Friday Book Review -- SILENCE by Endo: "The Christian Vine in a Holy Swamp"

by David Pence

Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) published Chinmoku in Japanese in 1969. It was translated the same year in English as Silence. The movie by Martin Scorsese was produced in 2016 and is a faithful rendition of this spiritually searing book which is likewise a faithful rendition of several real life characters who lived in late 16th-century Japan. Christianity came to Japan in 1549 with the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier.

The Church expanded under the sensitive leadership of Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano who came in 1579 and greatly accelerated the incorporation of an indigenous clergy. The planting of Christianity occurred during the Sengoku period (1467-1603) of warring daimyos (local lords). The period ended with a coalition of warlords uniting the country under the Shogun Ieyasu initiating the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 -1867). The last warlords had occasionally struck out against the Christian converts and foreigners. In 1597 they crucified 26 Japanese and European missionaries in Nagasaki. The Tokugawas, however, would not be so haphazard. They understood the danger of Christianity to their project of restoring Japanese unity. They were encouraged to rid their land of the Catholic Portuguese priests especially by the Protestant English and Dutch seamen who had become their trading partners. Following the 1614 order of expulsion (when 300,000 of Japan's 20 million people were Christian) the methods of subsequent shoguns were increasingly systematic, brutal, and highly effective in eradicating the public expression of the iconic and sacramental life of Catholics. Below the surface, there were always embers.

The translation by William Johnston (Sophia University, Tokyo) includes well-chosen reflections of Endo in the Translator’s Preface: "I received baptism when I was a child... I had to decide to make this ready fit suit fit me or get rid of it. I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism... but I was finally unable to do so.  It is not just that I did not throw it off; I was unable to throw it off. The fact it had penetrated so deep in me was a sign it had become coextensive with me. But there was always a feeling it was something borrowed and I wondered what my real self was. This is the 'mud swamp Japanese' in me. From the time I first wrote novels, this confrontation of my Catholic self with the self underneath echoed in my work. I felt I had to find a way to reconcile the two."  Later, Endo says: "I was attracted to nihilism but then came to see the grandeur of the Catholic faith [editor's note: Scorsese says something very similar about his own Catholic journey.] The Japanese must absorb Christianity without a Catholic history...No doubt that is the peculiar cross that God has given the Japanese... I have trust in Catholicism because I find in it much more possibility than any other for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony."

The basic story of the novel is about heroic Japanese martyrs and several Portuguese priests who apostatize. The priests do not apostatize because of their own torture, but because others are being tortured unless the priests renounce the faith. The ingenious Japanese persecutor had quickly deduced that torturing priests unto death allowed their public courage to multiply the faithful. He helps them see clearly the new situation: "You are not sacrificing for the Japanese people. They are dying for you." The public sign of rejecting the faith was to trample on the fumie (an image of Christ). The older priest Ferreira, and then later at his urging his former student Fr. Rodrigues, both apostasize and spend the rest of their lives working in collaboration with their overlords. Each year they publicly trample the fumie. Little children point at them and taunt, "Apostate Peter!  Apostate Paul!" There is another apostate Kichijiro -- a Japanese 'Gollum' disfigured by his own lifetime of betrayals. Kichijiro knows he is weak and returns at the end of the book to ask Rodrigues to exercise his power of absolution one more time for a penitent. Knowing the priests back home would consider it a sacrilege and Ferreira would count it meaningless, he absolves the sinner. Rodrigues still loves the face of Christ and when he trampled he had seen in the Lord’s eyes the permission, "Trample, for this I came into the world that men may trample on me." At the end Rodrigues hears the Lord. "I was not silent. I suffered with you."

When Ferreira was convincing his student to step on the image, he argued against the entire project of evangelizing the Japanese: "...the Japanese are not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their way of thinking in a way we can never imagine. 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 wings and trunk -- the externals 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... The mission lost its meaning. the sapling I brought quickly decayed to its roots in this swamp. It was a long time before I noticed."

