Serendipitously, it was with her that I visited the memorial place of the martyrs in Nagasaki one spring. In that same trip we were to visit Ooura, the place that marks the very moving emergence (a disinterment?) of the Hidden Christians to Fr. Bernard Petitjean--an amazing story (part of Endo's Kiku's Prayer). Reading up about it in the past week, all of the stories broke into my mind with a fresh and shocking quality that was --well one would rather expect this with martyrology, I should think--sobering.
There are a number of things that popped into consciousness in a new way as this reflection began to open in my mind. Reading Diarmaid McCulloch's elegantly written and magisterial (it is the thickest book I own) A History of Christianity, I learned that the Jesuits (represented by 'our' Basque, Francis Xavier, university friend of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order) are said to have taken Japanese culture seriously and made a 'determined and imaginative effort to meet the Japanese on their own terms.' Xavier is said to have loved the Japanese and claimed that 'these Japanese are more ready to be implanted with our holy faith than all the nations of the world.' It was seemly then that the sons of noblemen and samurai, people who would command respect in society, would have been recruited by the missionaries. (That they were 'available' was helped by the fact that there was squabbling ongoing among the feudal lords at the time.)
Samurai ethics, largely based on Confucian principles, expressed, in my view, some the best ideas with respect to self-cultivation. A life based on these rules called for a contemplative investigation of things (think: 'the examined life' of the Greeks), and a moving away from the delusions produced by selfishness and its desires, instead setting one's mind to higher things (think: 'sacrifice' in the sense of knowing from whence the true Gift comes). This was a life-long journey, ascetic, and something one was born to give one's heart and soul to. The guiding intuition and the highest moral good, lay in the unity and harmony of the microcosm (the person) and the macrocosm (the universe). This (perhaps ironically, but no less so than the chivalry of the knights) was the warrior's code.
St.Paul Miki was one such samurai. The times were a mix of missionaries, merchants and (Hideyoshi suspected, quite cannily) empire (in the colonizing sense, for the nation was not yet formed, the emperor not yet the locus of worship he was to become).
What amazes me are the sea-voyages that brought the Black Ships here. Xavier arrived in 1549, about fifteen years after the formation of the SJ order. When you think about the Dreamliners that have been grounded recently and you realize that people back then were still trying to work out magnetism and where true north on the compass was (stars are all very well for navigation, but what happens in spells of bad weather?): how amazing! All the more so because at the time even stars were proving somewhat unreliable, or at least behaving peculiarly. But arrive they did those Europeans, and by the boat-load . . . the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Dutch. Among those merchants and missionaries, however, there occurred a 'fatal entanglement with politics' and they overplayed their hands. One thing led to another and the Tokugawa government issued expulsion orders to the Christians in 1587, seven years after the first seminaries had opened and figures estimated that about 300,000 converts had been made. By 1597 things had gotten really ugly. MacCulloch writes:
"In the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan . . . They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history . . . The Church in Japan, despite the heroism of its native faithful, was reduced to a tiny and half-instructed remnant. It struggled to maintain even a secret existence for more than two centuries until Europeans used military force to secure free access to the country after the 1850s, and rediscovered it with astonishment . . . The Japanese persecution is a standing argument against the old idea that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." (my italics, 708-9).I confess, I have never really been able to wrap my mind around the whole topic of martyrs. In the last few days, though, perhaps some progress has been made? The martyrs, in MacCulloch's judgment, 'failed'; the 'evidence' of this being the small number of Christians in Japan, I suppose. I am not so sure I agree, but I do see his point.
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All (known, legit) martyrs are saints, but not all saints are martyrs. Which is a relief. I get saints. I think I might even love some saints. After all, 'The saint,' writes Ben Myers in Christ the Stranger, his luminous distillation of the theology of Rowan Williams, 'is an argument for eh existence of God' (81). But the martyrs are not easy to love. All those grisly ends are upsetting. Perhaps what is most distressing about the entire category is the capacity for inhumanity that the martyrs' ends signify. Those strands of evil that run through the human heart. Each side challenges with the question: how much is this worth to you? What will you do to preserve your belief, your sense of right order in the world? Will you hang on even at the cost of a life, maybe your own? What will you do with your freedom?
There is a curious consonance between the honour code of the samurai and the sacrifice of the martyr. I admit that I don't know all the ins and outs of the ritual suicide called 'hara kiri' except that it was a principled act and recognised as the costliest, indeed, the ultimate sacrifice for one's beliefs. It is said that because of the bloody history, Japanese Christians have a fervent devotion to the crucified saviour and a commitment to the cross as a symbol of endurance. (Anyone with any experience in Japan will know how important of the virtue of endurance is to this culture.) Of course, there is a mountain of difference between deciding, as a matter of honour, to take your own life and being a victim of others.
Perhaps it is right to feel a little knocked off our rockers in the presence of saints, and martyrs in particular. The shock should retain its vigour. And, in the story of Fr. Bernard Petitjean encountering, in the nineteenth century, the first Hidden Christians in his little church in Nagasaki, my heart quickened because here was the 'remnant' being revealed: after 200 or so years! "Our hearts are the same as yours" was the sentence uttered by the lady who knelt beside him. This sentence alone surely gives pause.
I'll close with the words of the psychologist Carol Pearson writing on the archetype of the martyr:
"Our lives are our contribution to the universe. We can give this gift freely and lovingly, or we can hold back as if it were possible by refusing life to avoid death. But no one can. How much worse to die, never having lived! The . . . lesson of the martyr [archetype] is to choose to give the gift of one's life for the giving's sake, knowing that life itself is its own reward and remembering that all little deaths, the losses in our lives always have brought with them transformation and new life, that actual deaths are not final but . . . a more dramatic passage through into the unknown"(115).
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