Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
George Gordon Lord Byron
(Oxford, 2008) [1812-18]
188 p.

She walks in beauty, like the night, and my ignorance of the life and poetry of Lord Byron is rather like the night too: dark and comprehensive. Nonetheless I took up this long poem with considerable interest. I’d come across excerpts from it here and there in my readings about Rome, and I thought I’d take a closer look to see what else, if anything, the poem has to say about the Eternal City.

That’s a narrow keyhole through which to approach a fairly wide-ranging poem, which recounts the travels of one Harold, a young and dissolute Englishman, as he rambles across the European continent. He lands first in Spain, makes his way east, stopping in Albania, and Greece, and eventually comes to Italy, where he visits, among other cities, Venice, Florence, and, yes, Rome.

The poem is allegedly based on Byron’s own European travels, which he undertook in the years 1809-11.

Harold is melancholy, undisciplined, and a rake:

Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.
(1, II)

In other words, we have here a Byronic hero, such as he is, and the poem, which was the first to bring Byron wide fame, is a notable example of English Romanticism in full flower. (Note that it was published just a few decades after the famous volume by which Wordsworth and Coleridge are said to have inaugurated Romanticism in England.) We find, for instance, the characteristic Romantic sense of the sublimity of Nature:

All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep: —
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentered in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.
(3, LXXXIX)

I was surprised to find that the anti-hero of the poem, whose brooding self-consciousness and jaundiced eye are supposed to seduce and repel us at once, was not so brooding, and especially not so jaundiced, as I had expected. When he comes to Greece, for instance, he is overwhelmed by the solemnity and glory of what once was, and says:

Where’er we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse’s tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon:
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold,
Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.
(2, LXXXVIII)

and then cries out with sincere admiration:

Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past
Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng:
Long shall the voyager, with th’ Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore:
Boast of the aged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,
As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore.
(2, XCI)

One has the distinct impression that Harold counts himself among the youth filled with Greece’s fame, himself a pensive pilgrim honouring the remnants of its splendid past.

In fact throughout the poem Harold shows a real desire to admire the great monuments, and to commune with the great tradition on which he has been nurtured. He is no mere tourist, no cynic in such matters. In comparison to twenty-somethings whom I have known, he comes across as positively effusive in his earnest praise:

Italia! too, Italia! looking on thee
Full flashes on the soul the light of ages,
Since the fierce Carthaginian almost won thee,
To the last halo of the chiefs and sages
Who glorify thy consecrated pages;
Thou wert the throne and grave of empires; still,
The fount at which the panting mind assuages
Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill,
Flows from the eternal source of Rome’s imperial hill.
(3, CX)

I hear in such verse more humility and sincerity than ironic sophistication. I may even say that I found in Harold, at least at such moments, an echo of my own feelings towards the European past, which is my cultural inheritance, and which I have laboured, here and elsewhere, to appropriate. This has been rather gratifying, not only inasmuch as Harold provides me with an eloquent — an, if anything, too eloquent — expression of my own feelings, but also inasmuch as it allows me to imagine myself a Byronic hero, a wholly unlooked-for denouement!

***

As to Harold’s sojourn in Rome, it was indeed the highlight of the poem for me (“O Rome! my country! city of the soul!”), and I cannot resist quoting some of my favourite stanzas. There may be no better image of the spirit of Romanticism than that of Byron — sorry, I meant Harold — standing in the moonlight gazing at the ruins of the Colosseum:

But when the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air,
The garland-forest, which the grey walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Caesar’s head;
When the light shines serene, but doth not glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot—’tis on their dust ye tread.
(4, CXLIV)

Here he wanders a bit north, into the warren of cobble-stoned streets of Old Rome, emerging into the piazza before the Pantheon:

Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime—
Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods,
From Jove to Jesus—spared and blest by time;
Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods
Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods
His way through thorns to ashes—glorious dome!
Shalt thou not last?—Time’s scythe and tyrants’ rods
Shiver upon thee—sanctuary and home
Of art and piety—Pantheon!—pride of Rome!

Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!
Despoiled yet perfect, with thy circle spreads
A holiness appealing to all hearts—
To art a model; and to him who treads
Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds
Her light through thy sole aperture; to those
Who worship, here are altars for their beads;
And they who feel for genius may repose
Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close.
(4, CXLVI-CXLVII)

Does your heart beat high? Do you feel nobler, even taller? Later he goes across the Tiber to St. Peter’s. Earlier in the poem he had let drop the casual anti-Catholic sentiments of an ordinary Englishman:

But here the Babylonian whore had built
A dome, where flaunts she in such glorious sheen,
That men forget the blood which she hath spilt,
And bow the knee to Pomp that loves to garnish guilt.
(1, XXIX)

but confronted with the glory of San Pietro he seems to forget himself:

But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone—with nothing like to thee—
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true,
Since Zion’s desolation, when that he
Forsook his former city, what could be,
Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,
Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.
(4, CLIV)

As he ponders it, walking beneath its sublime canopy, he senses the challenge it poses to his own soul, and he struggles to rise to it:

Not by its fault—but thine: Our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; e’en so this
Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great
Defies at first our nature’s littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
(4, CLVIII)

Who among us, confronted by a great work of art, has not experienced, or at least wanted to experience, such a thing? Even granting that an aesthetic experience is not the highest experience one might hope to have in a holy site, it’s nothing to sneer at.

I suppose I risk giving a lopsided view of the poem. It’s not all Rome, not all Italy. He doesn’t like Spain so much. And much of the poem is brooding, especially on the personal wreckage he left behind in England. But I came to the poem with something particular in mind, and I departed well-satisfied.

**

A word about the technical aspects of the poem. As is evident from the sections I’ve quoted, it is composed in Spenserian stanzas: ababbcbcc in iambic metre. It is a long poem, with nearly 500 such stanzas, split into four cantos of uneven length, and a few interpolations of verse in other metres and rhyme schemes. The poetry is astoundingly accomplished, technically. I haven’t actually tried it, but I imagine I’d have a horrendous time trying to produce even one such stanza of non-doggeral verse. To have the facility to write stanza after stanza, expressing and developing thought along the way, is a remarkable gift.

***

For my own benefit, I here append some other of the stanzas I appreciated most:

[Lament over Greece]
When riseth Lacedaemon’s hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens’ children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then mayst thou be restored; but not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust: and when
Can man its shattered splendour renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?
(2, LXXXIV)

[The natural beauty of Greece]
Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild:
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olives ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.
(2,LXXXVII)

[Rome and Italy]
The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome!
And even since, and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world, the home
Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree;
Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?
Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste
More rich than other climes’ fertility;
Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced
With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.
(4, XXVI)

[Praise of Tasso]
Peace to Torquato’s injured shade! ’twas his
In life and death to be the mark where Wrong
Aimed with their poisoned arrows—but to miss.
Oh, victor unsurpassed in modern song!
Each year brings forth its millions; but how long
The tide of generations shall roll on,
And not the whole combined and countless throng
Compose a mind like thine? Though all in one
Condensed their scattered rays, they would not form a sun.
(4, XXXIX)

[Laocoon]
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see
Laocoon’s torture dignifying pain—
A father’s love and mortal’s agony
With an immortal’s patience blending:—Vain
The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp,
The old man’s clench; the long envenomed chain
Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.
(4, CLX)

Veljo Tormis, RIP

The Estonian composer Veljo Tormis passed away on January 21. Here is an obituary from the New York Times. He was one of the elder statesman of musical life in Estonia — a country that punches well above its weight in this sphere. Arvo Pärt was one of his students.

Tormis’ music is quite interesting. He was greatly indebted to folk music traditions, and many of his compositions are inspired by folk songs or are new settings of traditional texts. Although he may have written some sacred music, I am not aware of any. His music is often extremely dramatic, charged with a Dionysian energy.

As an example of his art, here is Curse Upon Iron. The choir in this video (Nederlands Kamerkoor) is led by Tonu Kaljuste, one of the leading interpreters of Tormis’ music. I once had the privilege of attending a master class with Kaljuste in which he led his choir (the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, on that occasion) in a performance of this same piece. It was in a small room, with maybe thirty or so people present, and I’ll never forget how I felt engulfed by this strange, violent, and urgent music.

But Tormis could write simple, beautiful music as well. Here is “How Can I Recognize My Home”, one of my personal favourites:

Veljo Tormis, rest in peace.

A milestone

Today is the 10th birthday of this weblog! It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed.

I’ve enjoyed writing in this space, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know people by means of it. Most of all I’ve enjoyed the fame and glory that have been showered upon me as my blog’s influence has spread far and wide and covered the globe.

This is apparently the 1362nd post since the blog began. As a way of marking the milestone, let me link to the five most popular posts I’ve done. I have no idea what they are, since I haven’t looked at my stats in several years. Let’s see… Ah yes, here they are:

1. Building in the Middle Ages (2 March 2011)
2. Halloween costume ideas from Bob Dylan (24 October 2008)
3. Great moments in opera: La bohème (24 October 2011)
4. Messiaen and bird song (11 May 2008)
5. Favourites of 2008: Books (29 December 2008)

From this I deduce that 24 October is my best day to blog, and that I know of no way to predict what blog posts will be most popular.

