Tag: William Cavanaugh

Eucharist as the Nonviolent Reality of the Temple Rite: From Anthony Bartlett to Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Jesus’ recapitulation of the Temple is taken up in the Lord’s Supper, in which the Passover and the Day of Atonement are transformed in the meaning of the Eucharistic meal. The synoptics are in agreement in their presentation of this last meal as a celebration of the Passover Seder (Mark 14:12-16; Matt 26:17-19; Luke 22:7-13). The disciples ask Jesus specifically, “Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?” (Matt 26:17). Whatever the various changes of meaning, changes in time, and specifics of the rite that are developed in Jesus’ version of the meal, it begins as a Passover meal. Jesus acts with a creative freedom in all of his activity and teaching surrounding Israel and the Temple, but the specific leverage and shift in meaning may be made most concretely obvious in his recapitulation of the Passover meal.

This helps explain John’s alternative account, in which the meal occurred before the Passover (John 19:14: Jesus’ trial and execution are on the day of preparation for the Passover). In the spirit of the liberty of Christ, John has Jesus dying while the Passover lambs are being sacrificed (after which is usually the Passover). Clearly theology and not chronology are the main point, and in each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[1] Matthew is probably following Mark, but he also makes several modifications, adding that the “blood poured out for many” (Mk 14:24) is for “forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). Both are echoing Isaiah 53:12, “he poured out his life unto death” setting the overall pericope in that of the suffering servant. The language of “poured out” is also an allusion to the sacrifices in the Temple (e.g., Lev 4:7, 18, 25, 30, 34)[2] but Matthew in linking the Passover meal specifically to the suffering servant and to the Temple cult, poses a different sort of forgiveness, which in the Temple rite is achieved through an atoning sacrifice.

The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ. The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. As Anthony Bartlett points out, “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the “life was in the blood” and the life belonged to God alone.”[3] Which may be part of the point; this is no longer a sacrifice, but it is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God.

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle. He is now the lamb sacrificed, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[4] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice, as even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[5]

Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love.

Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[6] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning is focused on its sacrifices but he is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[7]

The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[8] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ.

 Martin Luther recognizes it is not the elements which are transformed but the human imagination and heart, which certainly involves embodiment. But with the Counter-Reformation, it may no longer be a point of disagreement but of emphasis. In the description of American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh, the body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[9] An over-spiritualized emphasis may imagine the event in terms of an inward reception, rather than involving a holistic, embodied performance.

On the other hand, focus on the material elements alone may also miss this embodied holism. As G.W.F. Hegel describes, it was a degraded understanding surrounding the Eucharist that spurred the Reformation. “The Church whose office it is to save souls from perdition, makes this salvation itself a mere external appliance, and is now degraded so far as to perform this office in a merely external fashion.”[10] Hegel recounts the selling of indulgences so as to build St. Peter’s, and he describes Luther as turning away from the mere sensuous and external, to issues of the “Spirit and the Heart” or what he calls “Absolute Ideality.” “Luther’s simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of Deity — infinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ — is in no way present and actual in an outward form, but as essentially spiritual is obtained only in being reconciled to God — in faith and spiritual enjoyment.”[11]

Focus is on the individual, who through faith and the Spirit, is filled with the “Divine Spirit” and not the external transformation of material elements. Ending external focus means “there is no longer a distinction between priests and laymen; we no longer find one class in possession of the substance of the Truth.”[12] The heart of every man can come into possession of the Truth, as an “absolute inwardness.” Hegel does not mean that this inwardness or “Subjectivity” is without its objective side, which is realized in an “actualized Christian Freedom.” “Time, since that epoch, has had no other work to do than the formal imbuing of the world with this principle, in bringing the Reconciliation implicit [in Christianity] into objective and explicit realization.”[13]

Faith and spirituality though, are not focused on a “sensuous object” serving as God, “nor even of something merely conceived, and which is not actual and present, but of a Reality that is not sensuous.”[14] There is the full presence of Christ, but as Hegel points out, this is not faith in a material object or even faith in historical events. “In fact it is not a belief in something that is absent, past and gone, but the subjective assurance of the Eternal, of Absolute Truth, the Truth of God.”[15] This is an achievement of the Holy Spirit, who alone brings about this Truth in the individual, constituting “his essential being.”[16]

For Hegel, this is true Catholicism, having taken away the focus on “externality.” But he is careful to point out that neither is this Calvinism, which reduces the Supper to a “mere commemoration, a mere reminiscence.” Luther’s view, according to Hegel, was that there is an “actual presence though only in faith and in Spirit. He maintained that the Spirit of Christ really fills the human heart — that Christ therefore is not to be regarded as merely a historical person, but that man sustains an immediate relation to him in Spirit.”[17] In Bartlett’s parallel description, “The anamnesis (remembrance) is then a work of semiosis,” that is, the mind and heart, in this mindful remembrance take on a depth of transformed meaning. It is “a day-by-day performance of divine meaning for the sake of human transformation.”[18] Bartlett, a former Catholic priest, sounds very much like Hegel’s Luther.

Jesus as Temple, in the Lord’s Supper, brings together the imagery of “death passing over” in multiple senses. No longer is there the necessity of violent sacrifice, whether that of religion or state, so as to avoid death. Death is no longer the impetus of control (over the Egyptians and humanity) and it is no longer the means of escape, as the Passover of Christ brings about a real deliverance from the clutches of death. The disciples find forgiveness, mercy, and love, through living out or being the body of Christ. This is the new non-ritualistic and non-sacrificial or “spiritual sacrifice” practiced in this new Temple of Living Stones (I Pet 2:5). As Bartlett sums it up, “At the end of the walk to Emmaus, and a dense catechesis showing the necessity of the Messiah’s suffering and non-retaliation, something happened; the living reality of this nonviolent Lord found its breakthrough point in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:35).”[19] 

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 168.

[2] Norman O. Francis, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple and its Cult in the Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy Thesis: The University of Edinburgh 2020) 229-230. There are discrepancies between when exactly the Festival of Unleavened Bread and Passover occurred, but the consensus is that by the first century the two festivals may have been fused.

[3] Bartlett, 171.

[4] Ibid, 170-171.

[5] Ibid, 171.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 172.

[9] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 229.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 432.

[11] Ibid, 433.

[12] Ibid, 434-435.

[13] Ibid, 435.

[14] Ibid, 433.

[15] Ibid, 434.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Barlett, 173,

[19] Ibid.

William T. Cavanaugh: Recovering The Body of Christ from the Modern Nation State

Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.

Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.

Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2]  “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]

Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.

Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7]  It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.

In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,

liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen … [11]

In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.

Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.

As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.

Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]

This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]

This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]

Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.

 In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. 

[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.

[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] McCarraher, 4.

[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.

[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.

[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.

[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.

[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.

Is Homelessness Inherent to Christian Faith?

‘A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears. Father, have you never thought of the difference in the soil, the difference in the water?’ [1]  

Shusaku Endo’s Silence

I lived for a year in Kagoshima, near the port where Francis Xavier first landed in Japan and inaugurated the period known as the Christian century in Japan (1549-1650). In an obscure area near Kinko Bay there is a long low stone wall and a golden statue of Xavier, which must be sought out to be found. This presumably marks the spot from which Xavier would begin to evangelize his way northward for one year, as the first of a series of missionaries. Japan was one of the most rapidly evangelized countries in all of Asia, with the Christian population numbering some 300,000 by the end of the century. Three hundred kilometers to the north, in Nagasaki, are the statues of the 26 martyrs, which marks the end of the Christian century and the beginning of one of the harshest and most “successful” persecutions in Christian history.

Shasaku Endo’s novel, Silence (quoted in the epigraph) builds upon several historical facts in addition to the above: the Japanese persecution is the most pervasive, brutal, and enduring on record; a Jesuit priest Cristovao Ferreira apostatized under torture; another Jesuit named Chiara (upon whom the character Rodrigues is based), hoping to make amends for Ferreira, entered Japan as part of a group of ten and all ten were captured and apostatized; Inoue was a Japanese magistrate set upon eradicating Christianity; the pit torture, hanging victims upside down in pits of excrement and opening a slight wound in the forehead, hanging sometimes for days and even weeks, was an effective and excruciating means of torture. The translator of Endo’s novel includes this description of the torture:

The victim was tightly bound around the body as high as the breast (one hand being left free to give the signal of recantation) and then hung downwards from a gallows into a pit which usually contained excreta and other filth, the top of the pit being level with his knees. In order to give the blood some vent, the forehead was lightly slashed with a knife. Some of the stronger martyrs lived for more than a week in this position, but the majority did not survive more than a day or two.[2]

