Silence’s Paradox

Abstract

The following essay argues that Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, elucidates a corrective to pragmatist deliberative philosophy. First, it begins with the book’s protagonist Rodrigues in his eventual role evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering seventeenth century Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their form of life. Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story navigates the gap between Rodrigues’s visceral suffering and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied affliction. To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. The desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between the characters’ different dispositions towards keeping quiet. In sum, the essay contends that when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak.

1. Introduction

“No matter what I say you will not change your minds. And I also have no intention of altering my way of thinking” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 180). The protagonist Portuguese padre Rodrigues utters this line amidst his Japanese inquisitors in Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence. By this point in the book, Rodrigues is imprisoned and knows that his torture is immanent if he does not step upon a fumi-e symbol of Christianity. While Christianity had spread amidst colonial encounter and the missionary activities of Francis Xavier since 1549, from 1614 the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), “turned the situation violently against the Japanese Christians” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. iv). Ostensibly, his “Statement on the Expulsion of the Bateren” was written after the Shimabara Rebellion and represented worries that the “Christians seek to make Japan into ‘their own possession’” (Hall 1989, p. 367). Later shoguns continued to “intensify their efforts to eradicate Christianity among the people of their domains” (Hall 1989, p. 368). By 1639 the Portuguese had been expelled and by 1644, the Jesuits “all had been rounded up, tortured, and killed or forced to apostatize” (Hall 1989, pp. 369–70). The tactics developed over time by later Shoguns, but the chosen method was eventually to get as many Christians as possible to apostatize by visibly trampling on a bronze fumi-e. Despite the attempt to avoid making martyrs of the Christians, estimated thousands died (Hall 1989, p. 370). Endō sets his novel at the height of these events in 1643. Rodrigues travels to Japan to seek out his former mentor Christovāo Ferreira (Endō [1966] 2007, p. iv). An historical figure, Ferreira had been a lead missionary to Japan who apostatized after anazuri torture by being hanged upside down in a pit with a tiny incision behind his ears (Nagasawa 2015, p. 248). The book and subsequent film adaptations gravitate around the meaning of these events.

Silence is a painful book to read, and it is difficult to watch its film adaptations. Its narrative goes into great detail into the characters’ embodied anguish. At the same time, their inner feelings are countered by significant communication breakdowns. Rodrigues is not in a debate with equal interlocutors trying to understand each other. His comment above is instead, outlining the limits of talk-based solutions to intractable disagreement about how to respond to human suffering. Endō’s characters have the space and time to consult, but no amount of evidence or force of argumentation seems to matter. Endō presents the experience with the highest life and death stakes. And yet, in Rodrigues’s final words in the book he claims that despite everything he has been through, his life continues to speak. “Even now I am the last priest in this land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 298). There is something paradoxical about the novel’s depiction of how silence speaks. Its ambiguity about divine silence only exacerbates the paradox.

The following essay argues that Silence’s paradox provides a necessary corrective to pragmatist deliberative contexts where “beliefs are exposed to reasons and arguments of others” (Misak 2009, p. 34, cf.; Stanley 2022, p. 2). The paper begins with Rodrigues’s eventual role in evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their “form of life” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 89/§19). Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story gravitates around Rodrigues’s visceral experiences and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied “affliction [malheur]” (Weil [1966] 2009, p. 117). To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. Her desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between Rodrigues and Ferreira’s different dispositions, especially in the moment when he shouts at Ferreira to “keep quiet” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 265). Juxtaposing Endō’s novel with Wittgenstein and Weil in this way exposes a necessary propaedeutic to meliorist deliberation. In sum, when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak.

2. Silent Acknowledgement

The final chapter of Silence relays the diary of a clerk named Jonassen at the Dutch firm Dejima in Nagasaki (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 280). At other points in the novel, Endō presents his aim to narrate his story “according to the records” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 250). The clerk’s dated entries consider Japanese border customs enforcement practices that were important to his company’s economic trade interests. Two apostate padres are mentioned in passing, who were prized for their expertise in evaluating the religious significance of European artifacts (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 281). Traders from Macao brought with them all manner of goods and only the padres were able to tell whether they “belonged to the category of forbidden Christian objects” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 277). The clerk aims to gather information about them and the final chapter focuses on Rodrigues who now goes by the Japanese name San’emon (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 286). Endō then adds an appendix with another diary of a Japanese officer overseeing a Christian house that included San’emon (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 299). It provides a subtle clue about hidden Christian communities under persistent surveillance. The officer includes a perfunctory report of San’emon’s death, his estate’s value and his funerial and cremation expenses (Endō [1966] 2007, pp. 305–6). His life is summarized in a single paragraph which ends, “The same San’emon was sixty-four of age. Except this there is nothing unusual here” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 306). All of the drama depicted in the previous chapters is reduced to these few sparse strokes of the officer’s pen.

Other authors writing after events of the second world war had concluded their accounts of bureaucratic colonial encounters similarly. For instance, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the life of Okonkwo of Umuofia was reduced to a paragraph planned in a book by a colonial commissioner (Achebe [1958] 1994, pp. 208–9). Endō’s novel also echoes other Japanese artists who visualized bureaucratic indifference as the backdrop for their emphasis on suffering, such as Akira Kurosawa’s (1952) Ikiru. When a group of women arrive at the office of its main protagonist Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), the section chief of public affairs, they are given the run around to several other departments who eventually refer them back to their starting place in public affairs. “You call this democracy?” they shout as they are sent on their way (Kurosawa 1952, p. 9.49). After the second world war, democracy in American occupied Japan had left intact “the civilian bureaucracy” (Duss 1989, p. 43, cf.; Caprio and Sugita 2007, p. 7). Kurosawa captured the public opinion rising over the 1950s that increasingly indicated that, “the notion that party politicians or state bureaucrats work on behalf of the public interest has lost plausibility” (Duss 1989, p. 52). Silence’s ending might be similarly interpreted as the bureaucratic pointlessness of the final years of Rodrigues’s life after he abandoned his priestly vocation. Such was the way the first film adaptation of the book, Chinmoku that abruptly ended with the priest identifying forbidden artifacts, before breaking his vows by taking a Japanese wife in a violent encounter (Shinoda 1971). A more hopeful tone was added in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 portrayal of Rodrigues’s Buddhist cremation, which slowly zoomed in on a tiny crucifix hidden in his hands surreptitiously placed there by his wife (Scorsese 2016, p. 2.33.47). Such explicit Christian symbols are absent in the book’s ending.