My sincere thanks to everyone who takes the time to read All Manner of Thing. I wish you the very best, and I hope you’ll stick around for another 10 years.

McCarthy: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
(Vintage, 2005)
309 p.

I’d seen the Coen brothers’ film, of course, and admired it, and was curious to get to know the source. Also, it had been several years since I last sat down with a Cormac McCarthy book — I won’t say that I missed him, exactly, but encountering his voice again — arid, compressed, and bereft of punctuation — was like slipping into a familiar, if thorn-lined, shirt. There’s nobody quite like him.

The set-up is superb: a man out hunting comes upon the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, with bodies and bullets everywhere and a bag of money for the taking. He takes it, and the action of the novel unfolds. It’s a violent and sometimes brutal affair, but it has its moments of humanity as well, especially in the person of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (of whom we hear a good deal more here than in the film adaptation).

In movie circles, Anton Chigurh is sometimes named as one of the great screen villains of all time; it is a testament to Javier Bardem that he was able to bring McCarthy’s character to such chilling life. He’s chilling on the page too, but not, I think, to the same extent, and I found that I had always to call Bardem’s performance to mind to capture his full potential.

Chigurh is a character worth pondering. As usual with McCarthy we are given no insight into his private thoughts; we see his acts and we hear him speak, and that is all. Yet because he is such an unusual character — unusually cruel and inhumane — ascription of motives is more difficult than usual. As a result, Chigurh is perceived as something like a force of nature, or as fate, and he himself seems to agree with this perception, for more than once he speaks about how his actions just happen, or he determines his course of action based on the outcome of chance events — either way, he avoids personal responsibility. Yet, at the same time, he adheres to a certain moral code, or, if that adjective seems abused in this context, then to a code of conduct. Witness his rendezvous with Carla Jean, simply because he had made a promise. And, deeper down, there lurks the question of what motivates him in the first place. It is not lust for wealth, for he surrenders the money without hesitation. Nor does he seem to act from loyalty, for he turns on his employer when his employer turns on him. At best, he might act from a very personal sense of duty, bound by having given his word. But it is hard to be sure.

The book is more than just a thriller or an exhibition of violence. Threaded throughout are observations and reflections, sometimes hard-bitten and always terse, on law, human relationships, and the dissolution of society and virtue. It’s a sad and dark vision, and would be intolerable but for Sheriff Bell, who hasn’t entirely given up hope.

Hawke: Rules For a Knight

Rules for a Knight
Ethan Hawke
(Knopf, 2015)
172 p.

Stories of knights and ladies have an enduring place in children’s literature. Though they act for better and for worse, there is something intrinsically ennobling about a knight that makes him a suitable bearer of moral instruction. Knights protect the innocent, are loyal to their friends, honour God, fight bravely, and have good manners.

This same tradition of knightly conduct informs this charming little book. Framed as a letter written by one Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke, a fifteenth-century knight, to his children, it includes a sequence of short meditations on a variety of knightly virtues. There are aphorisms, parables, and brief meditations, none longer than a few pages, and many containing solid moral insight.

To give a few examples: the book opens with a short meditation on the value of solitude, which includes this thought:

“Just as it is impossible to see your reflection in troubled water, so too is it with the soul.”

Or, on gratitude:

“The only intelligent response to the on-going gift of life is gratitude.”

Or, on friendship:

“The quality of your life will, to a large extent, be decided by with whom you elect to spend your time.”

Or, on honesty:

“We are here to grow, and the truth is the water, the light, and the soil from which we rise. The armor of falsehood is subtly wrought out of the darkness and hides us not only from others but from our own soul.”

Or, on courage:

“Anything that gives light must endure burning.”

Similarly, Sir Thomas discusses patience, forgiveness, generosity, justice, discipline, love, and other virtues. Although platitudes do crop up here and there, for the most part I found the book’s advice to be sound, thoughtful, and well-expressed.

The book does fall short in one significant respect: it is a book of immanent ethics, without a transcendent dimension. Even subjects, like “faith” and “grace”, that naturally would lead in that direction are cut short, with predictably feeble results. (Of faith: “Sometimes to understand more, you need to know less.”) In general, the greater the gravity of the subject (“love”, “death”), the less adequate Sir Thomas’ treatment sounds to me. This is not surprising, for these are the most difficult subjects to treat adequately.

Still, there is much solid counsel in these pages, and the book would make, I would think, a splendid and suitable gift for a child of 10 or 12 years old.

