Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs 6 to the world they inhabit, their culture. He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. So it was not historical research but his own experience that drew him to the stories of the Portuguese missionaries of the seventeenth century who were forced to apostasize. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.Įndo himself had great difficulty reconciling his Catholic faith with Japanese culture. In fact, it seems to me that Silence, his greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. When I use the word ‘particular’, I am not referring to the fact that Endo was Japanese. How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth-century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos and, from his own very particular perspective, Shusaku Endo. Extract > An Introduction to Shusaku Endo’s Silence by Martin Scorsese
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