As many of you know, Janet has begun the discussion of S. Endo’s Silence over at deepgraceoftheory. Here at TLOU, we’d like to investigate some of the more technical aspects of the theology behind Silence. So today, through the magic of cut and paste, we’re going to direct your attention to Janet’s and my conversation that we hope to continue here.
First, Janet quotes my early comment, and then responds to it:
“Rather, I think of it like participating in the sacraments. Our relationship to God through the church is starved if we deprive ourselves of the sacraments. Likewise, if we refuse to participate in the world in a way that conforms to our end, we lose something of the sacramentality of being in the world.”
Yes, I agree with you you about this “participation.” I suppose this is why Father Rodrigues was willing to hear Kichijiro’s confession and have him live with him in his little community.
The question, I suppose, is abut the forms and the realities, the letter and the spirit. How do we recognize charity or grace — or legalism or the spirit of death — when the labels start to get switched around. And as both Jesus and Paul warned, the labels of love and grace do get turned around and applied to phariseeism instead, over and over again in the history of human institutions….
I made my comments about grace (vs works) in relation to p. 187 when Inuoe says that Buddha always forgives, but in Christianity “you also have to be strong.” And Father Ferreira thinks, he doesn’t understand Christianity at all. I think this is the challenge of the book to Christians: to think toward the depths of how far divine forgiveness and love might extend. For Father Rodrigues, this is what is revealed for him when Jesus breaks the silence and speaks to him from the fumie…. Always it is the cross that is the ultimate silence, and speaking, of God. How do we “hear” the cross; what does it say to us?
So, do you think Inoue is right, that we “have to be strong” in addition to receiving God’s compassion and forgiveness? The sacraments are an interesting mention you made, because they are essentially means for receiving grace and love…. It’s hard to think of them as a kind of works or “being strong”….
I think I mostly agree with Janet. We definitely want to affirm emphatically the gratuity of salvation and theosis/deification. I’m not completey satisfied, however, that the “receiving” aspect of the sacraments entails or necessitates an complete passivity in practice. Hence, the idea of participation in God’s life seems to indicate a unique activity on our parts. I’d want to see a recognition that there’s human action in the sacraments and the church as well as Divine action.
It seems clear that Inoue does not understand this aspect of the Gospel, that Christ on the cross unltimately inverts human strength, as Janet mentions. But, once this revelation is made, we are called to receive the divine life. Yet we ought not dichotomize the divine action and the human action, as this would lose the meaning of participating in divine life that we are blessed with first in the church and then in heaven. So, it seems that, intrinsically, there is an aspect in which we are called to be “strong” as Inoue says, but this strength is not his strength but rather the strength of the cross, of the Father who sends his only Son to identify with his creation in a radically and sacramentally active yet vulnerable solidarity, thereby renewing and representing the creation link between God and those made in the image of God.
This is only my reading. Are there any other thoughts on this. Janet, how does this sound to you?
Well, first I want to correct a slip I made above where I wrote “Father Ferreira” when I meant “Father Rodriguez.” (I’m going to correct this over at deep grace of theory, too.)
Father Ferreira subscribes, I think, to Inoue’s view of how Christians have to be “strong” (or perhaps Hi would call it “hard-edged!), when he says in his disillusionment that the Japanese converts have simply changed Christianity into their own native belief systems without any true Christian distinctives. That their faith was never really Christianity anymore. (Does this mean their very real martyrdoms were not really martyrdoms, anymore?) And Rodriguez sees in Ferreira’s face the image of his own face, the face of apostasy from the faith, and cowardly unbelief. But these men were tried more deeply and in ways more diabolical than any of us have ever faced, and they were “strong” for a long, long time….
Both of these men were deeply versed in orthodoxy. Both dared and suffered greatly for Christ. I doubt either one would refute what Dan is saying about grace producing works and the beautiful coming-together of divine and human volition, since two parties are always equally necessary in terms of a love relationship to be a love relationship, without in any way disputing the priority of the divine Gift.
These men were both persons who had certainly responded to the sacraments and to the cross with an active faith for decades — and since we see into Rodriguez’s heart and mind more deeply, let’s remember his incredibly deep trust and his powerful activity of faith all during the months of God’s “silence” in his life as he ministered to the converts in his care.
But what happens when we cease to do so? When we lose faith, like Ferreira, or when we choose to deny the faith publicly as Rodriguez did and become a showpiece in Inoue’s public relations pantomime for the rest of his life? What happens when we turn Judas?
THAT, I think, is the issue for Endo in Silence. “Man looks upon the external actions, but God looks upon the heart.” Rodriguez judges himself, as indeed I think he must, and as Judas so obviously did, even committing the sin of self-annihilation after he has betrayed Jesus. We cannot see his heart. But Endo gives us a glimpse into Rodriguez’s heart.