Interpreters typically do not make much of Rodrigues’s bureaucratic actions (Deweese-Boyd 2017; Fujimura 2016; Nagasawa 2015). My contention is that Rodrigues’s ongoing work as a border enforcer of forbidden Christian objects provides Endō with the means to emphasize practices of silent acknowledgement. This aligns Endō with wider interest in literary silence, and the aim to “understand that words aren’t everything” (McLoughlin 2026, p. 3). Twentieth century barbarity had led other authors to conclude that “silence is an alternative” (Steiner 1967, p. 54, cf; McLoughlin 2026, p. 17). Philosophers have similarly taken up the challenge to evaluate silence’s importance. For instance, in Sami Pihlstrom’s pragmatist inquiry into the problem of suffering, he concludes that “perhaps silence, instead of theoretical reflection, is, then, the only acceptable form of acknowledgment” (Pihlström 2015, p. 99). At several points, he links silence to acknowledgement in a specific sense that he contrasts with recognition. The two terms can be confused in English, and they share a single German etymology in Anerkennung, which has a Hegelian heritage (Inwood 1992, p. 245). However, following Axel Honneth, Pihlstrom emphasizes recognition’s practical concern to understand or to “recognize someone as something” (Pihlström 2015, p. 78, cf.; Honneth 1996). Honneth develops recognition as a central motif in contemporary political life where it has been applied to “indigenous land claims or women’s carework, homosexual marriage or Muslim headscarves” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 1). However, when it comes to the problem of suffering, the unequal relationships between people and their experiences can make recognition difficult if not impossible in some situations. For Pihlstrom, in acknowledgement, “there is no need to ask for, search, or request recognition as anything specific” (Pihlström 2015, p. 98). It is possible to acknowledge someone’s suffering without apprehending it fully nor delimiting the responsibilities of everyone involved. Hence, silent acknowledgement becomes a reasonable response to suffering precisely because it focuses upon the full scope of events that exceed our capacity to recognize them.

The problem is that Pihlstrom pits silence against the pragmatist interest in ameliorating suffering. Hence, just after his conclusion concerning silent acknowledgement, Pihlstrom reiterates the potential for philosophical responses that aim to “help to create ethical and political spaces where evil can be resisted and fought against” (Pihlström 2015, p. 99). It is this concern that drives Pihlstrom to call for recognition between theists and atheists when considering how to respond to suffering horrendous evil (Pihlström 2015, p. 94). His own essay aims to place recognition at the center of that task. As he puts it, “recognition, then, could be regarded as a key to this entire problem” (Pihlström 2015, p. 91). In this Pihlstrom cites the pragmatist affirmation of deliberative practices where meaningful conversations can continue debate meliorist aims. While Pihlstrom does not explicitly cite this context, it is for similar reasons that Richard Rorty opposed conversation stopping practices such as religious appeals to authority. While religious reasons might be relevant to some political considerations, Rorty maintains “that citizens of a democracy should try to put off invoking conversation-stoppers as long as possible” (Rorty 2003, p. 148). The aim to thwart a conversation’s end, however, occludes silence’s potential necessity for conversations to begin after painful events.

Rorty shares John Rawls’s similar interest in drawing citizens into the deliberative pursuit of justice together. Rawls here stands as a proxy for deliberative, talk based approaches to political disagreement which appeals to all citizens’ shared interest in each other’s freedom. Rawls developed a thought experiment to consider such situations as an “original position” (Rawls [1971] 1999, p. 15). The image was nonetheless grounded in a deeply practical concern to consider how to “pursue one’s most cherished ends and commitments” (Freeman 2019). Rorty highlights that the backdrop for such a political community is the imminent threat of violence from “mindless thugs” and religious bigots (Rorty 2003, p. 146). As he points out, for many people today, suffering is an ongoing source of marginalization and social exclusion. For similar reasons, Rorty is also skeptical of people’s capacity “to agree on Rawls’ principles of justice” (Rorty 2003, p. 144). Hence, in the end, he can only hope for historical progress towards a utopic future “global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law” (Rorty 2005, p. 40). It would seem then that pragmatist interest in recognition can have little space for silent acknowledgement, if its aim is to stop conversations. They must rather be kept going if the pragmatist vision of deliberation is to be pursued.

A tension arises here between recognition and acknowledgement. The experience of suffering haunts the pragmatist vision in ways that make deliberative practices appear at times to be the privileged domain of those who have the strength to speak. What of those groups most in need of recognition on the margins of our societies, who nonetheless cannot speak? What of the suffering of those who have gone through horrendous evils that can only be acknowledged and defy comparison? At its worst, Rorty’s concern to keep conversations going distracts from the suffering in the here and now (Rorty 2003, p. 145). As Pihlstrom illustrates, philosophical debate about divine goodness in a world of suffering akin to Leibniz’s Theodicy (Leibniz [1710] 2007), can make God into a “calculating monster” (Pihlström 2015, p. 85). Similarly, pragmatist interest in deliberative political recognition can remake the promise of a utopic political state into the same. The specter of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan looms at this point (Hobbes [1651] 1996). Hobbes’s justification for the sovereign’s authority was its restraint on people’s ability to make life into a “nasty, brutish” affair (Hobbes [1651] 1996, p. 89/62). This irenic justification falls flat when faced with the actual experience of suffering in examples Pihlstrom cites, and which are depicted in Endō’s Silence.

