangelical, and in fairness to him the remark was prompted -- he and I had just been talking about how, if we absolutely had to go, which of the various ways of dying would be most preferable.) Lord knows where he picked this up. Adults overhearing this interchange might have been surprised by the lurid images evidently circling around this kid's head (especially if they haven't spent much time around kids or don't remember being one). Liberal academic theologians might have wrung their hands about the "denigration of the body" that this remark disclosed. That was not at all what bothered my childhood self about it, however. My first thought was: "Well, nobody would torture you to death." Me, maybe. But not you.

Christians, after all, were the majority, in my little world. If anyone was going to be doing the persecuting, it was mostly likely them. Didn't everyone know that the Christians had hunted witches and burned Michael Servetus at the stake? The victims, meanwhile, were everybody else, but especially the Jews and the Unitarians. We were the ones with martyrs! Before the age of twelve I could tell you about James Reeb and Servetus, and knew that at least one Unitarian minister had perished at the hands of the Gestapo.

At some point as a grown-up person I did progress beyond this intellectual stage. I came to know that, yes, the Servetus execution was a real thing, but so was the Vendée. And so were the events depicted in Silence. And so were all those Christian martyrs from whom we get, you know, pretty much this whole concept of martyrdom. I came to appreciate the fact that, in the grand scope of history, every nation, sect, and creed has been at various times both victim and persecutor-- that the problem is with people, not with any type of person.

But obscure mental hang-ups tend to outlast the discovery of such hard-won intellectual truisms. Silence, for some reason, still left a bad taste in my mouth. What had finally started to dislodge this feeling (enough, at least, to allow for my shower revelation) was a conversation with a friend. He is a fellow practitioner of liberal religion with a complicated relationship to Christianity somewhat like my own, and he highly recommended the book. "I just don't want to read something that's all like, 'Rah! Christian martyrs!'" I said. He assured me that it is nothing of the kind, and then described the plot. I saw from the story outline that he was right. It's not at all like what I had feared. It's kind of the exact opposite, but more on that later. I was intrigued.

But then, as I made my post-pluvial journey to the bookstore, I encountered mental obstacle number two. This was the fact that a Hollywood movie had recently been made out of the novel, directed by Scorsese (this was also the eventuality that had prompted my conversation with my friend about the book in the first place). On the one hand, this was a good thing. It meant that I actually had a solid chance of finding a copy on the shelves of the nearest book store -- as opposed that is to relying on the interminable multi-day wait of online ordering that would otherwise be necessary, during which time the spirit promptings might die away or move on to something else.

The bad news was that I knew that this would be a marketing opportunity that the book's current publishers -- who are otherwise confronted with the puzzling task of trying to move copies of a translated Japanese novel from half a century ago -- could not pass up. They almost certainly had replaced by now the former, pleasingly inscrutable pale cover of the book I had glimpsed in the Seminary Coop years ago with something far more gaudy and misleading. I had a dim presentiment of Liam Neeson's face beneath the words "Now a Major Motion Picture." Qui-Gon Jinn, I thought. How idiotic.

And sadly, I was right. That's exactly what's on the front cover. I almost didn't buy a copy, just for that reason. The spirits, who must always be obeyed, had a moment of doubt as they hovered over it, much like that of Padre Rodriguez in the novel. They twisted and squirmed. But eventually they told me to go ahead and buy it. "Take up and read! Take up and read!"

--

Once again, they were not wrong. Neither was my friend who steered me in this direction. This was a profoundly more interesting, morally complex, and ultimately ambiguous novel than anything I had expected. For those who have not yet read it, fair warning as to what lies ahead in the way of spoilers.  It's close to impossible to say anything meaningful about the book's themes, I find, without giving away the ending. I know, I know. I already let slip the twist in the inheritance plot of Felix Holt. What will I stoop to next?

The novel's two Portuguese Jesuit protagonists, Rodriguez and Garrpe, arrive in seventeenth century Japan seeking roughly the sort of heroic martyrdom I originally feared they might find. Endo plausibly depicts Buddhist Japan -- in the era after the formal expulsion of the Jesuits, the closure of the ports to Portuguese ships, and the proscription of Japanese Christianity -- as a pre-modern police state, with about as Orwellian a system of control as could be devised in the absence of electricity and mass communication. Officials descend on peasant villages without warning. The means they use to extirpate the remnants of Christianity they may find are house-to-house searches, an institution known as the fumie -- in which peasants are made to trod on the image of Christ and otherwise blaspheme in order to convince the government that they are not believers, and at last brutal state terror against anyone who fails these ideological tests.

