Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“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… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (5)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the critical literature on the Modern Catholic Novel suggests:

"... the highest achievements in the genre of the Catholic novel were possible only because a window of opportunity appeared as Catholicism was venturing out from its defensive posture and entering into conversation with the secular world yet still maintained a clear and robust sense of its own identity. If this thesis is correct, we are unlikely to see again Catholic novels of the quality of the best of Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, and Waugh or other European Catholic novelists in the years preceding Vatican II.

The Catholic writers who produced the flowering of the Catholic novel faced the perennial challenges of all Christian novelists: how to show the workings of grace and allow for the miraculous and supernatural without violating psychological credibility or the canons of realism, how to make salvation or damnation seem important to a secular reader, and how to convey a worldview based on a deeply held personal faith without appearing to engage in underhanded apologetics and evangelization ... not all critics agree that they met all these challenges successfully, yet some novelists found ways to navigate these difficulties and produce fiction of exceptionally high quality and wide appeal for secular as well as Christian readers. To what extent these extraordinary achievements in Catholic fiction were the result of the uncommon situation of the Church - an unprecedented openness to secularity while still retaining a clear and strong sense of its own identity - and to what extent they were the result of the appearance of several extraordinarily gifted Catholic writers must remain a matter for speculation."

Many of those discussed as Catholic novelists in this series of posts have, in the words of Theodore P. Fraser from The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, "adamantly shunned for themselves the nomenclature of "Catholic novelist" and have insisted that as artists they possess their own angle of vision and unique literary universe":

"Ultimately they view themselves not as writers consciously writing novels with specific "Catholic" content but as Catholics who happen to be novelists. François Mauriac has perhaps best explained the intention and intellectual disposition of Catholic novelists who are creative creative artists in their own right: "Being a Christian," he says, "my Christian beliefs dominate my novels, not because I want to make propaganda for Christianity, but because it is the deepest part of my nature ... I am a christian first and last, which means a man responsible to God and to his conscience for the epoch he lives in ... he has been put here to play a certain role among his fellow men. He is engaged; it isn't a question of deliberately engaging himself.""

David Lodge, in The Novelist at the Crossroads, insists that:

"in their appraisal of Catholic novelists critics would do well to follow the wise dictum of Henry James: that artists must be granted the right to use their ideas, their artistic vision, their donnée as their inspiration directs them, and that the proper role of critics is to comment on the use that authors have made of their donnée through an evaluation of the craft of their work (Lodge 1971, 88) ...

Using James's sensible critical principal as his point of departure, Lodge grants that Greene indeed makes frequent use of Catholic symbolism to create his "metapoesis." Yet in doing so his intention, Lodge insists, is not to proselytize or to present "a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent" but to see his fiction as "a system of concepts, source of situation, and reservoir of symbols ... to dramatize intuition about the nature of human experience" (Lodge 1971, 89). Hence, Lodge contends, Catholicism as a system of dogma and laws is not in or by itself an adequate key to understanding and interpreting the meaning of Greene's works, and these are, Lodge argues, as accessible to most readers as any other works of art that possess a unique vision and aesthetic patterns. These Catholic novels can therefore be appreciated as authentic pieces of literature above and beyond the doctrinal or confessional elements of faith contained therein."

Fraser believes that what Lodge says of Greene can be applied to other novelists considered as "Catholic".

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Bruce Cockburn - Understanding Nothing.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (1)

Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:

"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (Bloy, Péguy, Huysmans, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine  of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."

Marian E. Crowe has written in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth that:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Jean-Luc Barré writes in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of Léon Bloy.” There was firstly their discovery of Georges Rouault, “then of Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer, Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”

Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds, Louis Massignon, the philosopher Henri Gouhier, the writer Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.

In The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer note that:

“the French poet, writer, and surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters Gino Severini, a pioneer of Futurism, and Otto Van Rees, one of the first Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”

This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Léon Bloy. The reading of Bloy’s novel Le Femme pauvre led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the Maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” Rouault made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”

Crowe writes that:

"Mauriac and Bernanos ... clearly demonstrated that the spiritual world could have a dynamic presence even in that most secular of literary forms, the novel, and ... also introduced into it a new kind of interiority that was completely different from the stream of consciousness technique used by James Joyce, Virginia Wolff and others. They ... developed and expanded on several themes already introduced by earlier Catholic novelists - the pursuit of the sinner by God, the criticism of materialism and hypocrisy, the futility of life without God, regenerative suffering, and the motifs of sacrificial substitution and intercessory prayer - to which they added a critique of the Catholic community, especially its superficial pieties, its materialism, its arrogance and its neglect of the poor. Yet even in this critique, they disclosed sources of spiritual vitality within the Church - the sanctity of some of its most humble priests, and of the poor, the unchurched, and even the sinners. For the sinner in their works is not simply someone to be corrected and saved. Rather, Mauriac and Bernanos both show how the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity ... This concept would be dramatized in English Catholic novels, where sinners like Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited or Sarah in The End of the Affair not only are enmeshed in a web of grace that draws them in, but also help the larger community of the "saints." This and many other themes explored by these French novelists would animate the imaginations of some very talented Catholic writers on the other side of the English channel ..."

Fraser wrote in 1994 that:

"Born one generation after Bernanos and Waugh of American parents, Julien Green is today one of France's foremost novelists and the first American ever to be elected to the French Academy. (Jacques Maritain wrote of him several decades ago, "I find it marvelous that an American should be the greatest French writer of our times"[quoted in Dunaway, 15].) A prolific writer (and still writing today at a very advanced age), he had attained a certain recognition as novelist in the United States during the 1950s. Since then, though his works continue to be enthusiastically received by a small but fervent group of Francophile Catholics, earlier translations of his novels into English have long gone out of circulation and are virtually unavailable for the larger reading audience. He has, however, recently become the subject of renewed critical attention ... through the publication of what he calls his "Civil War novels." The first of these, Les Pays lointains (1991; The Distant Lands), has in fact been compared favorably in plot, length, and scope with Gone with the Wind, which is not surprising given Green's roots in the American South ...

Green has always refused, even bristled, at his possible designation as a Catholic novelist ("The very idea, he says, "appalls me! [Diary, 219]). Yet when he considers Jacques Maritain's judgement "that my books were those of a man living on the mystical plane," he concedes that "there lies in all my books a deep uneasiness that an irreligious man would never have felt." And he admits that all of his fiction, though written not to advance or support religious dogma, is nonetheless "essentially religious." And in the most succinct definition he will give of what he means by this appelation, he writes, "The anguish and loneliness of my characters can almost always be reduced to what I think I called a manifold dread of living in the world" (Diary, 219)."

David O'Connell, in his study on Michel de Saint Pierre, noted that the generation born in the decade before World War I produced a number of important authors forwarding the tradition of the French Catholic Novel. These included Jacques de Bourbon Busser, Gilbert Cesbron, Pierre Emmanuel, Saint Pierre, and Jean Sulivan. Fraser contrasts the careers of Saint Pierre and Sulivan as representatives for this generation of writers:

"Saint Pierre ... began his career as a novelist in 1948, a decade before Sulivan's tardy entry at the age of 45. At Saint Pierre's death in 1987 his literary production was far more extensive than that of Sulivan (who had died seven years earlier), and one of his novels, Les Nouveaux Prêtres (1964) - which deals with the struggle for control of the French Church between the conservative "intégristes" and the liberal "progressistes" just after the Second Vatican Council - had even been a best-seller in France.

Saint Michel's novels have continuously been reprinted and are in great demand. In contrast, though all of Sulivan's novels have been published by prominent French publishing houses ... he has so far not been regarded in his own country as a leading writer of his time, nor, for that matter, have his works been published in translation to any major extent abroad ...

Yet in any study of the Catholic novel Sulivan is an important and representative figure in regard to the change in form, emphasis, and themes the genre has undergone in the contemporary period, arguably as much so as the far better known Michel de Saint Pierre. From the start of his career Sulivan has been recognised as a direct literary descendent of the French giants of the Catholic novel's Golden Age - Bloy and Mauriac, but especially Bernanos, whose influence on Sulivan is both immediately obvious and commanding."

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Scott Walker - My Death.

Humility, humanity and shame culture

I've been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus, as well as watching Masahiro Shinoda's film of Endo's Silence, over the Christmas period.
De Waal is critical of Ruth Benedict's famous thesis, made in The Chrysanthmum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, "that the Japanese had a culture of shame rather than a culture of guilt." De Waal's criticisms - the simplicity of this polarity and Benedict's own lack of direct experience of Japan - are fairly standard current critiques of Benedict's thesis. What is interesting though is the continuing popularity of the book and it's influence on a Japanese writer like Endo.

Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." He then suggests that if his American readers "keep this point of view in mind as they move through A Life of Jesus, they will ... gain deeper insight into just where the religious psychology of the Japanese and other Orientals coincides with their own, and they will better appreciate those points at which the two psychologies perhaps diverge."

As Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on the issue Endo clearly accepts the shame culture versus guilt culture thesis and it may be that this reflects the influence of Western Catholicism on his thinking and writing. Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" during the period that Endo studied at the University of Lyon - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul."

Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Pinnington, however, argues that Endo's "initially negative picture of Japanese culture grows more positive" with "the lack of a strong self" coming to be seen as a "precious asset." This change in Endo mirrors the Japanese response to Benedict's thesis which was "initially accepted in a spirit of contrition after the war, but was later reversed into evidence for the greater humanity of Japanese society." Once this is understood, Pinnington suggests, Endo's early work can also be seen as less negative towards Japanese culture than has often been assumed. In Silence, for example, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."

On this basis, it would seem that, while Benedict's thesis cannot simply be accepted per se, its reception in Japan and the use made of it by Endo suggest that her thesis has much that can critique Western culture when understood through Japanese eyes.

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 Toru Takemitsu - Rain Spell.

Modern Catholic novels

I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.

Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.

All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.

In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.

What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

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Woven Hand - Tin Finger.

Needing things incarnated

Interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about Image. In the article Image's founding director, Greg Wolfe, speaks about the influence of the Arts in his conversion:

"He converted to Catholicism when he was 23 and a graduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford University. He said that the two main highways leading him toward the church were art, including literary art, and ethics.

“I’ve never been a very good abstract thinker. I tend to need things incarnated, made concrete. So for me, art and ethics take the big ideas and make them concrete in a very palpable, powerful way,” he said. “I began to be interested in issues to do with human life, and life and death, and sexuality and marriage and what seemed to me to be an increasingly coherent and unified cluster of moral understandings on the part of the Catholic church. ...

“And then of course there was the great art and literature of the Catholic tradition,” he said, naming 20th-century French writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac; Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; British writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo as people who “had a huge impact on my journey toward the church.”

Mr. Wolfe said that he sees the Incarnation “as a model of balance, that it brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live,” he said. “It’s hard to be balanced in that way. Sometimes we even tend to valorize being on one side or the other as if that makes us somehow more pure, more committed.”"

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Rachmaninov - Vespers (Nyne Otpushchaeshi)