In both Silence and the Mission, violence breaks out among two types of European foreigners: those who would favor religious priorities over economic ones (the priests), and those who would favor economic priorities over religious ones (the European tradesmen in Silence and the Portuguese and Spanish bounty hunters in the Mission. Moreover, according to Pena, like the Jesuits in the Mission, who are alone, isolated, at odds with their church, and sometimes even each other, "Rodrigues' trials are exacerbated by his physical and cultural isolation... Culturally, he must confront being in a nation whose language and customs are mostly alien and threatening to him."
In the Mission, the story begins when a bounty-hunting Spaniard, Rodrigo, kills his younger brother Felipe over a woman they both love, but who loves only Felipe. Languishing in prison afterward, Rodrigo is certain that all is lost until he is visited in his prison cell one day by a Jesuit, who offers Rodrigo a chance to repent through hard labor, which he then does by pulling a heavy weight uphill again and again, only to have it drop to the bottom of a steep, muddy hill, from where he then must begin his climb upward again. Rodrigo, still overcome with guilt over having killed his brother, wishes to continue his penance indefinitely. Finally, after months and months of this, the Jesuits themselves, fully convinced Rodrigo has by now repented for the murder of his brother, forcibly cut the heavy weight free from him. This illustrates the Catholic belief that anyone, whatever his or her circumstances, can repent and still serve God afterward, which Rodrigo indeed resolves to do.
Rodrigo then is ordained into the Jesuit order. Soon Rodrigo becomes, ironically, especially given his earlier trade as a bounty hunter, a fearless defender in the name of Christianity, of the lives of those same Colombian Indians he had ruthlessly sought, earlier, to capture and sell into slavery. In this way, Rodrigo himself becomes an example of how religious conviction and commitment, whenever these are taken up, can...
That, Endo implies, is the blind spot exhibited by the Catholic missionaries within this novel, and the Roman Catholic Church itself, in a period of Church history in which Catholic missionaries sought, often very aggressively, to convert non-Christians throughout the world to their faith. Arguably, the same could be said of the Jesuits within the Mission, although at least in their case, their presence within the areas where the indigenous peoples of Colombia lived served a protective as well as a religious purpose. However, in both Silence and the Mission, economic forces ultimately win out over religious ones. In both instances, rival European tradesmen, albeit with dist economic goals and purposes, ultimately win out over the Christian missionaries. Clearly, as both Silence and the Mission, and as the respective endings of both Silence and the Mission imply, both trade and religious conversion were in fact primary goals of the different groups of Europeans who came into contact with the peoples of the Americas and Asia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
The groups representing trade, rather than religion, however, seem, overall, to have won out.
Works Cited
Endo, Shusaku. Silence. London: Taplinger, 1980.
Joffe, Rolfe (Dir.). The Mission.
With Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.
United Kingdom. 1986.
Pena, Melvin. "A Novel of Undeniable Power." Review of Silence by Shusaku
Endo. Amazon.com. Retrieved May 28, 2005, at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0800871863/104-6?v=glance.html>.
Shusaku Endo - Silence (1969)." Christianity (Japenese). Retrieved May 28, 2005, from: http://members.tripod.com/~leongpc/sypnosis/christjap.htm.