Over the course of the last thirty years of his life with a Japanese name, San’emon’s actions can be understood as a form of silent acknowledgement. His actions include practices of silence that ensure Christian symbols do not enter into the Japanese context where suffering is their inevitable result. In so doing, he minimizes the chance that anyone else will suffer the torture he endured in a context where communicative understanding is extremely proscribed. When no one is listening in a context of total disregard for the suffering of others, such actions provide a means of evincing one’s meliorist comportment towards suffering as a persistent danger. San’emon’s silence echoes responses to suffering that do not try to explain it or recognize it fully. As commentators have noted, Silence, therefore does not fit the model of theodicy or anti-theodicy (Nagasawa 2015, p. 254). Its depiction of silent acknowledgement provides a model beyond either philosophical position. By its end, San’emon dwells in the silence knowing that his life continues to speak.

3. Practical Icons

The problem is that any attempt to explain suffering “engages in a theoretical speculation that might not only be considered insulting and even obscene by victims of evil but that may also be argued to be philosophically defective because of its failure to existentially engage human beings’ problems” (Pihlström 2015, p. 85). The challenge here is that the experience of suffering remains difficult to describe in a way that can be identified by people in their particular situations. The idea that an omniscient, benevolent deity might have “reasons to allow evil” (Pihlström 2015, p. 85), not only makes such a deity into a calculating monster. It demonstrates crass disregard for the suffering people face. This problem has been cited by those on both the theodicy and anti-theodicy sides of the philosophical debate (Pihlström 2015, p. 85). Pihlstrom therefore takes care to summarize those theodicies that consider the existential frame of suffering, such as in Marylin McCord Adams’s response to horrendous evils (Pihlström 2015, pp. 90–91). She agrees that strictly rationalist, instrumentalist responses deserve critique and as “morally obscene” (Adams 2013, p. 12). Nonetheless, she argues that “true to the logic of compensation, God would not choose to create a world in which humans suffer horrendous harms unless the overall divine plan built in strategies of compensation” (Adams 2013, p. 20, cf.; 1999). The question is whether Adams remains within the ambit of philosophical, deliberative responses that struggle to approach the consolation of a religious experience of faith or hope beyond any certain knowledge.

In response, Pihlstrom turns to Wittgenstein’s critique of theodicies to address how any form of language could be adequate to the experiences of suffering at the scale of the second world war. On the one hand, Wittgenstein was extremely critical of rationalist theodicies that aim to justify God’s omnipotent benevolence in the face of horrendous suffering and evil. On the other, he affirms alternative approaches where evil and suffering are “addressed in properly religious, symbolic, and possibly poetic language, such as the language we find in The Book of Job” (Pihlström 2015, pp. 87–88). Job is an ambiguous case, because it includes philosophical debate about Job’s suffering. Nonetheless, the debate is peppered with mythic language, and practical concern for Job’s anguish. For instance, Job includes a touching moment of silence when his friends sit with him for “seven days and seven nights, for they saw that his suffering was very great” (Bible 1991, p. 2.13). In such works there is space for empathetic experiences to convey silent acknowledgement before moving into their varying attempts at explanation. Even those ultimately fall silent again before the specter of a divine whirlwind (Bible 1991, pp. 38.1, 40.4). Pihlstrom summarizes Wittgenstein’s more broad aim where “the proper response is silence and wonder, perhaps faith and prayer—but equally possibly the loss of faith, depending decisively on the individual case” (Pihlström 2015, p. 88). Silent acknowledgement leaves open this space for people to process their pain.

Few have developed Wittgenstein’s ideas further with reference to this problem than D. Z. Phillips in The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. As Phillips points out, Wittgenstein was skeptical of abstract philosophical discourse “because metaphysical propositions could not be saying what they were presented as saying” (Phillips 2004, p. xvii). Phillips concentrates on the way theodicy arguments fail to face the suffering itself. It’s not that they make some deductive mistake in their logic. They are rather divorced from the inductive, evidential connection to the problem itself “The deception is in the thoughts that attract us and hold us captive. But when one sees through the arguments, they then strike us as having not given human suffering the attention it deserves” (Phillips 2004, p. 50). As Pihlstrom suggests, “we may imagine someone like Phillips arguing that to claim that God, after our deaths, ‘heals our meaning-making capacities,’ teaching us ‘how to make positive sense of our lives,’ can only sound like an incredible insult to anyone who really has to go through suffering of the magnitude of the Holocaust” (Pihlström 2015, p. 92, citing; Adams 2013). As other commentators have argued, Adams does not explain how it is that our historical experiences will be recognized in the compensatory eschatology she asks us to imagine (Williams 1996, p. 139, cf.; Phillips 2004, p. 271). The material embodied experiences of suffering thus continue to be elided in such accounts.

