Before a fall: The role of the interpreter in Endo's Silence

First conversation

In his first conversation with Rodrigues, the interpreter is distinguished by his lack of swords from the provincial samurai whom Rodrigues has encountered so far, but like those samurai he carries a fan which he uses incessantly (86–87); these class markers, and the interpreter's Portuguese skills, are sufficient to suggest his character even before he explains that, as “son of a court samurai,” he had accepted baptism and attended a Catholic seminary, though he had never been sincerely converted to Christianity (87). The “court samurai,” those members of the powerful regional houses who were required to reside in the capital, and made dependent on the central treasury, were divorced from the traditional land-based and clan-centered system of feudal Japan; they often lacked martial skills, and were dependent for advancement on their skills as civil servants and intriguers. The interpreter, unlike the samurai who captured Rodrigues and guard him, poses no concrete threat to Rodrigues; yet as a member of an intelligent, cultured elite, he has both motivation and skill to exploit the linguistic and cultural isolation, exacerbated by persecution, which has already led Rodrigues into spiritual confusion and doubts about the existence and goodness of God (67–69 et passim).

Offering cheerful word-play where Rodrigues expects violence, the interpreter begins his work by neutralizing the virtue Rodrigues has most prominently displayed: the courage to put up with the hardships of traveling around the world and living under conditions of extreme hardship for some time, while expecting martyrdom by torture (8–11). Acknowledging this courage while also treating it as foreign to their conversation, the interpreter points out that “many of the priests” are “fanatically filled with [a] blind courage” that “only causes trouble for other people” (88). This distinction between “courage” and “blind courage” operates according to the premise that virtue and vice should be distinguished by their social consequences; a courageous action which has “trouble” as a result is vicious, as opposed to virtuous. This enthymeme provides the underlying structure for not only the interpreter's arguments, but those of Ferreira and Inoue.

A similar conclusion follows from the interpreter's objection that Christianity is “foreign” (88). This objection, like the “blind courage” distinction, assumes that religious claims should be evaluated by their social consequences—under the circumstances, even consequences caused by opponents of that religion. Though many readers will be able to think of instances in history when Christians have used force in the service of religion, there is something especially ironic about a representative of a persecuting government accusing a captive foreigner of trying to “force on people things they don't want.” After all, the problem for the Japanese authorities of the time was precisely that so many people were adopting the “foreign” religion; enough that they could be martyred in crowds, and enough that mass executions had to be discontinued because of the conversions which followed them (85). ² The more important question excluded from this consideration of consequences, however, is the question of truth: of whether the person of good faith who understands the claims of Christianity ought to believe them, including the claim that the telos of historical events and processes lies beyond the chain of terrestrial causes and current social conditions. The interpreter evaluates religious questions strictly as a matter of preference, ignoring questions of truth; for him it is sufficient to say that the Japanese “have our own religion; we don't want a new, foreign one” (88). As a result, he cunningly and without apparent irony sets Rodrigues at fault for the suffering the Japanese authorities inflict, not only on the priest and his confreres, but on the Japanese people themselves.

Throughout this first conversation, the interpreter uses known faults of the early Jesuit missions in Japan, as well as the relative ignorance of Rodrigues concerning Japanese religious experience, to bolster his accusations. Rodrigues has to admit that some of the early leaders of the Jesuit mission in Japan, like Cabral, had seemed to create too strong a separation between Japanese converts and European priests (87). Moreover, Rodrigues clearly does not know how to address Buddhism in any but the crudest terms; when the interpreter makes the point that Buddhists do not believe that various manifestations of Buddha are merely enlightened humans, Rodrigues, without really following the distinction, assumes the interpreter is merely repeating jargon (88–9). At the same time, the interpreter's dialogue seems to mirror that of Rodrigues in this regard; the interpreter's answer about the various kinds of Buddha responds to his own trick question, not to the more nuanced terms in which Rodrigues answered. At just the time that Rodrigues is thinking that “this kind of dialogue soon ceased to be dialogue, becoming a play of words in which one tried vigorously to down one's opponent,” the interpreter angrily cries “Stop this sophistry … you can't beguile me.” At this juncture, this discourse is at an impasse; Rodrigues and the interpreter are mirror images of each other's ignorance about the other's religion, both of them letting verbal fetishism supplant authentic discourse and sound reasoning.