The face of Christ commanded "Trample!" -- and the voice of Christ said, "I was with you." The author sees this, somehow, related to Christ’s words to Judas, "Go quickly,  do what you must do." This aspect of the book has led to reflection, debate, and severe condemnation at notable conservative Catholic venues.

But here let us se if we can answer the arguments of the old apostate priest who is clearly presented in the book and movie as a broken and compromised man -- not in any way an admirable figure. Were his arguments like Lucifer's: a rationalization to get others to follow him in his turning from God? Or is there something of the swamp of Japan that will not let the sapling of Christianity grow in its soil? Those who read this book or see the movie and place the Portuguese Jesuits at the center of the narrative may miss this central question of a nation’s capacity for baptism.

One climax in the book is close to its beginning when this very special people of the islands first hear the good news. The film beautifully captures and the book states plainly, "For the first time they were treated like men." The absolute joy of the gospel message that God had come among us as Christ in history and now as the same Christ in the Eucharist filled men with a joy that sang the psalms until the waters finally washed over their crucified bodies. What did they care? They had eaten the bread of life. They were going to live forever. They now lived in the state of grace; they were in communion with God. Ferreira was right -- they knew a God that he did not. How they hungered for the chance of confession and opportunity for the Eucharist that only a priest could bring. They knew a God the Dutch and British traders did not know as well. They understood what it meant to belong to a Body. They understood that so much more deeply than their European fathers in the faith.

Three hundred years later the Japanese would function as a single social body with their Emperor as a head (see The Mystical Body of Japan). The army and farmers, especially, understood themselves as his working arms and marching legs. There is some great truth about the social nature of humanity and the particular manifestations of communal bonds that Japan (and China) know more deeply than most missionaries who teach them. In some way these ancient cultures are our elder brothers who have established communities of law, custom and ritual in accordance with  the natural law mandates of Noah.

And about that butterfly. It is true the trampled Christ no longer seems a king, much less God, hung mutilated on a cross or dissolved as man’s food. But he is mightier than any spider's web and there is no swamp he cannot draw into Himself. He has been deformed before to rise again in glory. The Body of Christ will not be fully glorified until the great nations of Japan and China are baptized. We who bring the sapling vine to these great cultural civilizations must be ready to see new contours of Christ’s reconstituted Body in their baptized forms. This beautiful book and great Catholic author have introduced another section of the orchestra to help fill the Catholic symphony.
 

A group of Red Guards attack the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Beijing 1966)

Christian Realism: A new paradigm for China

by David Pence

"Realists" in American foreign policy schools often argue a war is inevitable with a "rising China." To prepare for that occurrence, they advocate organizing ever larger trade and balancing military coalitions with China's regional neighbors. This is often called The Thucydides Trap after the Greek historian’s depiction of the impending press for war between an established power (Sparta) and a rising power (Athens).

Henry Kissinger ended his On China book by recalling a similar historical analogy. The Crowe memorandum was written in 1907 by a British foreign official stating that with the unification of Germany (1870), the new nation’s ability to launch a formidable navy was in itself an objective threat "incompatible with the existence of the British Empire." Sir Eyre Crowe said there was no idiomatic strategy which could arrest the inevitability of a war that must be prepared for and won. There is a significant body of American foreign policy thinkers and future aspirants for the presidency who would frame the relationship of established global power America to the rising "hegemony" of China in just those terms. John Mearsheimer, the "dean of US international relations" from the University of Chicago, makes the case for  offensive realism toward the Chinese. His message is that China's rising economic power will be translated into military power, and this will be a threat to America that should be resisted.
                                 

