The first time I wrote a long review, dedicated to the old horse.
I got to know Martin Scors from "Silence". At that time, the professor was talking about the topic of religion, and he accidentally mentioned the movie "Silence". I went to watch it, and I fell in love with Martin Scors ever since. In "Buying a Killer and Shooting People", Zhang Daming said that his idol is Martin Scorsese. I don't know if I was influenced by him. I have watched "Taxi Driver", "Goodfella", "Mean Street", "The Age of Innocence", etc. on and off, among which, besides "Taxi Driver", my favorite is probably "Silence". The first time I watched "Silence", because I was not a religious person, I didn't have a deep understanding of it. But when I learned about a heresy in Christianity: mysticism, I seemed to realize that the religious meaning expressed in "Silence" is extremely profound. Below, I will interpret "Silence" in terms of mystical religious thoughts, hoping to bring out what I understand and what Martin wants to express about religion.
First of all, allow me to briefly introduce the plot, the story is about two young Jesuit missionaries, one is the Darth Vader (because the actor played Han Solo's son in "Star Wars", the second generation black Samurai), the other is Spider-Man (because the actor played "The Amazing Spider-Man"), learned that a highly respected teacher who was preaching in Japan had abandoned the religion because of the Japanese Edo government's ban on Christianity, and even turned to the Japanese government , I can't believe it, so I want to go to Japan to find out the truth. They smuggled into Japan through Chinese merchant ships to baptize and pray for the local congregation, but unfortunately both were eventually arrested by the Japanese government. The government seems to have no intention of killing them. Instead, it threatens to abuse and kill ordinary believers and ask them to step on the idols to apostate religion, so that ordinary believers also give up their belief in Christianity. Darth Vader faced the threat that a young girl would be sunk to the bottom of the sea, and finally did not give in, but chose to die with the girl. And Spider-Man listened to the wailing of the congregation who endured the torture of the cave, and finally agreed to abstain from the religion. And the respected teacher that he also learned about also chose to give up teaching under such circumstances, and he finally understood his master's choice.
As the name suggests, the question that the film wants to explore is since God loves human beings, why does God always seem to be silent when human beings suffer? Maybe mysticism can give us an answer, and also why Spider-Man and his mentor finally have the courage to make their choices. Mysticism is inherited from Neoplatonism and is the product of the fusion of Neoplatonism and Christian theology. Mysticism is mysticism because they believe that God is a mysterious being. They believe that since God is an infinite and perfect existence, he must not be regulated by anything, because regulation means limiting God. Therefore, the supreme God is completely beyond the scope of our rational understanding, which means the application of concepts, and the application of concepts means the limitation of God, and thus ceases to be God. So God must be silent. If God suddenly comes out to save mankind like Deus Ex Machina, that is to concretize God and limit God, then he is no longer God. Furthermore, because God is also a concept, it is not actually God's real name, but just a title (like when we call our friends "Hello"). The real God is nameless. God stands on the opposite side of any conceptual definition and any concrete existence, so we can actually think that God is nothing (God is not things. → God is nothing.). But perhaps we may ask, if God is nothing, why does something concrete exist? The answer is very simple. Christianity believes that God created the world out of nothing, while mysticism believes that God is that nothing, and out of God's nothing, a concrete, multiple, and changing being is born. In other words, God’s nothingness is not just “nothing” as we understand it in the usual sense, but a rooted nothing, and it is on the basis of this rooted nothingness that being becomes possible, that is, being must be derived from There is nothing. And the creation of God from nothing to being is also inevitable, because if God is nothing but nothing, then God is still a finite being, distinct from being. And only when God created being, which covers all being, can it truly become an infinite duality that transcends being and non-being, and covers being and non-being. In other words, God is both nothing and being, and God is exactly that, a mysterious movement or gesture itself that we cannot comprehend. But what does this have to do with our theme today, the movie "Silence"?
As mentioned above, God as a source and a being different from concrete things is of course nothing, but this nothing God is still not a God in a complete sense. God can only create all things from himself and cover all things in the process. truly become an infinite being. Therefore, according to mysticism, God should not simply be an object that is completely cut off from the world, an object we can never reach, and can only look up to and worship. On the contrary, the God of God wants to return to the human world, and through the creation of existence, he will deny his own nothingness and truly become himself. It is as if God incarnated as Jesus (or sent his Son down, but in fact Jesus is a Trinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit) sacrificing himself to save people from sin and suffering, so that Jesus can be resurrected and truly return to God. Therefore, according to mysticism, a true Christian should not be someone who kneels before God and prays constantly, obsessed with an objectified God, who pays homage to the world without asking about the world. This objectified God is nothing but nothingness that is completely separated from the world. . Conversely, we should deny the objectified and empty God, save others through our love for the world and through our own virtues, demonstrate God’s Agape for the world, and return to God. Now let's go back and look at the choice of the two missionaries in "Silence". In order not to abandon the religion, the black warrior chose not to save the disciples and at the same time begged for his own death. Although it is a respectable behavior, it is bound by a pair of objectified In the complete submission of God, it cannot truly save the world. At the same time, his attachment to an objectified God shows that he is still selfish to a certain extent. On the other hand, Spider-Man and his master are the exact opposite, denying the objectified and nihilistic God with their apparent apostasy, and truly realizing God's unconditional love for the world with their actual moral behavior of saving others. That is to use one of the greatest sins (apostasy) to fulfill one of the greatest virtues (saving people's lives), and it is also to fulfill others by absolute sacrifice to oneself (willing to take the charge of apostate). Spider-Man really kills the selfish ego with his love for the world, and at the same time kills the objectified and empty God, and becomes Jesus himself, returning to the true God (and this is often seen in movies. A hint that when Spider-Man washes his face by the water, he turns into Jesus in the water.). And this may be the understanding of religion that Martin Scorsese wants to convey through this film. A true religion should not be just worship and prayer to an idol or a transcendent god. This idol, because it is an existence that is absolutely transcendent, absolutely detached from the world, and disconnected from the world, is a great help to the suffering of the world.
View more about Silence reviews