Discourse having reached an impasse by the end of the first conversation, the disparity in temporal power between the representative of the Japanese authorities and the isolated captive predictably plays out in explicitly coercive language. The first conversation ends with the interpreter threatening Rodrigues in terms Rodrigues almost fails to understand. The interpreter tells him that “the peasants will be suspended in the pit … unless you apostatize” (90). Rodrigues finds it difficult to understand the nature of the threat. This confusion between the interpreter and Rodrigues over the nature of the threat probes the cultural impasse in a subtler way even as it raises that impasse to life-and-death importance. Because the meaning of a threatened punishment depends on varying cultural conceptions of guilt, this particular confusion provides a window into Endo's perennial concern with East/West cultural gaps.

Adrian Pinnington underscores the role of Ruth Benedict's guilt–shame distinction between Western and Eastern cultures in postwar Japanese thought. Looking at the influence of Ruth Benedict's anthropological work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword on postwar Japanese culture, Pinnington draws attention to Japanese internalizations of Benedict's oversimplified distinction between shame and guilt cultures, and especially the notion of the “strong self” as a hallmark of Western culture (97–98). Pinnington argues that Endo was no exception to the Japanese postwar tendency to reinterpret Japanese uniqueness in paired East/West terms like those in Benedict's wartime work, extending the revision of Japanese history as a self-justification in Western categories already begun by the likes of Inazo Nitobe. ³ The Japanese search for a “strong self,” as well as occasional personal and cultural resentment that such an effort should seem necessary, resonates within Endo's work; Pinnington claims that “from the beginning he suggests a more complex sense of the contrast between pagan Japan and Catholic Europe than the Japanese proponents of a ‘strong self’” (98). Rodrigues, as a member of a guilt culture that twentieth-century Japanese writers might analyze as a “strong self” culture, misreads the threat because he is expecting to be punished for a crime; his expectation that punishment attaches to guilt makes the interpreter's allegation that Rodrigues will be responsible for the suffering of peasants tortured by Japanese authorities inscrutable, at first. ⁴

By the interpreter's logic, Rodrigues the captive priest is just as worthy of his scornful anger as is Cabral, whom the interpreter feels has personally wronged him. The interpreter's judgment, as seen in the “blind courage” comment and the objection to “foreign” religion, is that virtue and vice are distinguished by social consequences. Rodrigues, by this logic, lapses from virtue into vice because he does not anticipate the “trouble” which fidelity to his religion will cause for others under current conditions. That certain foreigners might think of the Japanese authorities who imprison priests and torture peasants as the ones responsible for the “trouble” will not move the interpreter, nor those who use the same logic. Regardless of any larger justice which may or may not be attributed to the decisions of the Japanese authorities, under the condition that they have decided to persecute Christians, to be Christian is to cause “trouble”; therefore the interpreter esteems the bringer of such “trouble” as vicious.

To cause such “trouble” is, ipso facto, to be “selfish.” The interpreter first uses the term “selfish” about Rodrigues in an aside to the guards at the end of the first conversation (91); the term clearly refers to the attitude of determination that Rodrigues attempts to show. To be faithful to Christian teaching and practice when the Japanese authorities had created a situation that made the priest's Christianity “trouble” for the peasants is “selfish” on the interpreter's scale. The stress laid on this term “selfish” is at least as important for the novel's twentieth-century context as its historical setting; the term is still commonly used in this fraught sense, with positive or negative charges, in twenty-first century Japan. In the aftermath of the major earthquake of March 2011, it was widely reported that Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a Shinto traditionalist, caused some controversy by calling contemporary Japanese culture “selfish” and treating the earthquake as divine intervention (Kuhn). Though this remark was widely received as a public gaffe, it should be understood against the background of Pinnington's analysis of postwar Japanese culture. As in Endo's works, where the search for the “strong self” and resentment that such a search should seem necessary alternate, so in contemporary Japanese culture such aspirations and resentments are mixed together.

