Silence

by

Shūsaku Endō

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Silence makes teaching easy.

Sebastien Rodrigues Character Analysis

Father Rodrigues is the protagonist of the story. He is a Portuguese Catholic missionary who travels to Japan to be a priest for the Japanese Christians and discover the truth about his former mentor, Father Ferreira, who is rumored to have apostatized and renounced his faith. When Rodrigues travels to Japan with Kichijiro and Father Garrpe, he is bold and passionate about his faith in Jesus Christ, often reflecting on Christ’s face which he finds as beautiful as one finds their beloved. However, the suffering of the Japanese Christians and the fierce persecution they face challenges his faith in God, especially as he sees many faithful Christians ingloriously killed and is confused by God’s silence in the face of their suffering. Although Rodrigues once pictured suffering for Christ and martyrdom as the most glorious end to one’s life (revealing how his devotion to God is mixed with his desire for personal glory), his experience fleeing the Japanese officials, being betrayed by Kichijiro, and being imprisoned destroys that illusion. As Rodrigues wrestles with God’s silence and struggles to counter the magistrate Inoue’s arguments about Christianity’s compatibility with and benefit for Japan, his faith wavers. After meeting Ferreira, who is a true apostate and believes that Christianity can never take root in Japan, and realizing that the Japanese Christians will be tortured until he apostatizes, Rodrigues ultimately chooses to step on Christ’s image, feeling that Christ affirms his choice and suffers alongside him in his pain. Although Rodrigues becomes an agent of the Japanese government helping them to combat Christianity, and although he is expelled from the Church, he maintains a private devotion to Christ and faith in God. This suggests that although Rodrigues has betrayed the institution of Christianity, he has not ultimately betrayed Christ himself.

Sebastien Rodrigues Quotes in Silence

The Silence quotes below are all either spoken by Sebastien Rodrigues or refer to Sebastien Rodrigues. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Apostasy Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Their plan was to make their way into Japan in the throes of persecution in order to carry on an underground missionary apostolate and to atone for the apostasy of Ferreira which had so wounded the honor of the Church.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe, Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan, Juan de Santa Marta
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

“In that stricken land the Christians have lost their priests and are like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Someone must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.”

Related Characters: Juan de Santa Marta (speaker), Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:

Every day we keep praying that [Santa Marta’s] health may be restored as soon as possible. But he makes no progress. Yet God bestows upon man a better fate than human knowledge could possibly think of or devise […] Perhaps God in his omnipotence will make all things well.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Francisco Garrpe, Juan de Santa Marta
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

You know well that the early Christians thought of Christ as a shepherd […] And then in the Eastern Church one finds the long nose, the curly hair, the black bear. All this was creating an oriental Christ. As for the medieval artists, many of them painted a face of Christ resplendent with the authority of a king.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Never have I felt so deeply how meaningful is the life of a priest. These Japanese Christians are like a ship lost in a storm without a chart. I see them without a single priest or brother to encourage and console, gradually losing hope and wandering bewildered in the darkness.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:

These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them. The Buddhist bonzes [monks] simply treat them like cattle. For a long time they have lived in resignation to such a fate.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable painful business it was! The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which willed them surges on uncannily—in silence.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Mokichi, Ichizo
Related Symbols: The Sea
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

I called out to the young man at the oars, asking him for water; but he made no answer. I began to understand that ever since that martyrdom, the people of Tomogi regarded me as a foreigner who had brought disaster to them all—a terrible burden to them.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:

No! No! I shook my head. If God does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? […] From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist…

This was a frightening fancy. If he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Sea
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

This story was well known. Its moral was that a priest does not exist to become a martyr; he must preserve his life in order that the flame of faith may not utterly die when the church is persecuted.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Kichijiro
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:

If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than an unfortunate puppet for the glory of the drama which was the life and death of Christ.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Kichijiro
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

All those Christians and missionaries who had been tortured and punished—had they heard the gentle voice of persuasion prior to their suffering?