To infiltrate this world and keep the light of faith and hope alive among the vestigial Japanese Christian population -- while also making contact with their former mentor Ferreira, a fellow Jesuit who is rumored to have apostatized -- is the mission of our two protagonists. They attempt a daring secret entry and live in hiding and restless flight in the countryside around Nagasaki for the first part of the book, until both are eventually captured.

The motives behind the government's vicious anti-Christian persecution are not entirely clear from the novel. Toward the book's close, the officials do engage in a somewhat tiresome interchange with the captured Rodriguez about truth and cultural relativism, but this sheds far more light on the preoccupations of Endo himself, as a twentieth century Japanese Christian, than it does on the historical roots of the violence. I take it from the introduction of our translator (William Johnston) that it was these debates that aroused the most passion, interest, and controversy in the country where the book was published, and especially among Japanese Christians. To an outside audience, however, the arguments are neither particularly interesting nor persuasive. The Jesuit Rodriguez, of course, believes that truth is universal -- if a religion is true for one time and place it will be true for all others. His Buddhist inquisitors, meanwhile, think that what's good for the goose might not be so good for the gander. What is truth, anyway? they ponder, Pilate-like. Maybe Catholicism works for Portugal, but they just don't want it where they are. And then Ferreira, the Apostate priest, reinforces the point. Japan is a "swamp," he says. Anything that is taught to the Japanese will be warped into their own belief system, bearing the outward forms and idiom of Christianity but fundamentally different at its core and concerned with quite another God and Christ. Better not to import a tree that cannot flourish in such soil.

One takes it from the translator's introduction that this attitude -- or at least, the intellectual doubt that informed it -- was Endo's own. Yet it doesn't really manage to carry conviction, at least not to me. I remain more persuaded by Rodriguez' insistence that he has seen the Japanese Christians face unimaginable torture and fear of death for the sake of the faith -- one can hardly say therefore that they, of all people, are not real Christians. He argues moreover that Christianity was once a flourishing and widely practiced religion in Japan, prior to the persecutions. It's not that it's failed to flourish, he says -- it's that it's been uprooted.

The officials, meanwhile, with their insistence that Christianity is a sort of ecologically unsound invasive species, remind one of their spiritual descendants today, in various authoritarian regimes, who maintain that human rights and democracy are undesirable Western imports. One is always tempted to ask why, if these concepts cannot take root in such places, the Chinese government, say, has to suppress all mention of them from online search engines. If they really will not be able to subsist in Chinese soil, what is the point of the government devoting so much energy to extirpating them?

Christianity is, like these other egalitarian ideas, an essentially revolutionary force wherever it hasn't hardened into a dominant ideology, and one senses that this is the true reason for the rulers' opposition. It is because the peasants of Japan are too interested in Christianity that they wish to pluck it up, not because they can never be interested enough. Rodriguez remarks early on how astonishingly willing the peasants are to embrace this new religion, at incredible risk to their lives and safety, simply because it recognizes their humanity. "The reason our religion has penetrated this territory [...] is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts." (Johnston trans. throughout). And later: "These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them."

One remains convinced to the end of the novel that, in spite of Rodriguez's doubts and waverings, the appeal of such a message to the powerless is universal. Just as the self-protection of rulers and officials is universal. People are remarkably similar in all times and places. One is reminded of that moving passage in Achebe's Things Fall Apart -- by no means a novel blind to the evils wrought by Western intrusion -- about what the arrival of Christianity signifies to the young Niwoye, who has witnessed human sacrifice and the exposure in the woods of infant twins. When he hears the teaching of the Christian fathers -- likewise Portuguese and probably Jesuits in his case as well -- it "seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul -- the question of the twins crying in the bush and of the Ikemefuna who was killed."

Of course, it is always far more comfortable to overturn someone else's social order than to question one's own. Back in Europe, the Church was far from the partisan of the serfs -- it was itself in many places the landowner exacting ruinous taxes from the poor. Meanwhile, as much as the ghastly early modern persecutions against Japanese Catholics provoke one's pity, horror, and indignation, one is aware that precisely the same story could have been told, with the role of the Church and its priests reversed, about the Inquisition's persecution of the Jews of Spain, or of the hunting of the Albigensians in rural France -- not too chronologically removed from the events of Silence. The same cross-examinations, the same terror, the same tests of ideological purity... one wonders what a different sort of role Rodriguez might have played, if he had stayed in Europe.

The missionaries were always at their moral best when they were being hounded out of someone else's country, always at their worst in their own. It was Graham Greene -- a Catholic in a Protestant country, and a writer to whom people seem irresistibly drawn to name in the same sentence as Shusaku Endo -- who reminded us of this fact. He famously urged us to be Protestants in a Catholic country, Catholics in a Protestant one, Communists in the West and capitalists in the Soviet bloc, etc. This was what he termed the "Virtue of Disloyalty."

Endo's novel -- and perhaps this is part of the reason for the de rigueur Greene comparisons it seems to inspire -- displays in every line this "Virtue of Disloyalty." Every sympathetic character in the book is disloyal at one time or another -- arriving ultimately in apostasy -- and the treacheries of Judas and the thrice-denying apostle Peter are recurring motifs. This is part of what makes the novel so interesting, and what informs its profound and unmistakable spirit of compassion. Endo's book breathes mercy for human beings -- all of them, as they actually exist, in their unheroic essence.

The pathetic and slightly Smeagol-like Kichijiro comes preeminently to mind. A peasant from a Japanese fishing village who apostatized from the faith in a previous life under threat of torture, Rodriguez and Garrpe encounter him in the port Macao and enlist his help as a guide to smuggle them through Japan. Aware from the beginning of the man's physical cowardice and tendency to deception, Rodriguez nevertheless places his life in Kichijiro's hands, reflecting that "Our Lord himself entrusted his destiny to untrustworthy people" -- Judas and Peter again coming to mind. When, in a moment of peril shortly thereafter, he finds himself wondering whether Kichijiro hasn't tipped off the authorities to their presence in order to collect the bounty on Christian priests. These fears are not confirmed, however, and Rodriguez quickly reproaches himself: "I bit my lip with shame. Our Lord had entrusted himself to anybody -- because he loved all men."

It turns out Rodriguez is not wrong, however, to doubt the steadfastness of his guide. Time and again Kichijiro either apostasizes and flees or commits worse treacheries. Whenever the ordeal of the fumie is undergone, he is the first one to trod on the holy image. And every time, he returns to beg forgiveness and absolution of the priest. (How he always manages to find Rodriguez, without fail, is where the literary willing suspension of disbelief comes in. One feels sometimes that this fisherman must be the only person in Japan, and one starts to roll one's eyes every time Rodriguez thinks aloud (which is often) something to the effect of: "I heard a faint voice that seemed vaguely familiar, although I could not place it." Who else is it gonna be?) In the culminating blow, Kichijiro sells Rodriguez out to the officials in exchange for his pieces of silver, and the priest is bound and imprisoned.

After this cycle of Kichijiro's betrayal and repentance is repeated enough times, the priest begins to take a certain ruthless pride in his ability to harden himself against the man's later apologies and  entreaties for compassion. (There's a bit of a Miller's Crossing vibe to all this -- John Turturro's character begging "Look in your hawt" over and over, only to go and sin again, comes to mind.) But he remains haunted as well by the thought that in so doing, he is failing the test of Christian charity.

Throughout the novel, Rodriguez continually returns to and grapples with Christ's words to Judas at the last supper, when he tells him in effect to just go ahead and get it over with (the version I'm most familiar with being the rendition in Jesus Christ Superstar: "Hurry, you fool, hurry and go,/ Save me your speeches, I don't want to know! GOOOOOO!") Rodriguez tells us he had entertained doubts about these lines as a seminary student, wondering how Christ could have enlisted Judas in the drama of his own betrayal and sacrifice, when he knew from the start the role that Judas would have to play, and the cost to his soul that would result. (Jesus Christ Superstar has some pretty good and succinct lines on this difficulty as well: Judas: "And you knew, a-hall the time -- Go-hod! I'll never, ever know/ Why you chose me for/Your crime! Your foul, bloody CRIIIIIIME")