Henry Kissinger takes a very different approach in his indispensable book. While his overview ends with the analogy of Crowe's British Empire and a rising Germany, he begins with a contrast of the American strategic game of chess and the Chinese game of wei qi. The American game of strategy is built on attack and possession of central targets, while the Chinese contest is the placement of many pieces encircling opponents on multiple fronts to gain strategic advantage. He reminds us, "China’s greatest fear is that an outside power or powers will establish military deployments around China’s periphery capable of encroachments on China’s territory or its domestic institutions." When it has deemed that it is faced with such threat, rather than risk the outcome of what it saw as gathering trends, China has gone to war -- in Korea in 1950, against India in 1962, along the northern border with the Soviet Union in 1969, and against Vietnam in 1972. It is hard not to think of wei qi when one looks at a map of China and US military bases in Asia. Mr Kissinger advocates understanding that great civilization as she understands herself. He would build peace with China through diplomacy.

One vision that Kissinger describes of China is Colonel Liu Mingfu’s 2010 China Dream. Liu sees an Asian century led by China becoming "number one in the world" by displacing the United States. This will happen because China’s leadership will be wiser and more temperate than the U.S. China will eschew hegemony and act as primus inter pares of the nations of the world. Liu remembers fondly the tradition of Chinese emperors acting as the elder brother to kings of smaller, weaker countries. The incredible array of Chinese infrastructure projects around the world compare favorably to the US arms industry and militarized diplomacy of the post-cold war era. Liu, however, says this policy will only be possible by building a strong national martial spirit to deter or defeat the practitioners of amoral great power politics.

Behind every "China Dream" is an acute sense of the 19th century history of free trade (in opium) enforced by multiple western nations in the era of "unequal treaties." This era of western and then Japanese exploitation and conquest after centuries of world dominion as the Middle Kingdom has never been adequately avenged in terms of restored honor. This can only be done if China as a national organism is allowed to develop according to its own nature. This must be respected both in national diplomacy and in the presentation of Christianity (see Finding the Elder Brother in China). Besides the fear of encirclement that On China highlights, there is also embedded in the Chinese memory a fear of foreign religions introducing competing loyalty patterns against the nation. The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) was a Sino-Confucian-Christian hybrid that almost served as the Han Chinese formulation to overthrow the Manchu-dominated Qing dynasty. Maintaining social order is not a rationalization for tyrants in China. Eras of disorder cause millions of deaths. There was probably no civil war in human history as bloody as the Taiping movement. 20 million dead is the most conservative estimate of its death toll. When a ruling group loses the Mandate of Heaven there certainly is a tradition of violent upheaval by a group ready to establish a higher order of harmony. Expressive individualism, however, is not the highest good in China -- it doesn’t even make the list. It is entirely possible that a reformed Communist party could be the ruling vehicle of a Dream not at all Marxist but very Chinese. The disaster of the Cultural Revolution still resonates enough that Chinese leaders will try in the Deng Xiaoping (see book review) tradition to use the governing structures at hand. They will not worry "if the cat is white or black as long as it catches the mice."

A very different approach to the future of China comes from Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian. He explains the "killer apps" that defined the West and argues the rising eastern nations apply "the killer apps" like the work ethic, trade, and consumer society much more effectively than the declining cultures of the West. Mr. Ferguson sounds his own kind of alarm that the next century will be marked by a reawakening of China and the Asian nations. Ferguson is tone deaf to the religious and  spiritual basis of civilizations but he is enough of a historian to describe some realities very well. 

The United States may decide to defend a position of global dominance in the name of realism and the "get tough" presidential campaigns of little men or ambitious women. If these forces prevail then we will militarily contest the nation meant to be the central regional power in Asia as surely as we will fight Iran in the Mideast and Russia in Eurasia. Once again our adolescent leaders forget our shared history as allies and the disproportionate losses of the Chinese in WWII. (Review of Forgotten Ally). After WWII the US developed a worldwide system of military bases; and, yet, we join the Swedish internationalists in begrudging our old fighting allies the development of military installations in uninhabited islands off their own shores. We would argue that developing a diplomacy fostering a concert of powers respecting regional realities is a better road to brotherhood than encirclements.

To close this reflection, let us listen to an elder brother. Even years after his death, one can find no better insights about leaders and strategic realities than listening to Singapore’s founding father Lee Kwan Yew (1923-2015). These are selections on China from a book that transcribed his last speeches and then categorized his thoughts on history and international relations.  