**

At the end of the book is an acknowledgements section, and although the list of those to whom thanks is extended includes living people who are, perhaps, the author’s friends, it also includes quite a few dead people whom the author could know only through books. One gets the sense, when perusing the names, that these are, in one sense or another, the author’s spiritual sources, those through whom he has gleaned what wisdom he has. The names are worth pondering:

It would be a good exercise for each of us to compile our own such list of names.

**

Physically, the book is a handsome thing: a gorgeous hardback with gilt lettering and a ribbon to mark one’s place. The paper is sturdy, and the text is graced with numerous pencil drawings of birds; these are a fine addition, for they complement the meditative tone of the book by giving the eye something lovely and delicate to rest upon between lessons. The book is small, perfectly scaled for a child’s hand. The only design flaw is that the author’s name is too prominent on both spine and gilt cover. But this, in the usual course of things, is the publisher’s doing, not the author’s.

Speaking of the author, yes, it’s that Ethan Hawke: novelist, screenwriter, and Hollywood star. There’s a caricature of movie stars as pretty-faced bubble-heads, as men without chests, and it would be contrary to evidence to claim this caricature wholly false, but this little book proves that it isn’t wholly true either. The illustrations are by Ryan Hawke, his wife.

Musical anniversaries in 2017

With the turning of the year, I like to plan a few focused listening projects that I’ll undertake during the coming year, and often I structure these projects around significant anniversaries.

After looking through a comprehensive list (Thanks, Osbert.) of such anniversaries, I’ve settled on the following as worthy of personal observance:

Birthdays

450 years

• Claudio Monteverdi
• Thomas Campion

Memorials

25 years

• John Cage
• Olivier Messiaen

50 years

• Zoltán Kodály

250 years

• Georg Philipp Telemann

500 years

• Heinrich Isaac

The heavyweights for me are Messiaen’s 25th and Monteverdi’s 450th; I’ll be spending a lot of time with each of those wonderful composers. For Messiaen, I’ll be listening to the piano music, the organ music, the Quatuor, his symphony, and the large-scale orchestral works. For Monteverdi it will be his madrigals (all nine books), at least three of his operas, and his sacred music, especially the Vespers of 1610.

My collection of music by the others is more modest in scale, but I’ll make an effort to get to know it better. I have the feeling that Cage, in particular, wrote a lot of music that I don’t know at all; I also have the feeling it may not be worth my time. I have similar thoughts about Telemann. Kodály, I think, will reward attention.

Apart from these, I’m also planning to focus this year on the music of Bruckner and Elgar. Why Elgar? It’s odd, but for several months I’ve been feeling that I’d really like to immerse myself in his music. I can’t explain it. Perhaps an hour or two in his company will cure me.

Endo: Silence

Silence
Shūsaku Endō
(Taplinger, 1980) [1966]
294 p. Second reading.

“Now a Major Motion Picture,” as they say, and I count myself among those anticipating Martin Scorcese’s long-gestated film adaptation of this, one of the notable, but controversial, Catholic novels of the twentieth century.

I want to discuss some aspects of the novel in detail, and this will involve spoilers. If you’ve not read the novel, you might wish to stop here.

*

The book is set in the early seventeenth century. We follow Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit priest preparing to depart for Japan, where a severe persecution has oppressed the Christians and led some, including a revered Jesuit missionary, Fr Ferreira, into apostasy, or so the rumours run. Rodrigues doesn’t believe it, and embarks for Japan full of confidence.

He discovers soon enough that the persecution is no rumour, and he and his companion priest, Fr Garrpe, spend much of the first half of the novel in hiding or on the run, ministering where they can to the beleaguered Christian faithful. In the novel’s second half Rodrigues is captured and pressured to apostatize, an act dramatized by stepping on a fumie, a bronze picture of Christ’s face. “Only a formality,” he is told, but clearly not considered such by the people, nor by Rodrigues, who has a special devotion to the face of Jesus.

Silence has been regarded with admiration and suspicion since its publication. It is admired because it is undoubtedly a fine novel: well-written, memorable, and challenging. But many readers, especially Catholics, have found it troubling, and for a variety of reasons.

Some have objected to the dispiriting arc of the story. Why write or read a novel about Catholics who apostatize under persecution? This I take to be a weak objection, for such persecutions, and the very real and human challenges they force on the faithful, are as much a part of our history as any more positive tale, and should we not hold the plights of our beset brothers and sisters close to our hearts as well, even though they fall short? Especially today, when persecution is a real and widespread reality in many parts of the world, we do well not to turn our eyes away.