This has always been a particularly troublesome knot in the skein of theodicy. Milton for one tried to justify God's willingness to allow the temptation and fall of man on the grounds that it merely proves God's goodness -- out of the apparent infinite evil that Satan tried to inflict on humankind, came the infinite goodness and mercy of Christ's sacrifice. This could not have happened if there had not first been a fall. Without sin, there could have been no redemption. The difficulty that this fails to resolve, however, is the damnation of Satan -- what goodness and mercy could there be in casting Lucifer in this role in a drama whose outcome God already knew, if it was bound to result in Lucifer's eternal banishment and wretchedness? Where is the fairness, where is the mercy, in that? Surely the love of God, if infinite, extends even to hell, even to Satan -- as Origen taught, before he was posthumously condemned as a heretic, and as the Yezedis are said to believe to this day (believers in an infinitely merciful cosmology, who have been subject for that very reason to centuries of persecution as supposed "Devil-worshippers.") None of which is even to mention the suffering of the damned portion of humanity, whom Milton presumably believed would exist even after Christ's sacrifice, unless he had secretly turned universalist. Anyway -- the problem of Judas that troubles Rodriguez is something similar.

This is not the last we will hear of it either. In the course of his long imprisonment, Rodriguez has a chance to test his dialectical skills on his captors over some of the more recondite differences between their sects, a la Darkness at Noon, and this same problem of evil of course turns up. Neither of the disputants makes a particularly compelling case either way, I fear -- on this or other matters. Rodriguez first tries an upper cut on his Buddhist interrogator in the form of the prime mover argument. "You Buddhists say the universe has always existed, but whatever exists must have had a beginning. Someone had to set it all in motion." That, anyway, is the gist. His Buddhist interpreter disappointingly fails to hit back with an Occam's Razor, as would be traditional at this stage of the contest. When they come to the problem of evil, Rodriguez makes only a tiresome free will defense. "God created everything for good," he says. "And for this good he bestowed on man the power of thought; but we men sometimes use this power of discrimination in the wrong way." And again it works surprisingly well on his opponent.

The difficulty with this argument, though -- even if Rodriguez' interlocutor doesn't spot it -- is the same that William Babcock draws from Augustine's discussion of original sin and moral agency -- namely, that even if God does not dictate human actions, he must have created human beings with a will and desire to do evil, as well as to do good -- since otherwise they could not have sinned. If he had not created them with this dual nature, then human beings could not have acted out of malice or ill-will when they disobeyed him in the Garden of Eden. They can only have gone astray through a kind of innocent mistake, in which case it was wrong and unjust to punish them (let alone to punish all of their descendants as well!). But if God did create human beings with a will to sin (even if it is counterbalanced by an equal will to do good, with which it is in a state of constant argument and tension), then God did bring evil into the world after all, or at least bears partial responsibility for it. So the problem of evil is not solved. In one of his poems, Stephen Crane vividly illustrates this point. He envisions the God of Eden plopping humanity down in the very face of temptation, and telling them: "[Y]ou must stifle your nostrils/And control your hands/ [...] And sit for sixty years/ But, -- leave be the apple." To which humanity replies:

Oh, most interesting God
What folly is this? 
Behold, thou hast moulded my desires
Even as thou hast moulded the apple.

Rodriguez's wrestling with the role Christ allowed -- or compelled -- Judas to play in his betrayal and sacrifice reveals that he is aware of this difficulty, even if he is not likely to give it an airing in front of his captors. Kichijiro even puts the problem to him directly. As he begs for the nth time for forgiveness, he tells the priest that he never wished to betray him or to apostasize -- that he simply lacks physical courage to withstand torture and threats and always will. "Do you think I trampled on [the holy image] willingly?" he cries. "My feet ached with the pain. God asks me to imitate the strong, even though he made me weak." Behold, thou has moulded my desires/ Even as thou hast moulded the apple. [...] How, then/ Can I conquer my life/ Which is thou? as Crane's poem continues.

Rodriguez knows that Christ came especially for the weak, the poor, and the outcast. This means, in traditional martyrology, that Christ suffers alongside the victims of persecution -- the Japanese peasants who heroically bear burning, beheading, drowning, and torture for the sake of the faith. Yet the problem that he confronts in the form of Kichijiro is: does God not also suffer with those who are too cowardly at last to bear the persecution? Is God not on the side of the apostate and the betrayer as well, in their pain? Would God say to Kichijiro: woe unto him, for he has had his reward? Would be be cast out as Judas was, to hang himself from a tree? This is hard to square with the Christ who dined with the tax collectors and Pharisees, the one who came not for the well, but for the sick, he says, because it is not the healthy who need a doctor. As Rodriguez observes at a peasant baptism early in the novel, "Christ did not die for the good and the beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt."