ON CHINA IN ASIA

"Of course they plan on being the number one power in Asia. Why not? They have transformed a poor society into an economic miracle. Theirs is a culture of 4000 years with 1.3 billion people, many of great talent -- a huge and very talented pool to draw from. How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time, the world? ... The Chinese people have raised their expectations and aspirations. Every Chinese wants a a strong and rich China. This reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force. Unlike other emergent countries China wants to be China and accepted as such, not an honorary member of the West. At the core of their mindset is the world before colonization... China means 'Middle Kingdom,' recalling a world where they were dominant and related to other states as supplicants and vassals."

ON DENG XIAO PENG

"He is in my lifetime, the most impressive man I have ever met."

CHINA'S STRATEGY

"China is following an approach consistent with the ideas of the Chinese television series, 'The Rise of Great Powers,' produced by the the Party to shape discussion among the elites. The mistake of Germany and Japan was their effort to challenge the existing order. The Chinese are not stupid; they have avoided this mistake. Overall GDP, not GDP per person, is what matters in terms of power. The Chinese have calculated they need 30, 40, maybe 50 years of peace and quiet to catch up and change the Communist system to the market system. They must avoid the mistakes of Germany and Japan. Their competition for power, influence, and resources led in the last century to two terrible wars. The Russian mistake was to put too much into military expenditure and so little into civilian technology. So, their economy collapsed. The Chinese leadership has learnt that if you compete with American armaments, you will lose. You will bankrupt yourself. So avoid it, keep your head down and smile... for 40 or 50 years."

ASSESSING XI JINPING

"He has had a tougher life than Hu Jintao (Chinese leader 2002-2012). He is reserved, not in the sense that he won't talk with you but in the sense that he will not betray his likes and dislikes. He has iron in his soul... I would put him in the Nelson Mandela class of persons -- a person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment. In other words he is impressive."

ADDENDUM JANUARY 2019
Why the US and China should not go to War. 
by Kishore Mahbubani

When it came to eugenics, Justice Holmes was not the 'Great Dissenter' but an imbecile

[first published March 24, 2012]


The early decades of the 20th century were not only marked by many Western intellectuals placing their faith and hope in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, but by an even broader coalition of "progressives" who surrendered all common sense as they leapt to grab the shiny promises of the eugenics movement.

A few of the men who should have known better: Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, Leland Stanford, and Linus Pauling. Playwright George Bernard Shaw insisted that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man" -- and even suggested a lethal chamber!

With Indiana and California leading the way, more than thirty states passed laws allowing sterilization.

In 1927 the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was former president William Howard Taft. Among the justices were Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

An eugenics case from Virginia, Buck v. Bell, came before the Supreme Court. In early May, they ruled 8-1 (with Mr. Holmes writing for the majority) that compulsory sterilization was allowed. The high court agreed that it was proven that Carrie Buck, as well as her mother and daughter, were feeble-minded. In Justice Holmes’ ringing words:

"Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The lone dissenter was a man with deep enough roots – a strong Catholic faith – to keep him from being swept up in the eugenics craze: Justice Pierce Butler from Saint Paul, Minnesota.

One of nine kids of Irish immigrants, he had worked as a lawyer for railroad magnate James J. Hill.

Justice Oliver Holmes commented before the eugenics decision: "Butler knows this is good law.  I wonder whether he will have the courage to vote with us in spite of his religion."



[Men of deep religious faith were certainly on the defensive -- the Scopes Monkey Trial occurred less than two years earlier.

Someday some adventurous Hollywood director will tell the tale of Pierce Butler's shining example. And the Catholic men of Saint Paul will commission a statue of him on Cathedral Hill.]

It was not until 1974 that the state of Virginia repealed its sterilization procedures.

At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, Nazi doctors employed Justice Holmes’ opinion in the Buck v. Bell case as part of their defense.
               