Phillips cites Wittgenstein’s various remarks on religious language to sketch an alternative descriptive role for philosophy to adopt. As he put it in Philosophical Investigations, “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (Phillips 1993b, p. 237, citing; Wittgenstein 1953, para. 24). As Wittgenstein made clear in his discussions of theological concepts at one point, “practice gives the words their sense” (Wittgenstein 1980a, p. 85e). Phillips suggests that this is the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s value for interpreting religious images and concepts. “We fail to give religious practice its due because we bring to it preconceptions concerning what words must mean” (Phillips 1993b, p. 238). This explains Wittgenstein’s critique of James Frazer’s comparative religious work The Golden Bough. Wittgenstein drew attention to Frazer’s inability to recognize how different religious languages operated in each context. “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes.” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 1e). In contrast, Wittgenstein aimed to understand their meaning in their own terms. That people follow certain rituals, does not mean that they inevitably “spring from wrong ideas about the physics of things” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 7e). On the one hand, Wittgenstein emphasized that words that “don’t express logical propositions… are nonsense” (McLoughlin 2026, p. 16). On the other, he called attention to alternative approaches to religious and artistic meaning more closely tied to their practical contexts. To understand such practices, Wittgenstein suggested that “we must plough over the whole of language” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 7e).

In other places, Wittgenstein remarked that to understand a person’s actions, we must include their “whole hurly-burly” (Wittgenstein 1980b, vol. 2, no. 620). As commentators have noted, this draws our attention to their “embodied, background responses and reactions” (Shotter 1996, p. 386, cf.; Greenleaf Brice 2013). For these reasons, Wittgenstein is cited as one of the philosophical antecedents of more recent developments in situated and embodied cognition (Gallagher 2009, pp. 45–47). Refocusing philosophy upon embodied practices explains Wittgenstein’s general approach to interpreting religious texts and images. Care must be taken when considering some of his own metaphors. For instance, when he applied the model of a “language game” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 31/§64), it may seem to suggest “a rule-governed procedure” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 59). However, his interest in the whole of language and the background hurly-burly, reiterates his focus upon embodied social practices. These are just “the kinds of things people pick up by participation without learning any rules but just by ‘know-how” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 59). One of the best ways to understand religious language then, is where such embodied social practices are dramatized carefully in literary or artistic works.

When Wittgenstein considered artwork, he cited the importance of comparison to the thing being depicted. The problem with religious images then is that the object is not possible to discern given the “context of application involved” (Phillips 1993c, p. 42). Phillips notes this point when discussing Michelangelo’s painting of God creating Adam (Phillips 1993c, p. 44, citing; Wittgenstein 1966, p. 63). “To say that God is in the picture, is not to say that it is a picture of God” (Phillips 1993c, p. 44). It is here that Phillips draws the distinction between knowledge and faith. We are finite and our finitude is what must be acknowledged for a way of seeing the painting as something other than a photograph. “To say God is in the picture is a profession of faith” (Phillips 1993c, p. 44). For Wittgenstein, the picture does not fail to apprehend because of the transcendence of God. Rather, he is clarifying “the kind of picture concerning God this picture is” (Phillips 1993c, p. 239). In this sense, as commentators have noted, Wittgenstein’s practical concern with the case of religious images is closer to an icon. A “religious icon is not the negation or suspension of this condition, as if its visibility directly led us to God, but the entry into an entirely different ‘logic’” (Rempza 2019, p. 317). This aligns Wittgenstein with other philosophical investigations of iconicity, such as in Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being, where the icon “provokes” vision to see beyond the image (Marion 1991, p. 17). Religious language for Wittgenstein was closer to riddles that cannot be fully understood without the answer that exceeds the terms of the riddle itself. Stephen Mulhall discusses this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought in relation to the riddle of the sphinx, “What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” only makes sense when understood as the stages of human life, which begins with crawling and ends with the support of a cane (Mulhall 2015, pp. 35–36). It is precisely this call to an alternative logic that is required to understand the images of suffering in Silence.

Early on in the book, Rodrigues reflects upon Piero della Francesca’s c. 1460 painting of The Resurrection of Christ (200 cm), which is held in the Town Hall in Sansepolcro, Italy (Murray and De Vecchi 1970, Plate LIX). Rodrigues sees this image while in seminary and it describes the triumphant forward facing direct image of the resurrected Christ (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 47). Endō is careful to note how the Christian scriptures themselves are “silent” on the matter of Jesus’s appearance (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 46). The result was diverse depictions over centuries that varied from early gentle shepherd motifs to eastern depictions of “the long nose, the curly hair, the black beard” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 47). Endō describes the moment when Rodrigues’s “tired, hollow face” is reflected in rainwater while evading his Japanese inquisitors in the mountains. (Endō [1966] 2007, pp. 115–16). It makes him think of Jesus’s face and its inspiration to artists who had never seen it.

Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film adaptation captures this scene of madness. A frail, heavily bearded Rodrigues played by Andrew Garfield gazes into his reflection (Scorsese 2016, p. 1.11.11; Endō [1966] 2007, pp. 115–16). As he does so, Scorsese transposes the play of the reflection’s ripples into a painting of Jesus’s face in El Greco’s c. 1580 St. Veronica with the Holy Shroud (Oil on canvas 84 × 91 cm), located in the Santa Cruz Museum in Toledo, Spain (Scholz-Hänsel 2004, p. 42). It is one of several that he painted on the theme (Prado 2026). In this painting, St. Veronica holds the shroud that she is said to have given to the suffering Jesus to comfort him on his way to Golgotha. This is not an encounter depicted in the Christian scriptures but is maintained in Roman Catholic liturgical tradition in the sixth station of the cross. El Greco does not paint Christ on the cross, but the direct image of the face imprinted on Veronica’s veil. The image is repeated throughout the film at the start as Rodrigues meditates before sleeping (Scorsese 2016, p. 12.45), after he is captured and imprisoned (Scorsese 2016, p. 1.25.12) and again in a flash before he steps on the fumi-e (Scorsese 2016, p. 2.18.16). This echoes the novel’s mention of moments when the image of Jesus flashes before Rodrigues’s mind “like a living, vivid image” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 253). In an interview, Scorsese said he included this particular painting of Jesus because it better represented his suffering than the painting of the resurrection referenced in Endō’s novel (Spadaro 2017, cf.; Endō [1966] 2007, p. 47). The movie thus aligns Endō’s aim to represent Jesus with a Japanese “responsiveness to one who ‘suffers with us’ and who ‘allows for our weakness” (Endō 1978, p. 1). However, the choice also provides an intimation of the book’s complicated use of images, which include the resurrection, mirrored reflections, and the fumi-e itself.