Amid these cultural currents, Western social styles, individualistic conceptions of human rights and the common good, and the vices of consumerism may seem nearly indistinguishable; relative to traditional Japanese cultural norms, they are all alike “selfish.” When Christians proclaim the unique role of one Christ in the redemptive work of one God, many Japanese hear another manifestation of this “selfish” cultural norm. Of particular interest, some Japanese Christians think it good to be “selfish” for just this reason. As Joy Hendry explains,

Japanese Christians tend to be individuals rather than whole families, and their children do not necessarily follow their example. It has become a “personal religion,” rather than an association of the continuing family, and some Christians are individuals who have moved for their employment away from their family and friends. One of the problems for Christianity in Japan is the exclusive nature of the religion. (139)

Second conversation

In his second conversation with Rodrigues (after Rodrigues has already met Inoue for the first time), the interpreter more definitely acts in the role of the accuser. He taunts Rodrigues, expressing false cheer and asking faux-naïve questions that toy with the prisoner's uncertainty about his situation (130–32). At one point, before revealing to Rodrigues that they will be distant spectators while Garrpe is tormented with the execution of several peasants, the interpreter asks him, “This mercy that the Christians talk about—what is it?” (132) The scene itself is worthy of much closer examination, as it is Garrpe's death scene, but its outline is as follows: The interpreter tells Rodrigues he is to meet someone (Rodrigues thinks it might be Ferreira), and situates him near the shore (130–31). A little distance away, Garrpe and some peasants are conducted to the shore under guard. The peasants are to be bound in straw mats, making them temporarily buoyant but unable to swim, and thrown overboard as “basket-worms” (132). After a local official has expostulated with Garrpe, the peasants are rowed out to the sea and thrown overboard, one at a time (133–34). While Rodrigues inwardly cries out for Garrpe to apostatize and the interpreter continues to taunt Rodrigues, Garrpe breaks away from his guards and runs into the sea, swimming out to where the peasants are slowly sinking, attempting to pray with them to the end. All three peasants and Garrpe ultimately drown, after which the interpreter in an indignant outburst blames Rodrigues for the result.

There are two or three points of interest in the interpreter's second conversation. First, the earlier impasse about the purpose of punishment is renewed and given additional significance when the interpreter describes the local official's conversation with Garrpe about the “basket-worms” and says, “in any case, these three have already apostatized” (132). In the course of the conversation, the interpreter seems to use this to suggest the futility of remaining faithful (if those peasants captured with the priests have already given up), or to diminish the immediate risk of the step (in case the priest thought he must stay strong to protect the peasants). The interpreter never seems to consider that the apostasy of the peasants under persecution suggests their need for faithful priests to call them to repentance and offer them reconciliation at least as potently as it suggests the futility or insignificance of the priests' fidelity or infidelity.

For the interpreter, though, the enthymeme that differentiates “courage” from “blind courage” is still operating here. From the point of view of the interpreter or the local official, both the virtue of fidelity and the hazard of infidelity are neutralized by the change in social consequences. If the priests are standing in solidarity with a group of believers, then in-group virtues must still be esteemed, even if that group itself is viewed as disruptive and suppressed; but if the peasants have apostatized, then the priests are isolated individuals whose claims of allegiance to a shadowy, distant group are automatically suspect. Whether that group is Japanese Christians or the European center of the Catholic Church is, for purposes of this calculus, irrelevant; the change in group composition effected by the apostasy of the peasants puts the priests back in the situation the Japanese authorities have constructed for them by threat, pursuit, imprisonment, isolation, interrogation, and the torture and execution of their coreligionists. They are isolated individuals who “make trouble.” At this point in the story, both Garrpe and Rodrigues are, even in the passive action of not committing apostasy, causing “trouble” by the standards the interpreter appeals to; they are failing to base their actions on a correct anticipation of the current social consequences. If at first Rodrigues was thought to be especially misguided, “blind,” and ill-informed, he is now beginning to understand; the situation has been made clear enough that the interpreter now regards him as blameworthy for failing to respond to it in accordance with the wishes of those who have control over the consequences.

Nor is this mere boilerplate cultural interaction; the interpreter's personal animus is well represented in this second conversation. The question the interpreter asks about “this mercy the Christians talk about” is clearly rhetorical (132); he gleefully suggests the inference that the Japanese do not understand the concept of mercy, an inference both supported and denied by his later suggestion that Garrpe should apostatize because “in Christianity the first thing is mercy and that God is Mercy itself” (133). On the one hand, the interpreter's use of “mercy” as a taunt to add psychological cruelty to the spectacle of violence does reflect a rather dim view of its quality, as does his suggestion that “mercy” lies in the hands of the captive Garrpe, rather than the Japanese authorities who perform the violent acts and construct the situation to which Garrpe (and Rodrigues) must respond. On the other hand, that the interpreter feels free to deploy the concept, and regards the mitigation of suffering as morally obligatory to the extent that he is angry with Rodrigues over the suffering of the peasants, suggests that the interpreter's conception of mercy is in some way commensurable with that of Rodrigues and Garrpe.

