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“Ideology and Christian Freedom” by Matthew A. Stanley (Thoughts)
A Theo-Political Reading of Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”
‘In the long run, pure fear through the application of violence can’t forge the lasting peace which a nationalist regime hopes to achieve. The sort of violence which forges nations must be internalized to become durable’ (p 84) — and so Matthew Stanley charts the course for a profound and unforgettable interpretation of Silence by Shūsaku Endō. Stanley considers the admonishments of Žižek on “Western Buddhism,” where we withdraw into a private, “interior space” for our spiritual life and nourishment, and Stanley makes the case that we should understand Silence as the story of a Christian committing this very mistake. We make a grave error if we conclude from a lack of direct force in the world that there is also a lack of indirect power (as perhaps the Capital-Nation-State of Karatani wants us to think), and Stanley helps us see how power gradually and slowly convinces Fr. Rodriquez to withdraw into a “private faith” that makes him complicit with worldly power. How this happens, and what consequences this might have for us today, is what Matthew Stanley meticulously and convincingly lays out.
“Fumi-e Cultue” (as Makoto Fujimura discusses) was where suspected Christians were required to step on an image of Christ or Mary to “show” (not merely “say,” please note) that they didn’t believe in Christ. An apostate is baptized, so this rejection was notably powerful. For Stanley, ‘[t]he fumi-e begins to answer the question of how a fisherman in Goto village on the southern tip of Kyushu may come to experience himself as ‘Japanese’ in the same sense that someone in the heart of Kyoto or Edo might’ (85), and the answer is through an aesthetic experience of power which can transform people within. ‘As everyone steps on the physical fumi-e forced upon them by the regime […] they […] also possessed a personal fumi-e which they step on in their hearts’ (86). The inner and the outer are not separated, but once a trauma like this occurs, we may (want to) split them to live with ourselves — a temptation into which Fr. Rodriquez arguably gives.
Stanley warns us that we are always vulnerable to ‘the operation of ideology [which] aims to reduce [our] cognitive dissonance and to assimilate itself to the dominate lifestyle of the group’ (214). This point in mind, I found it particularly compelling when Stanley described the ways that Inoue manipulated Rodriguez to end up “inwardly-ranged” in and by a “private faith,” stressing how ‘Inoue never orders violence against Rodriquez. The violence against the victims — the Japanese-Christians — never includes Rodriguez himself, and thus Rodriguez never becomes the victim which he always imagined he would become’ (173). ‘Rodriguez requests again and again that he should be punished, but he never is,’ suggesting that Inoue denies Rodriguez ‘enjoyment from his identification with the sufferings of Christ’ (175). Stanley notes that ‘seeing his trials through the lens of the life of Christ has served to keep [Rodriguez] together mentally and emotionally throughout this difficult journey in Japan’ (175), and in denying Rodriguez suffering, Inoue is denying Rodriguez togetherness. Softness breaks him, for softness denies Rodriguez a means to identify with Christ, ‘to fully unite himself to that archetype which he holds out for himself’ (175). Until he is offered the fumi-e, that is, toward which Rodriguez has been groomed to find a way to see it as a suffering which makes him “like Christ”…
By the time Inoue has Rodriguez brought to the fumi-e, Rodriguez is desperate to regain his enjoyment, and Rodriguez is thus primed to find a way through interpretation to turn “stepping on the fumi-e” into an act of martyrdom and enjoyment, exactly as Rodriguez does. How might we today similarly be undergoing “grooming” we don’t recognize? What “enjoyments” might the Capital-Nation-State deny us so that we are primed to interpret something into an inward-range exactly as the Capital-Nation-State would have of us? How might we be being made ‘sufficiently malleable?’ (177). Perhaps we’re fine? Perhaps we’re fine…
‘The Spirit community which is practicing the freedom of God sides with the contradiction through its commitment to the scapegoat, that rejected and contradictory element of the social body, and thereby works to achieve a freer and more beautiful communion through attempting to find an answer which supersedes and overcomes this contradiction’ (214–215). Stanley argues that despite Rodriquez’s genuine commitment to Christ, ‘Rodriquez betrays th[e] message by turning away from the contradiction’ and siding with power, ‘find[ing] solace in an interior and ineffectual faith’ (215). What is Rodriquez’s mistake? ‘He forgets that Christ does not demand sincerity, but rather a costly sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion of authenticity, but something far more terrifying — becoming a vessel in which God’s freedom becomes concrete in the world through love’ (215–216). Otherwise, ‘[r]eligion, the deepest thing of the heart, [easily] becomes a private matter which one is expected to sacrifice at a moment’s notice for the sake of a mere formality’ (86). ‘Does this describe us?’ — this is not a question we can simply ask ourselves. We are to be in a world and community. What says others? Are they silent?
Matthew Stanley is an insightful and eloquent writer, and I would highly suggest picking up a copy of his excellent book today. I have only scratched the surface of everything he has to offer.
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For more by Matthew Stanley, please visit Samsara Diagnostics today!