In the final pages of the novel, Rodriguez does manage to forgive Kichijiro -- and to do so in his heart as well as through his priestly office. He reflects on the fact that Christ sacrificed himself for the weak. But he has come to find it much more difficult than he once did to say who are the weak and who are not. Are they the victims of the persecution alone? Or are they also the persecutors, are they those too craven or morally blind to resist the persecution or who actively collaborated in it? Is Kichijiro not also the meek and the poor in spirit? "There are neither the strong nor the weak," Rodriguez concludes at last. "Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?" Kichijiro is not among those who have had their reward. He suffers in his physical cowardice, in the fact that God has placed demands on him that are impossible to bear for the weak vessel he has created.

But which, if any of us, has had their reward? Christ came for the miserable and the sinner. Is that the one who bears misery, or the sinner who inflicts it on his fellows? Endo's Christianity -- and my own, if I have one -- thus presses inevitably in the direction of universalism. Jesus must have loved all humanity, if he truly came for the wretched, because every one of us is wretched by some measure. "No one old enough to ride a trike is without a care in the world," writes Martin Amis in The Information. "Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit." Those who have gained the world have lost their souls. When the wealthy Miss Julie in Strindberg's play is told by a servant that she can have no hope for salvation, because it is written that the first shall be last on the day of judgment, she expresses her fear to another servant -- the man who has brought about her downfall -- that the woman's warning could be true. The man reassures her that she need not fear damnation; she will pass through the eye of the needle because -- "Now I know! -- You're no longer among the first! -- You're among -- the last!" (Robinson trans.)

If God so loved the world, he would forgive even Satan, even Judas. If Jesus came for the least among us, surely he would be a partisan of the damned, and of his own betrayers. This is the message of Endo's novel. It is indicative of the moral stupidity of Dante, by contrast, that he could think of nothing better to do with Judas than to stick him between the devil's jaws and torment him for eternity. It is a sign of Endo's maturity and depth of Christian charity that his Judas sits at the right hand of God. That line from Orwell's "Such, Such Were the Joys," when he writes that as a child he tried to love Jesus but could not bring himself to do it, that he could only hate him and love Judas, is a delicious blasphemy, but it is also a profoundly Christian utterance. Jesus too, in a choice between the sanctimonious of the world and the miserable sinners, chose the latter.

Of course, Rodriguez is helped along at last to this degree of universalism by the fact that he needs it in his own case too. By the end of the novel, he has likewise become a Judas figure. The means by which the Japanese authorities at last turn him apostate is the same they used to break the resistance of his former mentor Ferreira -- they persecute and torment the Japanese Christians, and promise only to stop when the father has himself given up the faith and trampled on Christ's image in the fumie.

This too -- this temptation to apostasy in the name of mercy -- is a recurring motif throughout the book. It is as if every one of the key events of the novel's conclusion has already occurred in miniature several times before it arrives -- Kichijiro's betrayal, penitence, and forgiveness, Rodriguez's apostasy and blasphemy for the sake of human beings. In the first peasant village he serves, the peasants ask him what they should do if they are presented with the image of Christ and told to step on it. It is not just their own safety that is at stake, after all. The entire village will be put to the question if they give the authorities any cause for suspicion. Rodriguez' answer emerges unequivocally: "Trample! Trample!" though he at once doubts it and regrets giving it. Later on, in what is perhaps the most moving passage in a consistently poignant novel, he sees his companion Garrpe being asked to apostasize, in exchange for the lives of three Christian peasants who will otherwise be drowned. Rodriguez watches as they are killed and Garrpe tries to save them. "He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men," he realizes with horror, "but instead of that the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him."

Ferreira tells him why he ultimately apostatized, and urges him to do the same. Rodriguez asks why he doesn't simply pray for God's mercy and intervention and leave the choice as to whether to save their own skins through apostasy to the Japanese Christians. He is informed that the peasants are not permitted to apostasize and escape. They are being used as tools to break the will of the fathers, whom the government is truly after. The authorities are at that very moment torturing women and men who have already apostatized themselves. Ferreira and Rodriguez are facing a choice between compassion and doctrine. And at last, Ferreira insists, it is the higher form of sacrifice to choose the former. It is the sacrifice of Church, vocation, and God to save the lives of human beings. This is "the most painful act of love that has ever been performed," he says. Even Jesus would have trampled on the fumie, Ferreira declares. "For love Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had."