A more substantive criticism concerns the way that Rodrigues finally apostatizes. He is imprisoned but treated well, while other Catholic prisoners are subjected to brutal tortures, and Rodrigues is told that the torture will stop only if he, Rodrigues, apostatizes. His motive in stepping on the fumie, then, is plausibly not to apostatize, but only to bring relief to those who suffer.

I think this doubt has some merit, and I think it plausible that Rodrigues’ sin is not really apostasy. There is some evidence in the books final pages that he retains his faith, although he lives as a Japanese and has forsaken the duties of the priesthood. But if his sin is not apostasy, it is, on this reading, certainly lying and causing scandal, for by his actions he brings the faith into disrepute and leads others to believe he has apostatized. Rodrigues is not exonerated; his desire to do good by evil means still involves him in evil. He obviously falls far short of the example of uprightness and courage set by, for example, the Roman martyrs, who refused to offer a pinch of incense to the bust of Caesar.

A second, more vexing, element of his apostasy is that in the moments before he tramples the fumie Rodrigues sees the face of Christ urging him to trample it. The passage reads:

The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on 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.”

The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.

This flirts with sacrilege on Endō’s part, for Christ appears in the role of tempter. In the Gospels Christ comforts sinners with words of mercy and forgiveness, he does not do so prior to the sin, but only after; prior to the sin he urges them to sin no more. And it is not true that Christ came into the world in order to be trampled on by men; he came to save their souls.

Just prior to this dramatic climax, Fr Ferreira tries to convince Rodrigues to apostatize, arguing that trampling on the fumie is “the most painful act of love that has ever been performed,” and that “Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men”. Trampling on the image of Christ is framed as a kind of self-denial, in which Rodrigues is urged to sacrifice that which is most dear to him — his conscience — for the good of others. This, we have to say, is deeply confused. That one should sacrifice one’s conscience as a form of self-denial, doing evil as a kind of asceticism, or even out of love for neighbour, is clean contrary to the moral teaching of the Church, which says both that there is always a strict obligation to obey one’s conscience and that love of neighbour is rightly rooted in love of God and of oneself (which we have on good authority); therefore one could never rightly show love to one’s neighbour by intentionally doing harm to one’s own soul.

These faults, most of which are packed onto just a few pages, mar a novel that otherwise has much to recommend it. I was particularly drawn, for example, to a secondary character, Kichijiro, who apostatizes early on, but who then follows Rodrigues throughout his wanderings and imprisonment, on the periphery, but intervening now and then to help Rodrigues. Kichijiro, we eventually come to learn, is truly repentant for his sin, and seeks to make amends. There were times when I wished I could read his story instead of Rodrigues’; it is a story in which I expect the imperatives of conscience, the horror of sin, and the mercy of Christ would be major themes.

An important question raised by the novel concerns the challenges of presenting the Gospel to a culture that has not heard it before. At first Rodrigues is impressed by the spread of Christianity in Japan following the initial mission of St Francis Xavier. “Our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth,” he thinks. But when he finally meets Fr Ferreira, the latter complains that the Japanese could not truly accept the faith, for when they attempted to adopt it they changed it. He says to Rodrigues:

“But in the churches we built throughout this country the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine. If you call that God…” Ferreira lowered his eyes and moved his lips as though something had occurred to him. “No. That is not God. It is like a butterfly caught in a spider’s web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton. In Japan our God is just like that butterfly caught in the spider’s web: only the exterior form of God remains, but it has already become a skeleton.”

The habits and categories of thought of the Japanese were sufficiently different from those of Christian lands that this mistranslation was seemingly inevitable. Ferreira therefore concluded that missionary work in Japan was pointless. He ought to have concluded that missionary work in Japan must be slow and careful, giving adequate respect to that country’s native culture, and that missionaries to Japan, like himself, must be patient. But the frustration is an understandable one, and the challenge is a real one that the Church must always grapple with.

Another major theme explored in the novel, from which it takes its name, is the silence of God in the face of suffering. Again and again Rodrigues has to confront the fact that he sees the Japanese Christians suffering, sometimes horribly, and yet God seems absent. There is a partial answer to this question, perhaps, in the fact that Rodrigues recapitulates the Passion of Christ in his own suffering — on numerous occasions he notes how one or another of his experiences reminds him of an episode in the Passion — and so Christ is present to Rodrigues in an intimate way, though Rodrigues himself does not see it. But what this story is lacking is an analogue of the Resurrection. Instead, Rodrigues’ commitment dwindles away, the persecution continues, and, in the long run, Japanese Christianity is very nearly exterminated. And this is what actually happened.

The novel is a haunting one. I’d be most interested to hear from others whether I’ve interpreted it sensibly or not.