“If there is no love here…”: The witness of St. Maximilian Kolbe and the problem of theodicy in the prose of Shūsaku Endō
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/tes.12102Keywords:
St. Maximilian Kolbe, Auschwitz, theodicy, Shūsaku Endō, Holocaust, problem of evil, Japanese literatureAbstract
One of the oldest and most serious philosophical objections to the existence of a loving God has been the problem of evil. If God exists, it has been argued, He must be indifferent or impotent. In the twentieth century, the mass murders perpetrated by authoritarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany, led many to abandon their religious faith. The problem of evil is present in the work of the Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō, whose vision of God, strongly influenced by Buddhist culture, is one of love. In two works, the novel “Sachiko” and the short story “Japanese in Warsaw,” Endō depicts the Polish Franciscan friar and martyr St. Maximilian Kolbe, who chose to die in a starvation bunker at the Auschwitz concentration camp so that another man may live. An analysis of Endō’s interpretation of Kolbe, contextualized within a study of Endō’s interpretation of Christianity and compared to the works of such diverse thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Viktor Frankl, and Cardinal Robert Sarah, seems to offer a response to the quandary of where God was in Auschwitz. Without the terrors of the camp, one could argue, heroic acts of love, such as that of St. Maximilian Kolbe, could not have happened.
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