Religious Arrogance Theme Analysis

Although Rodrigues makes his missionary voyage to Japan out of a self-sacrificing desire to serve Japanese Christians, his actions and thoughts betray a notable and damning pride and selfish attitude that is intertwined with his desire to serve. Rodrigues’s character reveals the arrogance often present within the proselytizing missionary and suggests that even the most seemingly devout people can also be self-serving to a fault. Through Rodrigues, Endō argues that such arrogance is a great danger to others, especially those people whom the missionary hopes to help.

Although Rodrigues’s initial belief in the Gospel and evangelism is pure and unwavering, it is interspersed with his own pride, demonstrating that dedication to service and unrecognized arrogance may exist within the same individual. Rodrigues’s love for Jesus Christ compels him to share that love with the persecuted Japanese people, even though it means he will never return to Portugal and will most likely experience suffering and even death, as have the many missionaries who have preceded him in Japan. Such a conviction suggests a level of selflessness, as his desire to serve God is stronger than his desire to protect himself. However, in spite of Rodrigues’s desire to serve and his disregard for his own safety, he clearly harbors a heightened view of himself. Although Rodrigues feels compassion for the Japanese peasants, he also feels revulsion at their squalor and their smell. As he lives amongst them and shares in their poverty, Rodrigues often observes that the Japanese peasants live “like beasts,” but notably never refers to himself as such even when he shares their lifestyle, suggesting an innate sense of his own superiority over them. Rather, as a priest and the lone purveyor of Christianity to such apparently wretched people, Rodrigues regards his life and role as “deeply meaningful.”

Further intertwining his arrogance with his religious service, Rodrigues constantly parallels his own suffering with Christ’s suffering, seemingly equating himself with Christ in his own mind. When Rodrigues is reviled by a crowd of people, he pictures Christ reviled; when Rodrigues is on trial before the magistrate Inoue, he imagines Christ standing before Pilate; when he sees his own Haggard reflection in a pool of water, he pictures it as Christ’s face staring back at him. Imagining himself as Christ denotes a staggering level of self-importance—a literal savior complex, though robed in self-sacrificing religious conviction. This is particularly ironic, since it is the Japanese peasants who suffer the most pain and torture (like Christ) because of his refusal to apostatize, while Rodrigues himself experiences comparatively little physical pain. Even towards Ferreira, who has now apostatized and disgraced the Church, Rodrigues feels “the pity that a superior person feels for the wretched,” which is again hypocritical, since Rodrigues himself will eventually apostatize as well.

Although Rodrigues is laboring for “the conversion of Japan and the glory of God,” his arrogance leads him to have glorious expectations of his own martyrdom and sacrifice, suggesting that he (and other missionaries like him) strives after his own glory as well. Although Rodrigues expects he may be killed in Japan, the glorious death he pictures for himself is a childish fantasy: “I had long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints—how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This is the splendid martyrdom I had seen in my dreams.” Rodrigues’s dreams of a glorious death suggest that not only is he arrogant, but he also seeks his own glory as much as God’s glory through his missionary work. Rodrigues’s boldness seems at least partially motivated by the hope of leaving a legacy and being remembered well, indicating that he his religious purity is stained by his self-aggrandizing arrogance.

Rodrigues’s arrogance and glorious expectations ultimately lead to the Japanese peasants’ inglorious suffering, suggesting that such religious arrogance, though intertwined with a noble conviction to love and to serve, is a danger to everyone else. Rodrigues’s noble of vision of martyrdom is defeated when he sees the Japanese peasants executed for their faith. Rather than glorious, the deaths are agonizing, slow, and seem to leave no mark upon the world, no glory in their wake. After watching several men drowned for their faith, he reflects, “And the sea which killed them surges on uncannily—in silence.” There seems to be no redemption for them, or for Rodrigues himself, only pointless suffering and death. Although Rodrigues encourages several Japanese peasants to apostatize in order to save themselves, his arrogance as a priest prevents him from apostatizing for a long time, even though it causes the torture and deaths of several Japanese Christians, since it would make him a shameful and traitorous figure in the Church’s eyes. Ferreira and the Japanese officials scold Rodrigues for bringing suffering on others over his own ego, saying, “You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation.” As Ferreira recognizes Rodrigues’s arrogance, since he was once similarly prideful and caught in the exact same position. Rodrigues’s arrogance, though intertwined with his Christian convictions and love for Christ, ultimately endangers the people around him and causes more suffering than if Rodrigues had the humility to immediately shame and disgrace himself—as Christ did—and spare the suffering of others, even though it denies him a glorious martyr’s death condemns him to live out his days as a traitor to the Church.

The Christian missionaries’ pride in Silence is both relatable—for all people hope to leave a legacy of some kind—as well as deeply destructive, demonstrating how even a priest’s hidden sins and self-interest may rise to the surface and bring ruin to others.