In fact, the interpreter's angry outburst at the end of this second conversation may, like a Shakespearean villain's aside, not only restate his characteristic theme but also provide an authentic look at the moral landscape of the drama. ⁶ The interpreter characterizes the Christian mission to Japan as a “selfish dream” that the Jesuits “impose” at great cost to the peasants (134), continuing the theme established at the end of the first conversation, when he tells the guards Rodrigues is “selfish” (91). The interpreter's apparently genuine fury suggests that he is emotionally committed to his interpretation; this response seems to manifest his ideology still more clearly than his various ironic and polemical gestures up to now have done. Coming on the heels of the traumatic scene with Garrpe and the “basket-worms,” the interpreter's words make an impression on Rodrigues that will stay with him to the moment of his apostasy. In the scene immediately following, Rodrigues twice uses the term “selfish” as he internalizes the criticisms of the interpreter and of Inoue (135–36), and it will be this very same construction of the situation which he acts upon at Ferreira's urging in the fumie scene (169ff.). The evidence of the “selfish” nature of the Christian mission, says the interpreter, is blatantly obvious: “Look! Blood is flowing again. The blood of those ignorant people is flowing again.” The interpreter seems incapable of thinking the Japanese authorities responsible for the violence, at least insofar as the violence can be seen as their response to a situation caused by foreign inroads.

Yet the very vehemence of the interpreter's tirade suggests something more than a restatement of his basic outlook; buried in his abuse of Rodrigues lies what may be a little noted interpretive crux in the book. Bearing in mind that after their first conversation the interpreter had already predicted that Rodrigues would apostatize, and that the interpreter is here reduced to sputtering vituperation, his assertion that “at least Garrpe was clean” but that Rodrigues was “the most weak-willed” so that he doesn't “deserve the name of ‘father’” bears closer examination. Garrpe has, after all, dramatically died by submersion in the ocean with those peasants for whom he was praying; if the interpreter did not see this as a concrete representation of the real power of the baptism that he had taken so lightly, he at least cannot fail to see that Garrpe has found a breach in the Japanese authorities’ structure of violence; by embracing martyrdom (but not suicide) in the performance of his priestly duties, he has defied the logic by which he can be seen as “making trouble.” What is fascinating is that the interpreter tacitly admits this distinction; though the interpreter may be trying to prevent Rodrigues from taking courage from Garrpe's example, he holds Garrpe up for Rodrigues to admire in doing so.

Exalting Garrpe plays directly against the interpreter's general strategy of minimizing the significance of the priest's fidelity or infidelity, so it should be received as reluctant evidence. Similarly, when spoken by one who has from the very first protested indifference to Christian doctrine and contempt or hatred for the “fathers” (87), the accusation “you don't deserve the name of ‘father’” bears especial significance. Buried here is the premise that to be “father” is a thing that one can “deserve” such that Garrpe did “deserve” that name, whereas Rodrigues does not. This admission under these circumstances has considerable evidential value, being what lawyers would describe as an “excited utterance.” ⁷ The interpreter has revealed his own inner conflict, admitting against himself that martyrdom is some vindication of Garrpe's profession, that their ordination did have some solemn matter of which the priests were to be worthy. By so doing, the interpreter opens up two key lines of inquiry into the real significance of Silence as a whole: whether Rodrigues has been tending to apostasy from the beginning of the story, and whether Garrpe's martyrdom argues the possibility of fidelity and joyful expectation even while caught in the trap that the Japanese authorities (and Endo) have built for Rodrigues.

Third conversation: the interpreter's summation

The interpreter's third conversation with Rodrigues takes place when the interpreter brings Rodrigues to meet Ferreira (141), and sits in with them to monitor their Portuguese conversation (142). Most of this conversation is actually between Ferreira and Rodrigues, but throughout this and the rest of his appearances, the interpreter generally maintains his characteristic sardonic, even sadistic, cheer. In this conversation, his chief role is to ensure that neither Ferreira nor Rodrigues take comfort from their encounter. The interpreter hints that Ferreira is helping the Japanese authorities (143); and then when Ferreira talks about innocuous forms of assistance, the interpreter makes sure to specifically mention the disavowal and refutation of Christian teaching that Ferreira is writing (144).

Ferreira's anti-Christian tract is not a fabrication of Endo's imagination, though Ferreira's contributions to the Japanese assimilation of European learning have become the stuff of (mostly incredible) legend. In a masterful historical examination of Ferreira's career, centered on his apostasy in Japan, Hubert Cieslik describes this document as emerging “three years after Ferreira's apostasy … bearing the title Kengi-roku (A Disclosure of Falsehoods)” and “attributed to Ferreira both in the introduction and in the epilogue” (36–37). Despite significant uncertainties which make it difficult to attribute most of the final state of the text to Ferreira, “its many theological expressions and details concerning the inner life of the Church show that the contents must be traced back to a theologically-trained foreign missionary” (37); Cieslik concludes that “this work contains a good deal of material not found in other anti-Christian tracts and therefore almost certainly goes back to Ferreira” (40). The interpreter's canny deployment of Ferreira's writing more fully develops the intertextual relationship between Endo's fiction about Rodrigues and the real history of Ferreira already established in the book's Prologue. After the Prologue recounts the history up to the sending of the First Rubino Group, the book's fictions begin with “In addition to this group” (7). The interpreter's use of Ferreira's work reminds the reader that this conversation, like the whole of Silence, blurs the boundary between past events and contemporary fictions about them. This role as the buffer or nexus between fact and fiction, between the context of the novel and its historical situation, may even be one reason the interpreter is given no other name.

In the course of this third conversation, the interpreter reiterates his accusation that the Christian mission to Japan is a “selfish dream” (146–47). The Japanese authorities, he promises, will certainly capture any future missionaries, and make Japanese peasants suffer. Continuing his paradoxical theme of blaming the helpless for the acts of persecutors, he says, “It is time to leave us in peace.” This is very nearly the last substantive speech the interpreter will make, but shortly before it the interpreter offers a summation which seems improbably modern:

Think it over … You're the only Christian priest left in this country. Now you're captured and there's no one left to teach the peasants and spread your doctrine. Aren't you useless? … You heard what Chuan [Ferreira] said. He's translating books of astronomy and medicine; he's helping the sick; he's working for other people. Think of this too: as the old bonze keeps reminding Chuan, the path of mercy means simply that you abandon self. Nobody should worry about getting others into his religious sect. To help others is the way of the Buddha and the teaching of Christianity—in this point the two religions are the same. What matters is whether or not you walk the path of truth. Sawano is writing this in his Gengiroku. (145–46)

Second, this secularization of meaning is here explicitly associated with a call for religious believers to move from de facto pluralism (which existed while the Japanese authorities tolerated Christian belief within the Shinto-Buddhist establishment) to pluralism de jure. De facto pluralism exists in most of the West today, due to both the salutary practice of religious toleration and the widespread secularization of the culture, while in Japan “religious pluralism is, as in other regions of Asia, not an ideological construction but a reality in which to live” (Morimoto 164). Yet to acknowledge such de facto pluralism is different in important respects than to insist on turning a descriptive social principle into a prescriptive theological principle. When that insistence is backed by the coercive power of the secular regime, then pluralism de jure has both the force of “in principle” and “by law.”

Although in Silence the apparent aim of the regime is to repress one particular foreign religion in the service of the Shinto-Buddhist establishment, the interpreter's words here offer a larger argument for pluralism de jure, an argument which is perennial and also manifestly current for readers of Silence. The interpreter argues that “to help others” in strictly secular and social senses becomes “the path of truth” in which “the two religions are the same.” In so doing, he calls on Rodrigues in two ways to subscribe to the principle that Buddhist and Christian understandings of what it means “to help others” are not merely compatible in points, but “the same”; that despite being so distinct that one is justifiably repressed by the regime, under an appropriate secular reduction either can be used indifferently by those who walk “the path of truth.” It should be especially clear to twenty-first-century readers that for Rodrigues to adopt this principle would mean to deem either Buddhism or Christianity an appropriate “path of truth” precisely insofar as either is accredited by the cultural principles and coercive power of the secular regime. When the interpreter attempts to shift the ground from pluralism de facto to pluralism de jure, then, he is not seeking to draw Rodrigues through increased religious understanding to broader toleration, but to force Rodrigues to replace religious with secular principles for the evaluation of beliefs and practices.

Buddhist–Christian dialogue and the interpreter's summation

The third point of interest in the interpreter's summation is complex, but worthy of extended treatment. In this summation, the interpreter's effort to force Rodrigues to adopt a secular standard for evaluating religious beliefs and practices adopts the protective coloration of ambiguous religious language: “the path of mercy means simply that you abandon self” (146). Much that has made Silence both appealing and controversial among its twentieth-century Japanese and American audiences can be unpacked from this sentence.

The studied ambiguity of the religious language the interpreter uses can be glimpsed in the supplemental “simply” in this translation. “Simply” here marks the suppression of a complex process of truncation and deflation which makes mercy “simply” (or “merely”) a negative quality of the individual's subjectivity; to call on another to “abandon self” in this sense begs the fundamental religious question of to whom or for what the self should abdicate its apparent self-authority. This call also tacitly denies that the self in question is already abandoned to or participating in some larger order, such as the priest's religious vocation and his receipt of holy orders. It is impossible to escape the signal irony of the gleefully cruel interpreter describing this enforced religious migration as “the path of mercy.” The reference to “the old bonze” instructing “Chuan” (Ferreira), who now wears Japanese religious vestments, evokes the history of Christian–Buddhist dialogue in the twentieth century, which has often been carried on in terms of the relationship between Zen and Continental philosophy. The language of the interpreter's summation is at least as suitable in that conversation as in any conversation that might have been held in Tokugawa Japan, and probably much more suitable.

A key point in that dialogue is, as Steve Odin has pointed out, “the mutual encounter of two monumental ideas: Christian kenosis (self-emptying) and Buddhist sunyata (emptiness)” (71). John T. Netland thinks that Endo has arrived at an understanding of kenosis in terms of “radically self-denying and culture-transcending love” in the course of his career, culminating in the character of Otsu in Deep River. Netland says that “In Silence this love is the self-negating invitation of the emaciated Jesus on the fumie who permits Father Rodrigues to apostatize and who reaffirms his presence to the disgraced apostate” (“From Resistance to Kenosis” 192). According to Netland, “always this love finds its origins and supreme expression in the broken body of Jesus hanging limply from the cross of Calvary.” Netland thus suggests that Endo's “self-negating” model of “radically self-denying … love” remains essentially Christian, though he admits that such “radical love … is not easily accommodated within the theological boundaries of Christianity” to an extent that makes Endo's work “disappointing to Christian readers who wonder if this singular devotion to divine love weakens the soteriology of the cross” (192). Netland points out that Endo's “reluctance to use the language of atonement and justification” and “selective emphasis on the self-emptying love of Jesus” have systematic consequences (193); this approach “renders traditional theological boundaries permeable” so that Endo's work represents “ambiguous spaces where Christian theology diffuses into a more inclusive, if theologically imprecise, ethic of love.” Netland maintains that even though Endo “creates a blurred soteriology” he nonetheless successfully “assumes a transcultural point of moral reference” in a way that “points us to the mystery of Christ's kenotic entrance into human history” (194). The interpreter's specific arguments, though, challenge the notion that this putative “transcultural point of moral reference” is distinguishable from a wholly secular determination of moral value that treats religious truth claims as culturally contingent.

Netland's account does not penetrate to the heart of the matter because he does not attend sufficiently to the blurring of the term kenosis in the interreligious discourse indicated by the interpreter's reference to the “bonze” (Buddhist monk) who instructs the apostate Jesuit Ferreira that Buddhism and Christianity converge on the effort to “abandon self.” Renée D. N. van Riessen helpfully clarifies the usage of kenosis: “Traditionally kenosis expresses the descent or approach of the Transcendent to earth” (180). Such a “descent or approach” modifies the transcendent being (“the Infinite, or God”) in relation to beings on “earth” so that transcendent being “is no longer a lofty and elevated idea that prefers to remain by itself and can only be understood by itself,” an entelechy like “the representation of God in the philosophy of Aristotle.” Instead, “A kenotic representation of God's relationship to reality” posits “a descent or humiliation that is not contrary to God's transcendence, but rather an articulation of it.” He suggests that Vattimo's philosophical appropriation of kenosis goes too far in “trying to argue that being itself is subject to a process of weakening in its historical development” because “the time of the world view (as Heidegger called it) is over. Thinking has gradually become ‘secularised’” (202). Thus Vattimo's account boils down Christian kenoticism to say that, “influenced by the story of the emptying of God in Christ, a process is going on in our culture in which man is learning to conquer the violent nature of the sacred and of social life.” Such a reduction of kenosis to secularization strongly resembles the interpreter's call for the Jesuits to “leave us in peace” after being driven onto a “path of mercy” that substitutes a range of secular efforts for the practice of the Christian faith.

Odin's work on kenosis in Buddhist–Christian discourse clarifies this parallel between the interpreter's summation, Vattimo's metaphysical reduction of kenosis, and Netland's quasi-kenotic “ethic of love” interpretation. In his critique of “the mutual encounter” between “Christian kenosis (self-emptying) and Buddhist sunyata (emptiness),” Odin provides the key to understanding the instruction “the path of mercy means simply that you abandon self” that the interpreter relays from the “bonze.” Odin acknowledges that “Christian kenosis and Buddhist sunyata traditions” strongly resemble each other in that “the process of self-emptying becomes the pattern for true discipleship” (72). This resemblance consists in the similarity between kenosis and “the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) in its standard definition as anatman (no-self, selflessness, or non-ego)” (71). The Buddha's coming to conceive all things through the concept sunyata is “the model of enlightenment in Buddhism” insofar as the Buddha came to view the world as definitively and exclusively populated with objects of moribund desire, so that conceiving that which desires (the self) as itself an intrinsically ephemeral manifestation of that moribund desire becomes the central movement of Buddhist “enlightenment,” the realization of anatman. Twentieth-century Buddhist–Christian dialogue presses the superficial similarity between kenosis and sunyata in much the manner suggested by the interpreter in Silence.

As Odin states, a perceived identity of kenosis and sunyata has become a cornerstone of Buddhist–Christian dialogue, especially in light of the work of thinkers in the Japanese Buddhist tradition of the Kyoto School, whose “project of relating kenosis to sunyata is a form of syncretism that is developed in the framework of a kenotic buddhology” (77). Odin traces this juxtaposition throughout the work of the Kyoto School, from Nishida to Abe (73–75), but he proposes that the work of Nishitani Keiji offers the clearest examples of “identification of Christian kenosis with Buddhist sunyata or emptiness in its meaning as anatman or non-ego” (77). Specifically, Odin cites Nishitani's assertion that “What is ekkenosis for the Son is kenosis for the Father. In the East, this would be called anatman, or non-ego.” Odin's summary suggests how much Nishitani's approach modifies the understanding of kenosis found in van Riessen's summary of the traditional teaching:

Nishitani calls for a shift from the Aristotelian/Scholastic ideal of divine perfection as “self-sufficiency” toward a completely nonsubstantialist ideal of divine perfection as “self-emptying,” or, as it were, “making oneself empty” (onore o munashikusurukoto) as espoused by both the Christian kenosis and Buddhist sunyata traditions. However, of special importance here is Nishitani's primary distinction between the original kenosis or self-emptying of God and the derivative ekkenosis or self-emptying of Christ. Kenosis is the original condition of “having made Himself empty,” which is essentially entailed from the beginning in the idea of the divine perfection of God, whereas ekkenosis or the activity of self-emptying love as typified by Christ and the command of man is the embodiment or practice of that perfection. Hence, the kenosis of God is the origin of the ekkenosis of Christ. (74)

As Odin points out, “The Kyoto School project of relating kenosis to sunyata” represents a contribution to “a kenotic buddhology rather than a kenotic christology as such” (77). Like Christian teaching about kenosis, Nishitani pushes off from the “the philosophy of Aristotle”; like Vattimo, however, Nishitani gives the term a radically different meaning. By eliding the difference between Aristotelian and Christian conceptions of God, Nishitani pushes off against “the Aristotelian/Scholastic ideal of divine perfection as ‘self-sufficiency’” (Odin 74). A properly Aristotelian view differs from a scholastic view precisely insofar as scholastic philosophy is Christian, that is, as the scholastics understood the kenosis of Incarnation to be the central fact of Christian revelation. To conflate these views into an “Aristotelian/Scholastic ideal” masks the double movement from Aristotle to Aquinas and from Aquinas to the scholastics; it also masks the subsequent movements of thought that give Nishitani's words, and the interpreter's, a force today that they could not have had in the sixteenth century.

