Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence is one of the great contemporary novels about religious faith, and one that seems more complex and profound – at the level of Dostoevsky – each time I reread it.   The novel tells the story of three Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan, and of the ways they are encouraged, through torture and other forms of violence, to apostasize – to renounce their faith by defacing an image of Christ prepared for the express purpose of inducing apostasy.  

I’ve taught the novel the past three years at Georgetown, each time in anticipation of Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, which has been in the pipeline for years.  Well, this year the movie is imminent: it is due to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.    The three Jesuits are played by Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, and Adam Driver.   From Taken and Spider-Man and Star Wars to Silence: here they are action heroes of a very different kind.  

This year – by coincidence – I taught the book during Georgetown’s Jesuit Heritage Week, whereby the university affirms its Jesuit identity and expresses it through a dozen events, ranging from lectures to evening prayer to a sportive Jesuit Trivia contest in the Bulldog Tavern.  There could be no better context for the novel, for it represents the Jesuit sensibility past and present: the sensibility of the missionaries in the novel, and the sensibility of Shusaku Endo – given an honorary degree by Georgetown in 1987 – who tells their story with maximum attention to its paradoxes: God’s seeming silence in response to human violence, and the anguish felt by the apostate, who is urged to humiliate Christ but who feels the act as a personal humiliation.  

As it happened, the aptest context for the novel this week came from a certain Jesuit in Rome.  Pope Francis, speaking on the story of King David in a morning homily at the Casa Santa Marta, explained that David’s early humiliation was a precondition of his leadership of the people of Israel.  His remark could be a gloss on Silence:

Humility … can only get into the heart via humiliation. There is no humility without humiliation, and if you are not able to put up with some humiliations in your life, you are not humble.

 The only way to humility is through humiliation. David’s destiny, which is holiness, comes through humiliation. The destiny of that holiness which God gives to his children, gives to the Church, comes through the humiliation of his Son, who allows himself to be insulted, who allows himself to be placed on the cross - unjustly … And this Son of God who humbles himself, this is the way of holiness. And David, through his behavior, prophesizes  this humiliation of Jesus.

“Humility cannot be achieved without humiliation.”  It’s “mathematical,” Francis says.   I suppose it is, right down to the root the two words share.  And yet the point strikes me as profoundly countercultural – and it opens a whole other area of insight into Shusaku Endo’s extraordinary novel.