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“Father, we are not disputing about the right and wrong of your doctrine. In Spain and Portugal and such countries it may be true. The reason that we have outlawed Christianity in Japan is that, after deep and earnest consideration, we find its teachings of no value for the Japan of today.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

Stupefied, [Rodrigues] gazed at the old man [Inoue] who, naïve as a child, returned his gaze still rubbing his hands. How could he have recognized one who so utterly betrayed all his expectations? The man whom Valignano had called a devil, who had made the missionaries apostatize one by one—until now he had envisaged the face of this man as pale and crafty. But here before his very eyes sat this understanding, seemingly good, meek man.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Inoue, Valignano
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

On the day of my death, too, will the world go relentlessly on its way, indifferent just as now? After I am murdered, will the cicadas sing and the flies whirl their wings inducing sleep? Do I want to be as heroic as that? And yet, am I looking for the true hidden martyrdom or just for a glorious death? Is that I want to be honored, to be prayed to, to be called a saint?

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, The One-Eyed Man
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“You look upon missionary work as the forcing of love upon someone?”

“Yes, that’s what it is—from our standpoint.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Inoue (speaker)
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men, but instead of that, the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes, crouching on the ashen earth of Gethsemane that had imbibed all the heat of the day, alone and separated from his sleeping disciples, a man had said: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death.” And his sweat became like drops of blood. This was the face that was no before [Rodrigues’s] eyes. Hundreds and hundreds of times it had appeared in his dreams; but why was that only now did the suffering, perspiring face seem so far away? Yet tonight he focused all his attention on the emaciated expression on those cheeks.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:

“[Ferreira’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 [monk] keeps reminding Chuan, the path of mercy means simply that you abandon self. Nobody should worry about getting others into his religious sect.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan
Page Number: 156
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

This guard did not possess any aristocratic cruelty; rather was it the cruelty of a low-class fellow toward beasts and animals weaker than himself. [Rodrigues] had seen such fellows in the countryside in Portugal, and he knew them well. This fellow had not the slightest idea of the suffering that would be inflicted on others because of his conduct. It was this kind of fellow who had killed that man whose face was the best and most beautiful than ever one could dream of.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 176
Explanation and Analysis:

“You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say that you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. This will be saved from suffering. And you refuse to do so. It’s because you dread to betray the Church. You dread to be the dregs of the Church, like me.”

Related Characters: Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan (speaker), Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:

[Rodrigues] will now trample what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: “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.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Yet the face was different from that on which the priest had gazed so often in Portugal, in Rome, in Goa and in Macao. It was not a Christ whose face was filled with majesty and glory; neither was it a face made beautiful by endurance of pain; nor was it a face filled with the strength of a will that has repelled temptation. The face of the man who lay at his feet was sunken and utterly exhausted.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“Lord, I resented your silence.”

“I was not silent. I suffered beside you.”

“But you told Judas to go away: What thou dost do quickly. What happened to Judas?”

“I did not say that. Just as I told you to step on the plaque, so I told Judas to do what he was going to do. For Judas was in anguish as you are now.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis:
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Sebastien Rodrigues Quotes in Silence

The Silence quotes below are all either spoken by Sebastien Rodrigues or refer to Sebastien Rodrigues. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Apostasy Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Their plan was to make their way into Japan in the throes of persecution in order to carry on an underground missionary apostolate and to atone for the apostasy of Ferreira which had so wounded the honor of the Church.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe, Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan, Juan de Santa Marta
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

“In that stricken land the Christians have lost their priests and are like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Someone must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.”

Related Characters: Juan de Santa Marta (speaker), Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:

Every day we keep praying that [Santa Marta’s] health may be restored as soon as possible. But he makes no progress. Yet God bestows upon man a better fate than human knowledge could possibly think of or devise […] Perhaps God in his omnipotence will make all things well.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Francisco Garrpe, Juan de Santa Marta
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

You know well that the early Christians thought of Christ as a shepherd […] And then in the Eastern Church one finds the long nose, the curly hair, the black bear. All this was creating an oriental Christ. As for the medieval artists, many of them painted a face of Christ resplendent with the authority of a king.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Never have I felt so deeply how meaningful is the life of a priest. These Japanese Christians are like a ship lost in a storm without a chart. I see them without a single priest or brother to encourage and console, gradually losing hope and wandering bewildered in the darkness.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:

These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them. The Buddhist bonzes [monks] simply treat them like cattle. For a long time they have lived in resignation to such a fate.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable painful business it was! The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which willed them surges on uncannily—in silence.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Mokichi, Ichizo
Related Symbols: The Sea
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

I called out to the young man at the oars, asking him for water; but he made no answer. I began to understand that ever since that martyrdom, the people of Tomogi regarded me as a foreigner who had brought disaster to them all—a terrible burden to them.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:

No! No! I shook my head. If God does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? […] From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist…

This was a frightening fancy. If he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Sea
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

This story was well known. Its moral was that a priest does not exist to become a martyr; he must preserve his life in order that the flame of faith may not utterly die when the church is persecuted.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Kichijiro
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:

If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than an unfortunate puppet for the glory of the drama which was the life and death of Christ.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Kichijiro
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

All those Christians and missionaries who had been tortured and punished—had they heard the gentle voice of persuasion prior to their suffering?

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“Father, we are not disputing about the right and wrong of your doctrine. In Spain and Portugal and such countries it may be true. The reason that we have outlawed Christianity in Japan is that, after deep and earnest consideration, we find its teachings of no value for the Japan of today.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

Stupefied, [Rodrigues] gazed at the old man [Inoue] who, naïve as a child, returned his gaze still rubbing his hands. How could he have recognized one who so utterly betrayed all his expectations? The man whom Valignano had called a devil, who had made the missionaries apostatize one by one—until now he had envisaged the face of this man as pale and crafty. But here before his very eyes sat this understanding, seemingly good, meek man.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Inoue, Valignano
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

On the day of my death, too, will the world go relentlessly on its way, indifferent just as now? After I am murdered, will the cicadas sing and the flies whirl their wings inducing sleep? Do I want to be as heroic as that? And yet, am I looking for the true hidden martyrdom or just for a glorious death? Is that I want to be honored, to be prayed to, to be called a saint?

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, The One-Eyed Man
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“You look upon missionary work as the forcing of love upon someone?”

“Yes, that’s what it is—from our standpoint.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker), Inoue (speaker)
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men, but instead of that, the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes, crouching on the ashen earth of Gethsemane that had imbibed all the heat of the day, alone and separated from his sleeping disciples, a man had said: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death.” And his sweat became like drops of blood. This was the face that was no before [Rodrigues’s] eyes. Hundreds and hundreds of times it had appeared in his dreams; but why was that only now did the suffering, perspiring face seem so far away? Yet tonight he focused all his attention on the emaciated expression on those cheeks.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:

“[Ferreira’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 [monk] keeps reminding Chuan, the path of mercy means simply that you abandon self. Nobody should worry about getting others into his religious sect.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues, Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan
Page Number: 156
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

This guard did not possess any aristocratic cruelty; rather was it the cruelty of a low-class fellow toward beasts and animals weaker than himself. [Rodrigues] had seen such fellows in the countryside in Portugal, and he knew them well. This fellow had not the slightest idea of the suffering that would be inflicted on others because of his conduct. It was this kind of fellow who had killed that man whose face was the best and most beautiful than ever one could dream of.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 176
Explanation and Analysis:

“You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say that you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. This will be saved from suffering. And you refuse to do so. It’s because you dread to betray the Church. You dread to be the dregs of the Church, like me.”

Related Characters: Christovao Ferreira / Sawano Chuan (speaker), Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:

[Rodrigues] will now trample what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: “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.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Yet the face was different from that on which the priest had gazed so often in Portugal, in Rome, in Goa and in Macao. It was not a Christ whose face was filled with majesty and glory; neither was it a face made beautiful by endurance of pain; nor was it a face filled with the strength of a will that has repelled temptation. The face of the man who lay at his feet was sunken and utterly exhausted.

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues
Related Symbols: Christ’s Face
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“Lord, I resented your silence.”

“I was not silent. I suffered beside you.”

“But you told Judas to go away: What thou dost do quickly. What happened to Judas?”

“I did not say that. Just as I told you to step on the plaque, so I told Judas to do what he was going to do. For Judas was in anguish as you are now.”

Related Characters: Sebastien Rodrigues (speaker)
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis: