earticle

영어

Endo's life-long search for the image of God in the Catholic monotheism has made a new genre of Christian literature which lacked in Japanese literary circles. His main theme is the relation between the presence of God in the Japanese and Christian religion in Japan. He approaches it as the fighting between human soul and body.
Endo, who hates the paternal image of the western Christian religion, visualizes Jesus as a maternal God of Love. His literature is characterized by this change of image of God.
We can find, in his early works, the antagonistic structure between good and evil, crime and punishment, the weak and the strong, soul and body, in short the antagonism between man and God. But its antagonistic structure is transformed into a reconcilable one in the middle works, and a harmonious one in the last works. This can be said as a transformation from the paternal God who judges and punishes to the maternal God who forgives. At the same time, it can be said that he has succeeded in making a universal truth of Catholicism by considerations from an oriental angle.
'My Jesus' visualized by Endo is 'a maternal God' who always consoles men of grief and agony, who forgives and tolerates even sinners, accompanies them eternally. We feel at ease with Endo's Jesus in that he tolerate us who are weak and evil.
The image of Jesus in Endo's works is not the Almighty, but humane God who everyone is familiar with. It is not suggested that Endo originated the image embodied by his considerations, but he was the first to commit them in writing, at least in Japan.