Fiona's Reviews > Silence

Endo addresses the question that so many ask - why does God stay silent in the face of human suffering? I was brought up in the church (of Scotland) and had a deep faith as a child but I started to question my faith in my late teens, eg the irrationality of believing in a supernatural being who watches and judges us throughout our lives; the irrationality of praying to or believing in a concept; that other world faiths have gods so there cannot be just one God, and to believe that there is and that s/he is the Christians' God is to dismiss the beliefs of millions worldwide. Despite losing my faith, I've maintained an interest in religious ideas and have retained a sense of spirituality - not a belief in anything but an emotional response perhaps. Or just a curiosity.

This is a deeply profound story in which we walk hand in hand with Rodrigues, a Portuguese priest who has asked to go to Japan to work, his hidden agenda being to search for his old mentor, Ferreira who, it is rumoured, has apostatized. Rarely has a book given me so much food for thought. Why was Christianity seen as such a threat to the Japanese (and to others in the course of history)? They slaughtered and tortured unknown thousands during this period. Why did Western Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, see themselves as so superior to those they converted? Why were they so patronising when Jesus had taught that all men are equal in the eyes of God?

Once imprisoned by the Japanese who want him to apostatize, Rodrigues starts to identify his journey with that of Christ's last few days. He sees that martyrdom can be perceived as sheer vanity, that it is an act performed for the self rather than for others, in the belief that the church will reward them with sainthood in due course. Rodrigues embarks on a spiritual journey from the blindness of faith over reason to the stubbornness of faith in the face of blinding reality. When he reaches the point where he must apostatize or die, I was with him every step of the tortured way towards his final decision.

This is an exhausting book but not one that I will easily forget. The inventiveness of Japanese methods of torture is stomach churning but has parallels with the Inquisition - which raises more questions? Why were men of God guilty of such despicable cruelty towards their fellow men? How did they reconcile this with their faith and the teachings of the Bible? Why did God remain silent then too?

This is probably the longest review I've ever written to date. Perhaps this book is best read by a book group so that all of these questions can be discussed properly. Meanwhile, I'll be thinking about this book and discussing it with anyone who will listen for a long time.