Burning proved to be too quick and seemed to only encourage more martyrs. Richard Cocks describes seeing “fifty-five persons of all ages and both sexes burnt alive on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto (October 1619) and among them little children of five or six years old in their mothers’ arms, crying out, ‘Jesus receive their souls!,”[3] Killing and burning became something of a spectacle as tens of thousands would gather to watch, and many would subsequently convert. Thus the authorities devised various forms of excruciating torture. It was after six hours hanging in the pit that Ferreira apostatized, and this was significant as he was the first missionary to do so. Despite crucifixions, burnings, water-torture, and hanging in the pit, no missionary had apostatized until 1632. Being the acknowledged leader of the mission and the fact that he began collaborating with his persecutors, Ferreira’s apostasy proved a shock to the Christians.

Endo adds a twist to the story, in that he has Rodrigues apostatize, not due to his own tortures, but in order to save others. Inoue, in the story indicates that if he is willing to trample on an image of Christ (fumie) he can save his flock from torture – and in the story, Ferreira assists Inoue and had also apostatized under these conditions. After a long period of resistance, Rodrigues tramples on the fumie when Christ calls out to him: “‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.’ The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”[4]

The problem concerns literal interpretation from Japanese to English, which also entails several levels of cultural awareness. In the English the trampling is an imperative, but as Matthew Potts notes, “There is a sense of a quiet willingness to suffer indignity in the Japanese that softens the English’s annihilating command for erasure.”[5] The voice in Endo’s novel is on the order of a Japanese mother assuring her child that there is no end to indulgence (amae). Christ’s identity, like that of a good Japanese mother (Takeo Doi’s point), in Potts description, can “accommodate effacement.”  

The inquisitor, in suggesting that the act is only an outward formality and in no way impinges upon continued private belief, taps into a long history in Japan of an inward (ura, honne) and outward (omote, tatemae) self. Wearing a mask, in Doi’s estimate, is a requirement of Japanese society. The inquisitor and his translator require, not inward, but only outward conformity: “Give up this stubbornness! We’re not telling you to trample in all sincerity. Won’t you just go through with the formality of trampling? Just the formality! Then everything will be alright.’”[6] Martin Scorsese’s inquisitor goes to some lengths to explain that it is a simple lifting and movement of the foot.

Outward conformity and inward secrecy are not simply the lot of Japanese Christians, but are the burden of every Japanese according to Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask), Natsume Sōseki (I Am a Cat), and in Doi’s analytic approach.  The problem is then, whether this is simply an intensification of Japanese cultural requirements which, under this definition, require secrecy, mask wearing, and what western Christians might dub hypocrisy.

On the other hand, is not the trampling an extreme example of the kenotic outpouring of the love of Christ (which is the argument of Ferreira in trying to convince Rodrigues)? Every Christian, like his Master is called to lose himself, but in this instance this losing is absolute: one must be willing to give their soul for love of the other. Ferreira argues, ‘Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men.’ ‘No, no!’ said the priest, covering his face with his hands and wrenching his voice through his fingers. ‘No, no!’ ‘For love Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had.’[7] One must ultimately be willing to relinquish everything in order to follow Christ, according to the priest.

As Patricia Snow remarks, the novel creates an unresolvable dilemma, “If it is always and everywhere difficult for human beings to hold in their minds seemingly contradictory tenets of Christianity, Silence makes the task feel impossible. Mercy is pitted against truth, love of neighbor against allegiance to God.”[8]

In Snow’s opinion this is not really the problem of 17th century Japanese Christians but reflects modern peculiarities: “What this means is that the deeply disturbing, polarizing drama at the heart of Silence is an anachronism. It is a projection of the modern mind, a hallucination of an anxious, confused, and codependent imagination.” She notes, what Endo himself seems well aware of, that death of God theology is in the air in the time Endo is composing Silence. Ferreira (Endo) “is speaking not the language of seventeenth-century Jesuits, but the language of Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, twentieth-century Death of God theologians who believed that not only Christ but Christianity must die, that it is not finally Christian to be Christian, and that in the name of Christian charity, Christians must reject Christian truths.”[9] Snow may be correct about the anachronism; in fact Endo would probably agree, as he describes his own struggle with nihilism.