The novel leaves room for ambivalence as to the rightness of Ferreira's reasoning and of the decision that he and Rodriguez both ultimately make. Its two epilogues, written in the form of a journal of a Dutch trader and a local Japanese official, make clear that even after the two priests have apostatized, the persecution continues. Their pleading in the cases of various Christians fall on deaf ears and, in spite of themselves, they are pulled ever deeper into complicity. "Behind his eyelids arose the picture of a slope down which he kept sliding endlessly" -- this said of Rodriguez -- "To resist, to refuse -- this was no longer possible." Were any lives saved by their apostasy? Or did they further empower the regime?

There is a song in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage that teases the notion of martyrdom and virtuous self-sacrifice. One cannot help but be reminded of it, when one reads Endo's description of the persecutions, and of the "silence of God" -- the terrible silence of the novel's title -- that follows it. "A man has died," thinks Rodriguez wildly, shortly after he witnesses the beheading of a peasant Christian. "Yet the outside world went on as if nothing had happened. Could anything be more crazy? [...] Why are you silent? Here this one-eyed man has died -- and for you. You ought to know.") It was this silence that ultimately broke Ferreira as well. It was listening to the groans of tortured Christian peasants and finding that God did nothing to assuage their pain. Rodriguez speaks earlier in the novel of "the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent." Brecht's song from Mother Courage reads, in part:

God's ten commandments we have kept
And acted as we should
It has not done us any good [...]
Our godliness has brought us to this pass.
A man is better off without. (Bentley trans.)

As a teenager I was always bothered by finding this kind of sniping at altruism in the writings of the great socialists. After all, didn't we socialists have altruism on our side? Wasn't our doctrine the ultimate in generosity? Why squander this obvious moral capital? Especially when Brecht himself, for all his teasing of morality here and elsewhere, displays a depth of moral feeling -- and even of Christian charity. In Mother Courage itself, the mute girl Kattrin is a heroine of Christian love if ever there was one -- I can remember now very little else of the text of the play in which she appears, apart from one scene of stirring and Christ-like self-sacrifice -- the one in which she ascends into a tree and beats a drum so as to attract the invading armies to her, and to spare the little town they are otherwise about to ravage.

Now, however, I can see in Brecht's words, as in Silence, that there is a kind of altruism that can inform doubt about the value of self-sacrifice as well as self-sacrifice. Behind the rage against God -- the rage against the penalties he exacts, and does not compensate, the tears he does not wipe away--disguised as humor in Brecht's song, presented directly in Endo's novel -- there is a sort of reverse godliness. It is anger at God for failing to be godly, it is Christian love turned against the perception of Christ's own failures of love. It is, to borrow that line from Friedrich Reck that he attributes to Dostoevsky, that "blasphemy that is closer to God than skepticism." (Rubens trans.) "[I]t's God speaking within us, this indignation. This rebellion," as a character says in John Updike's Roger's Version. "It's what makes atheists so religious, in a way[.]"

It is the humanistic attitude that suggests that suffering itself, whether the suffering of Christ or anyone else, is not glamorous or holy. ("The martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I describe to you was no such glorious thing," says Rodriguez. "What a miserable and painful business it was!") Suffering is justified, however, when it is undergone for the sake of compassion -- when its purpose is the alleviation of the suffering of others. It was for this, not to shame anyone or test their faith or subject them to similar persecutions that Christ died, in Endo's scheme. This is why, as Rodriguez contemplates trodding on the fumie, the image speaks to him: "Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross." And later: "Just as I told you to step on the plaque, so I told Judas to do what he was going to do." Christ was crucified so as to bring an end to the crucifixion of humankind. That is why his death could not have meant the damnation of Judas. This is why he forgave Peter, despite his three denials.

Jesus was a believer in Greene's "Virtue of Disloyalty." He is wherever the last may be found. He is an atheist among the Christians, a Cathar among the Catholics, a Christian among the Soviets or the early modern Buddhists. This, at least, is Endo's vision. It is, at last, the best in Christianity, as it is the best in humanism, the best in socialism, the best in skepticism. It is love, the anger of love, and the impossible quest for its perfection.