And God did not remain silent to Rodriguez, or so Rodriguez believes. Was Rodriguez merely rationalizing when he thinks he hears Christ speaking to him from the fumie? There, right there, is the heart of the novel and the heart of its theological issues, and they are deeper than orthodoxy (or “right opinion”) can reach, because those principles are “rules” for guidance and for keeping soundness in the faith, but this is deeper — because this is way down in the deepest depths of the mysteries of the human heart. And the deepest depths of the mysteries of the unfailing divine love, where we can only go existentially, and in extremity: “What you MUST do, do it quickly. Trample on me. This is why I came.”
That’s the supreme moment for me - when Jesus speaks from the fumie and as Janet says this is at “the deepest depths of the mysteries of the human heart”. Here is true beauty and I wonder if it’s not a sacramental action - this treading on the fumie at the call of Christ. I wonder.
I guess I’m not doing very well on spelling either. “Rodrigues”!
Dan, I guess that my response to your questions is most fundamentally to shift the discussion of grace and works back into the context of a love relationship and all the paradoxes of the romance that IS a love relationship. Augustine and all the many many Augustinian centuries that followed him thought of Christianity as God’s romance with the world — in fact, Chesterton said that, “having begun as He had begun” [i.e. Genesis 1-3, having made a world genuinely separate from himself and yet filled with His energy and promise freely gifted upon it], God could continue in no other way than “to grant to the world a REAL romance.”
Anselm said God would have come down into the world “Personally” even without the Fall of humankind, just for the greater fulfilling of the inherent potential here for the mutual and reciprocal givings and exchangings of love. But, given the sad need of humankind, the Incarnation begets the “passion” of Christ, where he dies for his Bride. This is why Augustine exclaimed: O felix culpa! Oh blessed crime! [because] it hath deserved so great a Redeemer!” If the we had not so grievously wounded our God, we would never have seen how deep God’s love is, and we would never have come to know THIS PERSON who has saved us. (Or as Paul said, so near to blasphemy and yet so far from it, “where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound.”)
So I really deeply agree with you Dan about the beautiful mystery of human participation and volitional actions in this love relationship. It is set out in Ephesians 2 in the Greek text, “For BY grace are we saved, THROUGH faith — and THAT [not just faith, or grace, but grace working through faith] IS [all of it] OUT FROM THE SOURCE OF GOD, not out from the source of ourselves, lest any of us should boast….”
This was something I wanted to say to Davis over at my own weblog. There is, curiously, a deep kind of privilege in those moments when life shows to us and we see ourselves as genuinely being reprobate, like Kichijiro, like Rodrigues — in that we are — for those moments at least — rescued from our “boasting” — that is, from thinking that we are such hot stuff. It is then when our gratitude and love is purest.
But Augustine and Milton knew also just how ephemeral and tricky the emotion of gratitude is, among self-choosing beings, who must retain their independent selfhood, and enjoy their gift of agency, and rightly so. So see Satan’s address to the Sun (SON) at the start of Book 4 of _Paradise Lost_, where it is gratitude — “the debt of gratitude, endless and immense” — that frightens the Fallen One out of throwing himself upon God’s mercy.
The greatest mystery of Love is the way one is freed to be oneself and at the same time utterly gifted by the Other, simultaneously, at least for those rare moments of gracious oneness, as in the mystery of physical love and in the sacraments…. There aren’t any rules for acheiving this state of grace — the wonderful rules of our faith only keep us from going too far off track in any one direction. We have to dwell in that perilous space in the midst of all these oppositional considerations, in the middest of the divine action.
So I just wonder if Rodrigues-as-Kichijiro, or any of us as Kichijiro, is not in a place that is a supremely blessed place. And as our own tradition itself teaches us, if we were aware of it, we wouldn’t be there! You’ll find this too in George Herbert’s “Affliction I,” where the sorrowful and afflicted believer says, so quaintly “I read and sigh and wish I were a tree, for surely then some bird would find me, and make her home in me….” He yearns to be “fruitful” instead of simply being lost in this wilderness….
And the final lines of the poem show just how far into the state of blessedness Grace has brought him….
Well, I will change the service
And go seek some other master out.
Ah my dear God! Though I be clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
If we measure everything only by love and by the inward capacity to love, the Cross shows us God’s capacity to love — plumbed to an unimaginable depth and revealed to an unimaginable fullness. How can we hold up any of our little rules, however helpful and “right” they surely are, in the face of THAT?
Sorry Davis — I didn’t see your comment until after I wrote my second comment above. I wasn’t ignoring you!!!
Wow. What a thought. His trampling the fumie was certainly, as an act, a “means of grace” to the Japanese sufferers over the pit. But here’s the problem, isn’t it, that in Christianity we generally think the spiritual trumps merely physical wellbeing…. This is part of why the Christian faith appears so “hard edged” to the native Japanese, compared with their own more eirenic religions…
On the other hand, what is the sacrament of communion except a return to the Cross and to Jesus’ sacrificial death for us. “This is my body broken for you.” The Cross always signifies in some part our trampling of Christ…?