Despite the contextual differences, Nishitani and the interpreter employ the same rhetorical strategy. The interpreter quotes the “bonze” as saying that “the path of mercy simply means to abandon self,” while interpreting “abandon self” under Japanese Buddhist assumptions. When Nishitani prefers an understanding of kenosis which makes “‘making oneself empty’ (onore o munashikusurukoto)” the “ideal of divine perfection,” so that the Christian should imitate Christ (in his ekkenosis) as one who realizes the sunyata (emptiness) of a God whose divinity consists in perfectly manifesting anatman (no-self), he is making excellent Buddhist sense over against a misrepresentation of the Christian teaching of kenosis. To use Christian vocabulary under such assumptions is to reduce the facts of God's self-revelation that form the core of Christian faith to mere instruments for realizing sunyata; it shrinks hope until it can envision only the objects of moribund desire. Especially under the conditions the Japanese authorities have created by persecution, the interpreter and the “bonze” seem eminently reasonable in suggesting that the only remaining senses in which Christian ethical teaching could be interpreted would demand apostasy. They thus work a direct reversal of the sense in which a Christian is taught to “abandon self.”

Endo's own Catholic baptism and the Catholicism of his Christian characters are chief contributors to the tension within his work, so it is hardly surprising that the interpreter's words resonate far beyond their putative seventeenth-century context in this way. As if to refute the interpreter's misprisions, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's recent declaration Dominus Iesus authoritatively restates key elements of Christian teaching about the Incarnation, especially in the context of interreligious discourse. It points out that teachings which make “the revelation of Jesus Christ … complementary to that found in other religions” are “in radical contradiction with the foregoing statements of Catholic faith according to which the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God is given in Jesus Christ” (Congregation 6), then summarizes that revelation as follows:

The truth about God … is unique, full, and complete, because he who speaks and acts is the Incarnate Son of God. Thus, faith requires us to profess that the Word made flesh, in his entire mystery, who moves from incarnation to glorification, is the source, participated but real, as well as the fulfilment of every salvific revelation of God to humanity.

If, as Odin concludes, the fusion of Buddhism and Christianity apparently effected by the identification of kenosis with sunyata is an illusion, so must be the connection the interpreter suggests between “the path of mercy” as a religion-tinged secular effort to achieve social goods (“to help others”) and this syncretistic interpretation of the command to “abandon self.” As Mark Williams has recently pointed out in a very important critique of interreligious themes in Endo's work, in mid-career Endo already acknowledges that he is “indebted in equal measure to the Buddhist preoccupation with knowing the self and the Christian focus on redemption” (120). In the character of the interpreter, Endo seems to dress twentieth-century interreligious discourse in seventeenth-century garb.

It is the interpreter's cunning exploitation of a certain vulnerability to these innovations in the faith of the character Rodrigues, and Endo's probing of the faith of his modern readers, that makes the apostasy of Rodrigues such compelling spiritual drama and demonstrates its continuing cultural relevance. Although it is under Ferreira's direct influence and the malevolent superintendence of Inoue that Rodrigues is finally broken, the interpreter's arguments lay the groundwork for the priest's apostasy. If this otherwise unnamed character seems to be more chorus than character, it may well be because the interpreter's accusations against Rodrigues spell out several perennial challenges to living Christian faith in forms readily understood by Endo's audience. It is a tribute to Endo's skill that readers are not generally struck by the monstrous absurdity of the interpreter's description of the “path of mercy” open to Rodrigues. Because the Japanese authorities are intent on torturing their own people in order to secure the priest's compliance, the interpreter suggests that Rodrigues must show “mercy” by abandoning the faith and joining Ferreira, who now writes against the faith, in collaborating with the Japanese authorities. The interpreter's apparent success in subverting the priest's faith, as well as the specific content of the interpreter's arguments, demonstrates that any effort to understand this story of persecution, accusation, and apostasy as a response to Christian proclamation must go deeper than a reflection on the language of the fumie scene.