One of Justice Holmes' clerks in 1930 was Alger Hiss

If the Black Lives Matter folks in Minnesota were serious, they would rally every May 2nd on Pierce Butler Parkway in Saint Paul -- praising the man who stood up against the wacky "pro-science" progressives of his day!

It would be fitting, also, for a place like Brandeis University to have an annual teach-in to plumb the reasons why compassionate liberals were seduced by the pro-sterilization arguments.




UPDATE: Another sad eugenics tale is this one centering on the father of the late TV correspondent Charles 'On the Road' Kuralt. As director of public welfare in Mecklenburg County (1945 – 1972), Wallace Kuralt harbored nary a doubt that he was vanquishing poverty and bringing a better life to North Carolinians by sterilizing folks recommended by his social workers. 


George Will has a recent column on the many liberals who loved eugenics:

"Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and agenda."

                                                       

Catholic Sociobiology: Was there an Adam and Eve?

by David Pence, MD


Most events in the physical world can be explained quite nicely by physical causes. When I ask my students how eukaryotic cells capable of forming multicellular organisms came from the prokaryotic world of bacteria, I expect an explanation of endosymbiosis -- not a shout out to God. There are certain pivotal events, though, that cannot be explained without the direct spiritual hand of God. The manifestation of electromagnetic radiation and matter 13.7 billion years ago is one such event, but it is by no means the last one. The daily sacraments, each conception of a human life, the Incarnation of Christ, the creation of humans, the appearance of the first life all require the direct intervention of God. There is a lot of agreement about these interactions in Catholic circles, with a notable exception that the theological poetry of Adam and Eve is not always so well received. To call the story of Adam and Eve "theological poetry" is no great offense. But to deny the truthful essence of the story in the name of Science is a trivializing of the poetry and a denial of the theology.

Here is a tape of Bishop Robert Barron on the subject, with his critic attaching many relevant Church documents presenting a different interpretation. Bishop Barron is a great defender of the faith, and has brought more souls to the Lord than most of us. However, this video is a good man at his worst as his explanation concedes way too much to a lesser authority.
               

Do all humans have the same original parents? Are all the races and tribes of humanity truly monogenetic? Was human creation a unique shaping by God of a new species and kingdom? Did man by the hand of God come from matter, and woman by that same hand come from man? Was there an original state of unity between God, man, and woman that was disrupted by the disobedience of our first parents leading to the dispersal of humanity deformed by original sin? We answer unequivocally YES to all these questions.

The proposal that accident and adaptation are an adequate explanation of the universe and man -- this becomes more untenable each day to the eyes of both religious men and materialists. We are not here making an extended argument against the materialist evolutionists, but warning good religious men not to concede so much so quickly to a failing paradigm. If Marxism found its last defenders in university professors, it seems Darwinism has organized its last stand among Christian clerics.

Sometime between 100,000 and one million years ago, human beings appeared on earth. We will learn in the next decades that the emergence of new species of living beings will appear more as multiple developments from very primitive forms of life, rather than a well-defined animal like a mole altering one protein at a time over a long period of time to eventually evolve into a horse. The Cambrian Explosion of 500 million years ago hints at this quite dramatically. Our picture of the development of species will look like many different stalks of a bush coming from some less differentiated multipotent stem cells in the roots. The oak tree picture with smaller branches emanating from larger branches growing out of larger trunks will become less and less defensible. We will think of the first cell of life as a kind of stem cell from which other stem cells and then more differentiated organisms develop. No one says that a zygote evolves into a human. Speaking of the development of various life forms from the original information-laden cell (a procaryote 3.8 billion years ago) will replace the older term of evolution which is irreversibly tied to accident and adaptation as its chief mechanisms of change.

When God picked up that original matter and breathed forth an adult man, it is not clear what was in the clay. But he breathed into something that looked much more like a primitive cell or chunks of soil than a baboon just waiting for one more protein sequence to break into speech. I am fairly confident that this picture of the development of differentiated life forms from more primitive undifferentiated organisms will become mainstream biology in the next few decades. I am even more confident it will not cause conversions of hard-core materialists. The source of their disbelief has nothing to do with biological facts or providing adequate causality for observed historical sequencing.