Yet we, who crucify him, are one with Him, and remain, as sinners, parts of his own Body. Isn’t this the mystery that angels desire to look into? (Lewis thought it was in _Perelandra_, his very own response to Paradise Lost, when the eldila say to the human, There is such darkness in you that were it in any of us, our light would perish, and yet YOU are IN the Holy One — or words to that effect…)
These comments remind me of the creation story in the Silmarillion where God is singing the world into being and the Satan character starts to sing out of tune to destroy it all. But God, as the supreme Jazz bass player that he is, just modulates, improvises, and makes it sound all right. Satan goes further off key but he ends up just making it sound right funky. The Judas moment is about as off-key as you can get, a true Diabolus in Musica, yet I think we have to say that God even harmonizes this clanger. It is NOT that Judas is the greatest of the disciples because he takes on the hardest task (as the latest gospel would have it). It is God who saves, it is God who loves, resting a five string bass on his fat sweaty paunch.
“Fat sweaty paunch” is an image I’ll find it hard to avoid LOL!
Aron’s words remind me of the fabulous description of God creating the world through Janis Joplin music and wild horses in the opening pages of _Reservation Blues_, a novel written by the native American from the Spokane Rez (and wickedly satirical/poetic literary genius) Sherman Alexie. (Who has since converted to Catholicism, btw….)
Okay, over at deepgraceoftheory, Dan asked me the following:
“Janet, …I’d love to continue the discussion of the role of sacraments, especially your thoughts of how the sacraments play into Endo’s idea of salvation and the life of the church.”
Being a good Anglican, I was shocked when I read in the earlier part of Endo’s _Silence_that the two Jesuit fathers could not administer the sacraments to the Japanese converts because they did not have the proper eucharistic elements. For one thing, I remember Father Teilhard de Chardin doing his paleological researches in a remote area of China, offering the earth itself as bread and all its creatures’ sorrows as the wine in his powerful essay on the eucharist…. The modern liturgical churches, I believe, all have special provisions for celebrating the Eucharist with emergency materials. I’m sure some of you know all about this and can fill us in. I’ve been told by my own Episcopal priest that he can offer the sacrament to prison inmates using only toilet paper and water, if necessary. So what gives with the 17th century Jesuits in Japan?
Anyhow, confession and absolution were the main sacraments that Fathers Rodrigues and Garp offered to their congregants, along with their “mere” physical presence there in Japan among them.
Okay, I deal with this question about the role of the sacraments based on two instincts, one derived from evangelical protestantism and one from the great Thomistic synthesis I learned from Aquinas and Dante.
For the true “evangelicals” down through the centuries and today, all those who were overwhelmed by the grace of God in saving them and who wanted only to spread the good news, I derive the instinct that says that ultimately, when pressed, the deepest truths and realities are spiritual and all incarnational instantiations of them in the material world and in history are fungible when the spirit is operating. The two fathers WERE a sacrament to those believers, and the details are far less important. Many modern protestants wouldn’t miss the sacraments at all in reading this book. And finally we remember always the thief on the cross. Or that terrible traitorous criminal whom Dante meets in ascending the Mount of Purgatory toward Pardise, simply because he cried out in the very last instant of his life — and to Mary….
The spirit rules.
Second, from Thomas, I received the best gift of my entire life in thought, the understanding that “names” of genuine formal entities belong to their instantiations not by mere convention (nominalism) but by naming the significant constitutive dialectical differences and compositional structures that those names are meant to signify. Hence the Christ-event can be genuinely present to various human beings under different “names” and “signs,” because it is the genuine form-al identity that makes all things what they are. All genuine innocence, therefore, “is” Christ’s innocence; all vicarious self-offering “is” Christ’s proffer to humanity. “All truth “is” God’s truth,” as Augustine so justly claimed.
This makes it quite possible that, as Davis says, Father Rodrigues’s trampling of the fumie in obedience to Christ’s desire, like our crucifixion of Jesus with our sins and like our obeying the invitation to “sit and eat” His substance, could indeed be a “sacrament.” And I’m not at all sure that WE are qualified to judge…
All of this reminds me of Father John Fergueson’s repeated statement that our tradition and rituals and even Jesus Christ himself are “sure and certain means” for knowing and loving and worshipping God, but they are not exclusive means… because as another priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, says:
Christ is known in many ways and places…
To the Father, through the features of men’s faces…
And not just through men’s faces, but through the flash of the kingfishers’ wings and “bright chesnut firefalls” and all the other testaments and instantiations of form-al realities that he mentions in his incomparable sonnet “As kingfishers catch fire….”
“The just man justices, keeps grace, / That makes all his goings graces…” and that is true whether the truly just man knows the name of Christ or not. Getting the names right only matters as a means of getting there, but “being” there is a reality no matter what the “names” are that happen to be in play by historical or geographical or cultural contingency….
Apologies to Hopkins for the inexact quotation (shame on me! it’s a sacrilege), but I’m not quite up to checking it, right this minute. Best, Janet