El Greco’s painting is an interesting choice because it renders iconographic aesthetic practices into a European sensibility. Early in his life in Crete, El Greco learned to paint orthodox icons, “a rigid form of painting with little or no perspective” (Griswold 1930, p. 15). Crete at that time belonged to the Republic of Venice (Scholz-Hänsel 2004, p. 7). His training in iconography is thought to have included “hybrid” melding of Byzantine and European aesthetic (Scholz-Hänsel 2004, p. 8). Scorsese’s choice unwittingly deepens the film’s engagement with the challenge of reflecting on the unknown appearance of Jesus. The story of Veronica itself also trades on the play of words “a vera icona or true image” (Prado 2026). Orthodox iconography intentionally aims to reflect the gap between painted images and the theological subject matter’s inherent irrepresentability. As a result, “the iconographer may limit himself to a few characteristic traits” (Ouspensky 2003, p. 47). The iconographer aims to disrupt the viewer’s gaze to inspire reflection upon what is inevitably absent. After Wittgenstein, the practical context for the religious image is this epistemic change that is represented in Rodrigues’s encounter with their limits. It matters not whether a Byzantine icon, the cubism of Picasso, or the minimalism of Rothko. “The icon is not what points infinitely beyond itself. Whatever points for me is still trapped in the realm of the limits of my own understanding… the only way to have an icon is to completely abandon this system of reference” (Rempza 2019, pp. 316–17). Iconicity then requires a change in epistemic disposition. Commentators on Scorsese’s Silence have noted the film’s identification with the typical Jesuit training encouraged by its founder Ignatius Loyola (Deweese-Boyd 2017, p. 2, cf.; Ignatius 2000). However, the novel and later films progress to show Rodrigues slowly learning the limits of such training and the call to reflect on an image of an invisible deity that is not described in any written works on his life or teaching. Rodrigues is eventually forced to accept this silence inherent in all images of Jesus, not least of which in the moment he steps on the fumi-e.

4. Embodied Affliction

At the point at which Rodrigues has been physically broken, Rodrigues prays, “Lord, since long, long ago, innumerable times I have thought of your face… And now with this foot I am going to trample on it” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 270). It is in this moment, that he hears a voice permitting him to trample. The bronze fumi-e itself arises in this silence. “And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: ‘Trample!’ ‘Trample!’” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 271). The call to trample occurs several times throughout the book. The first is Rodrigues’ initial response to the description of the fumi-e torture practices (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 95). Another similar moment is when his fellow missionary Garpe is being tortured. Rodrigues says in his heart “Apostatize! Apostatize!” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 216). But he does not say this, and he looks away from his suffering death. His experience of the fumi-e is also later repeated when his torturer Inoue recalls Rodrigues’s report of the event, and wonders whether this was “self-deception” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 292). The precise meaning of the event can also be nuanced when considering the translation of the moment from Japanese into English. “In the English translation the verb is in the imperative mode, whereas in the original Japanese text the verb is in the permissive mode” (Endo 1999, p. 145). Scorsese’s film softens the language with the words, “Come ahead now. It’s alright. Step on me” (Scorsese 2016, p. 2.17.18). It is also the only point in the film when its ambient soundtrack goes silent to make clear that this is the film’s climax (Deweese-Boyd 2017, p. 1).

The scene where Rodrigues eventually tramples is presented as an intimate moment of suffering in Silence. It is never explicitly stated that God speaks. At times in the book, it remains ambivalent what or who is speaking to Rodrigues to trample. As noted above, it is the fumi-e itself “the Christ in bronze” that speaks (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 271). At other times it is not clearly narrated, but simply a first person response to Rodrigues. “‘Lord, I resented your silence.’ ‘I was not silent. I suffered beside you’” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 297, cf.; Scorsese 2016, p. 2.27.16). In many ways, this ambivalence rehearses the broader difficulty of hearing or seeing anything in the experience of suffering. It also captures the intimate interiority of pain. This intimacy has the effect of avoiding attempts to compare different kinds of suffering across different historical contexts. By emphasizing people’s embodied suffering in a seventeenth century prison camp, Silence echoes the millions who suffered in twentieth century camps, the countless millions who died on the Eastern front (Snyder 2010, pp. 5–8), and the Japanese experience of two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Endō reduces Rodrigues’s suffering to intimate moments of anguish. This embodied focus can potentially assuage some of the challenges of comparing different cultural and linguistic accounts of twentieth-century horrors. It can be considered akin to Simone Weil’s notion of “affliction” which she describes in her Factory Journal on her 1934 experiences in Paris (Weil 1987). Her use of the French malheur, has no easy English equivalent, but translators typically cite a “sense of inevitability and doom” (Weil [1966] 2009, p. 117). It was a concept which became more prominent in her later works (McFarland and Van Ness 1987, p. 154).

Weil’s notes on suffering affliction included three senses, given “embodied pain combined with psychological agony and social degradation—and to which she would later add spiritual distress” (Rozelle-Stone and Davis 2021). Her journals are visceral at times, detailed and they indicate the cruelties of working in brutal factory conditions. As she put it at one point, “the main fact isn’t the suffering, but the humiliation” (Weil 1987, p. 225). This inherently social aspect encompassed both her own pain, but also the empathy she felt as “the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul” (Weil [1966] 2009, p. 66). In Waiting for God, she would argue that suffering does not meet the criteria for affliction “unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential” (Weil [1966] 2009, p. 119). At the same time, affliction is not relative to different social situations or historical locations. The experience of affliction is intimately connected to the cry of pain itself. Weil portrays this same insight in an essay written in the last year of her life on “Human Personality” (Weil 2005, p. 69). “Whenever a man cries inwardly: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible… it remains from earliest infancy perfectly intact and totally innocent” (Weil 2005, pp. 93–94). Out of this infallible experience of pain (Weil [1956] 2004, p. 290), Weil suggested an encounter with divine silence (Weil [1947] 2004, p. 112). “It is when from the innermost depths of our being we need a sound which does mean something—when we cry out for an answer and it is not given us—it is then that we touch the silence of God” (Weil [1947] 2004, p. 113). Only in the face of such affliction can Weil’s desire for a necessary non-existent God arise.

Weil leans into Kant’s critique of the attribution of existence to God to make this point. For Kant, “being is not a real predicate” (Kant [1781/7] 1998, p. A599/B627). Kant explains with reference to 100 thalers or dollars in money. “‘A hundred actual dollars do not contain the least bit more than a hundred possible ones” (Kant [1781/7] 1998, p. A599/B627). In her notebooks, Weil accepts Kant’s premise but presses its ontological implications further. Considering 100 dollars, “the same applies to God. We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything, except that he does not exist, for we have not reached the point where God exists” (Weil [1956] 2004, p. 151). As Rowan Williams puts it in his summary of Weil’s thought, “we cannot affirm that this God exists over against us, an agent within the system of agencies, a subject with whom I can converse, a particular determination of my own existence in the world” (Williams 1993, p. 55). In Weil’s own pithy summary at one point in Gravity and Grace, “God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem?” (Weil [1947] 2004, p. 114). What she aims to hold together here is a notion of God that is not touched by ontological questions of existence in a world of suffering. The very question of God’s existence is to misconstrue a relation grounded in loving desire to be free from pain. “This non-existent object of love is not a fiction, however, for our fictions cannot be any more worthy of love than we are ourselves, and we are not worthy of it” (Weil [1947] 2004, p. 110). Weil may seem close to other twentieth century proposals for a post-ontological God, although she is rarely cited in prominent examples (Caputo et al. 2007; Rorty et al. 2005; Vattimo 2002). I will return to these considerations in the conclusions below. What should not be missed is the experiential manner in which she relies on embodiment to make her point.

Critics have questioned the “damagingly abstract” nature of Weil’s Platonic essentialism (Williams 1993, p. 63). This can be seen in ambiguities in her interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory (Plato 1935, Book VII, pp. 514a–520a). For Weil, “Plato is an authentic mystic, and indeed the father of Western mysticism” (Weil [1968] 2009, p. 92). Her interpretation of Plato also carried a Kantian inflection. The point of the cave allegory for Weil, was to demonstrate that ideals such as “truth, beauty, God—are not to be thought of as objects in this world; they are separate, lying outside the cave where all human living occurs” (Plant 2009, p. 203). This tension between our embodied life and the desire for God runs throughout Weil’s work. Hence, as Phillips notes, she also placed embodied action at the center of her argument. As she put it in her Lectures on Philosophy, “everything that we see suggests some kind of movement, however imperceptible” (Weil 1978, p. 31). As commentators have noted she is comparable to Wittgenstein in this regard (Phillips 1993a, pp. 78–79). She can therefore be cited as another progenitor of situated and embodied cognition. In sum, it is possible to emphasize this embodied aspect of Weil’s account of suffering, and her call “to return to the cave, and act there” (Weil 1978, p. 221). Her aim was neither theist nor atheist. Not bound by earthly gravity but nonetheless, desire tethers us to something else. Affliction apprehends the full scope of our pain, by contrasting it to a divine alternative.

Some commentators on Silence, note that Endō doesn’t rely on a mystery beyond suffering to console Rodrigues (Nagasawa 2015, p. 255). This would be consistent with Weil’s view, that in this actual life in the cave, “the knowledge of this presence of God does not afford consolation; it takes nothing from the fearful bitterness of affliction; nor does it heal the mutilation of the soul” (Weil [1966] 2009, p. 89). This cuts against any quick conclusion that somehow, the experiential problem of suffering cannot live with the silence, or that the only resolution requires that God somehow speak or explain in some way (Nagasawa 2015, p. 256, cf.; Noguchi Reese 2023). However, this conclusion can be tempered by contrasting Rodrigues with Ferreira, which is detailed in their deliberations once they eventually meet. Endō is clear that Ferreira shared the suffering Rodrigues faced and tries to help him through it. However, there are also moments when Ferreira goes beyond compassionate concern. At one point, he speaks to Rodrigues in a manner that continues to claim that the Japanese cannot know God. He claims that Japan “is a swamp” in which Christianity cannot grow (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 237). His hubris encompasses the capacity of all Japanese people to believe what he himself knows. As he argues at one point, “and supposing the God whom the Japanese believed in was not the God of Christian teaching…’ (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 237). Ferreira goes on to compare Deus to the “‘Dainichi’ (The Great Sun)” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 238), to justify his superior knowledge of the linguistic context. For Ferreira the whole context of suffering is structured by the concept of God, as if there was a simple mistranslation at stake. “The Japanese to this day have never had the concept of God; and they never will” he protests (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 241). It is not only that he stands above all previous missionaries who’ve misunderstood. He also claims to speak on behalf of a God that he has limited to concepts and categories he maintains as errors over against his truth.