A major difference between Christian biology and materialist evolution is that Christians contend the fulfillment of matter as having already occurred. Our developmental task as a species is to conform ourselves to the new Adam—the fruition of nature and life already present on earth. We are not pointing to some indefinite future moment or mutation that will lead to a more highly evolved human. We look back to when Eternity entered the Temporal, and try to conform ourselves to that Person-Event. The Head has shaped a template meant to be perfected by our participation. We do not seek utopia in an indeterminate future, but seek perfection in an interpersonal order which was present in the distant past and is present today. Not only are Christ and Mary the perfect male and female, but Adam and Eve before the Fall are also exemplars of our true nature and ultimate destiny. We are not evolving to some new type of organism. With the grace of God, we are recovering from a Fall.

Biblical truths like the creation of all matter by a spiritual God and the existence of a single set of human parents for all people are indispensable explanatory events in the narrative of reality which we are meant to proclaim to a darkened humanity. The Christian intellect cannot block out these ordering truths. In explaining reality there is no reason to flee from facts which we learn from the Bible because we cannot yet surround them with a continuous biological narrative. We are still piecing together connective tissue, but the bones are in place. Christian revelation is the real Enlightenment, and we should not turn off the floodlights to win favor with our atheistic friends by stumbling with them in the dark.

Stammering through Genesis betrays a lack of trust in God (a deficit of the theological virtue of hope) which is deeply tied to courage in facing the atheist court of respectable opinion. Retelling Genesis as a meta-narrative of non-violence is not a better explanation of the full reality of creation. In fact, that modern flight from violence exposes an ignorance of the violence constituent in the universe. This does not help our argument, especially with astrophysicists. The unwillingness to stand by the essential Christian account of God’s work calls to mind the original cowardice of Adam. The science of Satan was offered as the fruit of the tree to the woman -- but only after he had scared the male protector away from his guard post. It is not intellectual rigor but intellectual fear that paralyzes our pastors and "Catholic intellectuals." This leaves the sheep vulnerable, as once Adam left Eve with the Evil One. Let us face that Liar and his modern materialist scientists today in a more courageous way than Adam did so many years ago. Our courage will come from a more radical trust in God who has told us the truth in the theological poetry of His Holy Word.  


David Pence practiced Radiation Oncology (treating cancer with radiation) for thirty years. He then earned a Masters Degree in Education with specialty licenses in Earth and Space Sciences and the Life Sciences. He has designed and presently teaches a four-year science curriculum at a Catholic seminary.

Map on Monday: Sixteen Rare Metals and Minerals

The map above (click to enlarge) depicts the location and amount of sixteen of the world's rare minerals and metals. These sixteen minerals and metals include: Aluminium, Antimony, Chromium, Copper, Gold, Hafnium, Indium, Lead, Nickel, Phosphorus, Platinum/Rhodium, Silver, Tantalum, Tin, Uranium, and Zinc (click on the link for more information about how these resources are commonly used).

Some nations stand out for having a diverse amount of mineral resources. The United States and South Africa possess eight of the sixteen resources; with South Africa holding a third of the world's Chromium, 40% of the world's gold, and 88% of the world's Platinum/Rhodium. China and Australia are also blessed -- with Australia possessing ten of the sixteen resources, and China eleven. Brazil ranks fifth on this map with six of the sixteen resources found within its borders.

While some nations have a diverse collection of mineral and metal resources, others stand out for large quantities of one or two of them. Morocco and Western Sahara, for example, possess 42% of the world's Phosphorus. Other countries include: Poland (25% of the world's silver), Canada (33% of the world's Indium),  Chile (38% of world's copper), Brazil (48% of the world's Tantalum), Australia (52% of the world's Tantalum and 53% of the world's Hafnium), Kazakhstan (60% of the world's Chromium), and China (62% of the world's Antimony and 31% of the world's tin). The three top Uranium countries (with combined 50% of world supply) are Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada.