I am grateful to Father Nye, a wise old Jesuit friend for advising me to go and see and make my own mind up about Silence which arrived at my local London movie house on New Year’s Day. ‘Only don’t expect humour. It doesn’t have any’, ‘he added.
Up to that point a reading of some reviews had led me to thinking I might avoid it. The suggestion was that this was an overlong and dark film, with a somewhat leaden dialogue, a miscast central character, and containing scenes of torture and execution of such brutality and despair which I could well do without as I put behind me a pretty awful 2016 (Brexit, Trump, relentless terrorism, and a good friend dying of cancer just before Christmas) and, with Christian optimism, looked forward to a better 2017.
The much commented on largely male on male violence on screen was enough to put off my wife and daughters but Fr Nye’s timely advice, the day after the film’s first screening in the English capital, left this Jesuit educated layman instinctively booking a back row seat in a half empty cinema.
In fairness I also owe a debt of gratitude to Anthony Quinn, film critic of The Tablet that in my view has managed to capture the essence of Silence in a way few of his colleagues have managed.
I found the film worthwhile and absorbing, stimulating all sorts of reflections with its story of two missionary Jesuits who travel to Japan in the 1640’s in the midst of a mass persecution of local Christians , in search of their mentor, an older priest who allegedly apostatised.
This is as Quinn rightly notes a journey into a heart of darkness.The opening shot of Christians crucified and tortured with boiling water is harrowing but not gratuitous, leaving it up to the viewer to imagine the nature of the pain suffered by the victims, in the absence of excessive blood and gore.
The imagery of this and other tortures and executions that occur in the film raise the central moral question posed by the film-to what extent should one embrace the pain or allow others to suffer on behalf of one’s faith, when the human option is of love, to stop the suffering and ensure life if possible. And with this an associated question to do with Christian witness and conscience- is martyrdom necessary to save one’s soul?
For me the film provoked other thoughts about the nature of religion and its capacity to evolve beyond fundamentalist dogma. The story takes place at a time when Christianity was outlawed in Japan as being an alien faith with which Buddhism, the official religion of the Japanese, had nothing in common- or so the Japanese warlords at the time insisted.
For much of the film, the Japanese martial enforcers act with a disciplined brutality that recall World War Two prisoner of war films rather than than the gentle meditative religion of incense, and soothing mantras we associate with modern day Pagodas and other Buddhist places of spiritual wellbeing.
Yet the head enforcer’s title as The Inquisitor can hardly fail to remind us of the brutality which Christians acted against each other and other faiths in the same century and the ones that preceded it.
In so doing I was reminded of the English and Scottish Jesuit martyrs that were so venerated at my Jesuit school Stonyhurst and have continued to form part of my religious imagination ever since. The stories of their hanging and quartering in London public places were narrated in contemporary accounts with more graphic detail than anything depicted in Silence.
And that led me to thank God for enlightened Buddhists and Christians who, as history progressed, moved towards each other not against each other- , in mutual respect for each other’s spirituality, just as Tolkien dreamed.
It also prompted me to reflect on the terrorist violence that continues to be used in the name of a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in modern times, still stuck in the 12th century- and the plight of those who suffer it, even if most of us witness it only on screen.
I emerged thinking how right the alleged apostate priest was advising the younger Jesuit that he would be better off serving God showing love for his children by saving them than allowing them to suffer on his account.
A different story which comes to mind is that of Alfred Delp the German Jesuit executed by the Nazis in World War Two for refusing to renounce his priesthood. During his six-month incarceration, he wrote of his fear, sadness and anger and then about his transformation from an ‘unholy character into a saint’ in a series of prison letters he smuggled out.
In the end Depp did not seek his martyrdom aggressively, but reflected on his on his love of God, sense of peace and surrender.
As Thomas Merton the monk and poet has observed about Father Delp’s prison writings: “In these pages we meet a stern, recurrent foreboding that the ‘voice in the wilderness is growing fainter and fainter, and it will soon not be heard at all. “
After watching Silence it was the final frame that lingered in my thoughts: of the small wooden cross cupped in the priest’s hand as he is cremated as a Buddhist. I asked myself the question , what right did I have to expect that the young Jesuit in Japan himself should in conscience seek martyrdom as some of his brothers had done, instead of deciding not to? This a film not about saints or sinners but about sharing in our fragile humanity and doubt and our need for reconciliation. In death as in life, however much the world may seem to sink into godless despair, it is faith in a loving God that ultimately should and does prevail.