In his early encounter with Rodrigues after they are introduced in Nagasaki, Ferreira “kept prattling to justify his existence in his own eyes: ‘I am useful to this country!’” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 231). His proof is his translation of a book on astronomy and petition to “the Dutch commander to be kind enough to lend us lenses and telescopes. So I am not useless in this country” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 231). The interpreter between them is keen to commend this aspect of Ferreira’s work, and goes further to make clear that Ferreira is also writing a refutation of the errors of Christianity in a book by that title “Gengiroku” [1644] (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 235, cf.; Nagasawa 2015, p. 254). Silence does not go into any detail on the book or Ferreira’s pragmatist interests. However, his actions embody the danger of a pragmatic interest in being of use that has lost sight of the scope of suffering around him. Ferreira’s patronizing concern for Rodrigues seems to be to get him to apostatize to end the suffering. As the interpreter later suggests to him, what does it matter, “it is only a formality” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 271). But Ferreira goes further to justify his own new “self-confidence” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 241). In this, he continues in the missionary zeal for his new life no matter its consequences for Rodrigues or Japanese people. In their later encounter just before Rodrigues eventually tramples the fumi-e, he screams out at Ferreira “keep quiet!” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 265, cf.; Scorsese 2016, p. 2.14.10). This is a different statement to what he evinced to Ferreira in their previous encounter, “I don’t want to listen to your nonsensical talk” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 240). Here they were at an impasse. By the end, Rodrigues evinces something stronger, which is to say that he has identified something wrong not just in what Ferreira says, but that he continues to speak at all. The 1971 film adaptation Chinmoku, uses the more visceral “hold your tongue!” (Shinoda 1971). In this film, Ferreira does all the talking in the scene where Rodrigues eventually tramples, thus fully displacing any ambiguity about divine speech. In either case, by the end, Rodrigues comes to accept that practices of keeping quiet are crucial indications of one’s actual comportment in the face of such suffering.

5. And Yet…

One of the few things Rodrigues shouts as he is being paraded through Nagasaki to the jeers of the crowd, is “and yet…” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 251). It is a laconic echo of his translator’s mockery of the scene. “And to think that you came to this country for them; and yet not a single one feels that he needs you. You’re a useless fellow—useless” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 251). Endō’s ellipsis holds open the possibility that the translator has not fully understood the multiple potential perspectives of the onlookers of events. It is not just hope that Rodrigues evinces, but the possibility of a meaning beyond what the translator can imagine. Rodrigues recounts Jesus’s similar experience of the multitudes beyond Pilate’s mansion at this point (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 251, cf.; Coogan et al. 2007, John 18.38–19.16). Earlier on in the novel, Jesus’s brief discussion with Pilate is also noted, which ends with the question “What is truth?” (Endō 1978, p. 135; Coogan et al. 2007, p. 18.38). Jesus is silent in response, before Pilate heads out to the crowd to suggest his innocence. Endō reiterates Jesus’s silence in his encounter with Herod Antipas, where “people put questions without any interest in the answer” (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 226, cf.; 1978, p. 136; Coogan et al. 2007, Luke 23.8). Jesus’s complete silence here draws attention to the seeming pointlessness of speech in situations of powerlessness. Nonetheless, the embodied nature of Rodrigues’s eventual practices of silence points to alternative conclusions.

By Josephus’s account, Pilate was a ruthless procurator with shrewd experience in Jewish affairs (Josephus 1987, pp. 479–82/18.3). He would likely have known enough to be suspicious of calls to prosecute capital punishment “early in the morning” (Coogan et al. 2007, John 18.28). Setting aside the transcendent religious frame of Jesus’s actions, the narrative also includes the immanent, more banal context of a calculating political operator who knew Jesus did not deserve death. Nonetheless he did not risk his authority to stop Jesus’s crucifixion. Along these lines it is also possible to locate Rodrigues’s belief in a possibility worth shouting “and yet.” It seems pointless, but it fits the model of meliorist aims outlined in William James’s Will to Believe. For James, religious beliefs could be justified according to their ability to ameliorate suffering, after all other evidence runs out (Gale 2009, p. 16). James outlines a thought experiment where train robbers encounter a group of passive passengers. He compares this to a train full of people with courageous belief in opposition to the highwaymen. The passengers’ boldness, he concludes, would make such violence much less likely once it was widely known robbers would be rigorously resisted (James 1897, pp. 24–25). A belief’s justification is directly related to its aim for an outcome that reduces suffering.

Silence’s paradox in the end is that it speaks precisely in a vivid narrative where the hurly-burly of Rodrigues’s embodied social practices become visible. Its portrayal of his pain operates as a rubric for adjudicating the views of its various characters. In this light, Ferreira is “blackhearted” precisely because of his lack of silence (Endō [1966] 2007, p. 286), as logical propositions pepper his encounters with Rodrigues. And yet, the novel presents Rodrigues as holding a different disposition, that I have argued is closer to silent acknowledgement. At one point, Rodrigues’s “only solace and support was in the thought of that other man who had also tasted fear and trembling” (Endō [1966] 2007, pp. 252–53). Endō here echoes the work of Soren Kierkegaard, whose book by that title explored another story of Abraham on Mount Moriah found in the Hebrew Bible (Coogan et al. 2007, Genesis 22). Fear and Trembling is pseudonymously authored by Johannes de Silentio, where Abraham is considered as a kind of “knight of faith” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 46). This knight is resigned to “infinitely renounce the love” for the person who rejects him (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 46). However, Kierkegaard notes a second movement to have faith “that for God all things are possible” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 46). In the case of Abraham’s actions to sacrifice his son Isaac, Kierkegaard argues a similar faith must be at work. Abraham does not sacrifice himself for the universal law to save his son Isaac. Kierkegaard makes clear that it is not an ethical relation that is in view in the story. Rather, he argues that Abraham does not speak to Sarah, to Eliezer or Isaac in the story because he is faced with a paradox (Kierkegaard 1983, pp. 112–13). How can a God who promised him Isaac ask him to kill that very child? Everything is wrong in God’s request. However, Abraham’s story presents this paradox as a litmus test. For Kierkegaard the paradox makes clear that “faith begins precisely where thought stops” (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 53). Silence is thus embedded in faith. This is also why Kierkegaard does not speak of a leap of faith (Ferreira 1998, pp. 207–8), but rather the passion that results in a “leap in existence” where a faithful disposition becomes possible (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 42).