Endo’s personal struggle may have been with a similar sort of “Christian” nihilism but he see his faith as a rescue from this darkness: “For a long time I was attracted to a meaningless nihilism and when I finally came to realize the fearfulness of such a void I was struck once again with the grandeur of the Catholic Faith.” Though Endo finds comfort in his Catholicism, it is not too far removed from the modern non-religious form of the faith. “This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism with my Japanese blood … has taught me one thing: that is, that the Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian tradition or history or legacy or sensibility.”[10] This no tradition, no history, no legacy, sensibility is not simply Japanese but modern. In fact, the Japanese inherit this precise sense, not because they are Japanese, but because they are modern.

The Japan Endo projects into the Tokugawa period, with its mud-swamp qualities, its inherent mask wearing, and its native soil poisoning the Christian tree, is very much a modern sensibility. There is not a “Japanese” ethnic identity, Japanese uniqueness, or even a sense of Japaneseness, prior to the Meiji restoration. The ideology crafted in the Meiji Restoration unifies the disparate religions, dialects, and clan identities, under State Shinto. “Japanese identity” is not a “naturally” occurring or universal phenomena but is an ideology which required its own missionaries, forced adherence, and forms of punishment. The goal of this formation of a national or ethnic identity was to ward off the Christian west and to make of Japan a colonizing power like Great Britain and the United States. In other words, modern ideology is the stuff making up Endo’s mud swamp, and not the peculiarities of being Japanese.

This seems problematic for Matthew Pott’s argument: “I would like to suggest that what the critical analyses of this novel have neglected to recognize is that Rodrigues has not really been asked here to renounce his moral integrity or his religious faith. What he has been asked to reject in this climactic scene is his ethnicity. What he is being forced to abandon is his whiteness.”[11] This certainly does not fit the 17th century nor does it really work even as an anachronism, as non-Japanese can never become Japanese under the modern ideology, no matter what they relinquish, no matter what name they take, no matter the color of their skin. The ideology is militant in its advocacy of Japanese uniqueness: the Japanese language is unique, the Japanese brain is unique, the Japanese body is unique, the Japanese islands are unique, and Japanese nature is unique. This modern ideology of uniqueness was non-existent in the Tokugawa period, but is precisely the ideology that would make of Japan an anti-Christian mud swamp. It was this sense that was missing in the rapid turn of 300,000 Japanese to Christianity and in the underground church’s survival of 200 years of persecution.

Certainly, Christians in Japan understand the struggle Endo describes in his novel, of feeling homeless and divided between being Japanese and Christian. As Endo describes it, “Japan is a swamp because it sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process. It is the spider’s web that destroys the butterfly, leaving only the ugly skeleton.”[12] After more than twenty years in Japan, I understand the eroding effects Japanese culture, Japanese nationalism, and Japanese identity may have on the Christian faith, but I felt Endo-like homelessness most intensely upon my return to the United States. I no longer recognized the peculiar faith produced by the soil and water of this country: the political nationalism, the insipid preaching, the shallow music, the consumer mentality, and outright hostility toward the depth of the gospel.

As William Cavanaugh points out, “Endo is misunderstood if this struggle is limited to a Japanese context.”[13] God in Christ had nowhere to lay his head, and was ultimately reviled and crucified. Resolving this original homelessness may be the continual temptation of Constantinian Christianity, colonial Christianity, national Christianity, American Christianity, or simply institutional Christianity. The issue of effacement of Christ is always at stake in Christianity’s encounter with culture and the attempt to fill in his features (give him a home) through cultural rootedness.

[1] Shusaku Endo, Silence: A Novel (p. 138). Lulu.com. Kindle Edition.

[2] Silence, 9.

[3] Silence, 9.

[4] Silence, 208.

[5] Matthew Potts, “Christ, Identity, and Empire in Silence” The Journal of Religion

Volume 101, Number 2 April 2021, 193.

[6] Silence, 189.

[7] Silence, 206.

[8] Patricia Snow, “Empathy Is Not Charity,” First Things, October 2017

[9] Snow, Empathy is Not Charity.

[10] Silence, Translator’s Introduction, 14.

[11] Potts, 200.

[12] Silence, from the Introduction, 13.

[13] William T. Cavanaugh, “The God of Silence: Shusaku Endo’s reading of the Passion,” Commonweal, March 13, 1998, 10.