In this, Fear and Trembling comes close to Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty’s various discussions of “weak thought” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 55). The difference being that it does not assume that recognition is the only possibility when evaluating contexts in which conversations can flourish. For example, they both hold out little hope for any dialogue between European democracies and Islamic societies (Rorty et al. 2005, pp. 72–73). For Rorty, just as the eighteenth-century Vatican had its best interests in mind, “the mullahs have theirs” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 73). When one side is not listening or interested in the potential for exchange, Rorty leaves aside the aim of conversation all together. Much of Rorty and Vattimo’s work is addressed to the challenge of a pragmatic interest in weak thought that does not aim at the power derived from metaphysical foundations. As Vattimo puts it, “that there is no metaphysical foundation is still a foundation” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 63). This is why they continue to speak of God and being, because they are part of the linguistic, historical heritage in which they make their claims. As Vattimo has it, “when I say that ‘thanks to God I am an atheist,’ ‘thanks to God’ is very important, it means thanks to the history of the revelation, the salvation, the dissolution of Being that I’m an atheist and this history actually is my paradoxical foundation” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 63). Weak thought, in order to be honest about itself, must inevitably continue the discourses that it opposes, if only to challenge it all the more deeply. When it comes to intractable differences with other intellectual traditions, however, the role of silent acknowledgement is obscured.

Nancy Frankenberry cites this challenge in the kenotic element that permeates Gianni Vattimo’s thought (Frankenberry 2007, p. 273). While Vattimo does not include the provenance of kenosis in Philippians 2.6–8, Frankenberry introduces this aspect of his work in these terms to make explicit the connection between divine self-emptying into “a human being in the form of a servant” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 273, cf.; Coogan et al. 2007), and Vattimo’s wider aim to “reimagine Christianity” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 274). For Vattimo, “the story of philosophy’s weakening is at the same time a story of Christianity’s coming to fulfilment in the very process of secularization” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 274). European secular democracies are thus a direct consequence of a religious heritage that empties itself into a more tolerant society that recognizes an expanded diversity of people who live harmoniously together. “No doubt Vattimo is right that in exchange we get pluralism, tolerance, and a lot more caritas to go around” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 278). However, Frankenberry’s concern is that in such a society the specific truth of human suffering must be kept in view. Frankenberry makes the point through a dialogue from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India between a conservative missionary named Graysford and his more open-minded colleague Sorley. They debate the eschatological vision of a mansion with many rooms and the scope of its hospitality. “And why should the divine hospitality end there? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys… the jackals… the wasps… And the bacteria inside Mr Sorley? No, this was going too far. We must exclude something from our gather, or we shall be left with nothing.” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 278, citing; Forster 1924, p. 38). While she does not note the connection, she is reiterating a theme in Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, which makes the similar point that tolerance demands some opposition to those that oppose it (Popper 1945, p. 226n4). An open society requires this bare minimum interest in people’s ability to recognize suffering and oppose it. It is in this context that Pihlstrom cites the struggle for recognition noted above. Recognition “can be regarded as lying between mere toleration, on the one hand and full agreement on the other” (Pihlström 2015, p. 94). Here again however, Pihlstrom’s emphasis on silent acknowledgement must be included in any vision of a deliberative society that aims to provide an alternative. Silence in this sense retains an interest in the truth, even if it goes unsaid at times.

Frankenberry remains skeptical of paradox’s place in discerning suffering. For her, Kierkegaard’s paradox “conforms to the logical structure of self-deception” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 291). “When a person acts in such a way to provide herself with reasons for altering an unpleasant belief (or adopting a more pleasant one), the desire to change a belief causes the change but is not a reason for holding the new belief true or the old one false. However much self-deception functions like a belief, its content is always a desire” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 291). She outlines a continuum here between “wishful thinking, fueled by desire and fantasy, at one end, to self-deception, fed by desire and inner division, at the other end” (Frankenberry 2007, p. 291). Her aim is to put the “belief-desire nexus” at the heart of philosophy of religion (Frankenberry 2007, p. 292). For Frankenberry, Kierkegaard’s paradox can be placed at the far end of the latter continuum in the self-deception camp. He is not of two minds. He is rather living with a desire that results in this divided paradoxical belief.

My contention, however, is that this overlooks the context of suffering to which Kierkegaard responded as he tells Abraham’s story. Paradox in this case is more closely aligned with the pragmatist will to believe, but in ways James did not imagine. Kierkegaard made clear that the paradox cannot be resolved by simply pitting Abraham against God, or providing some other stand-in for universal law against murder. Abraham is no Ferreira. Rorty and Vattimo touch on this same problematic when they note the contrast between “the general rule and personal vocation” in Kierkegaard (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 71). Rorty notes Kierkegaard’s “taste for dramatization and infinite differences” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 71). What goes unsaid is the important form of embodied life depicted in Kierkegaard’s dramatizations. While Abraham’s words are few on Mt Moriah, they indicate a belief that there are options beyond the situation’s known parameters. This is not to say that there are no journalistic interests here as Derrida suggested (Derrida 2001). The story is written for readers to reflect upon and consider what Abraham’s silence might mean. After Wittgenstein, there is a value in narrating a story about what it might have been like to be silent in the midst of that painful walk up the mountain. After Silence, readers are reminded that holding our tongue is required until such a time as it might become possible for deliberative practices of recognition to begin.