[D66] Silence!

[R.O.]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/29/silence-christian-history-macculloch-review


  Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review

Clerical abuse, the Holocaust … the church has often stayed silent. 
Stuart Kelly is impressed by a rich, robust study of Christian quietness
Piety or concealment? … silence is not always golden in the Christian 
church. Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP
Stuart Kelly <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stuart-kelly>

Published on Fri 29 Mar 2013 08.01 GMT

Christianity has a deeply ambivalent relationship with silence. While 
one hymn exhorts the believer "Tell out my soul", another warns "Let all 
mortal flesh keep silence"; Psalm 62, in the New King James Version, 
begins "truly my soul silently waits for God", while Psalm 109 starts 
"Do not keep silent, oh God of my praise". Jesus silences the evil 
spirits in Capernaum, at Mark 1:25, but remains silent himself in the 
face of his accusers, at Mark 14:61; in Luke's Gospel he rebukes the 
Pharisees during the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem saying that were 
he to silence his disciples, the very stones would cry out; yet in the 
period beforehand he strictly admonished the disciples to keep silent 
about his ministry.

In the wider metaphysics, Christianity has pondered God as language – 
the speaking of creation into being, John's identification of Jesus with 
the Logos, Gerard Manley Hopkins' wonderful image of the Trinity as 
"Utterer, Utterèd, Uttering" in "Margaret Clitheroe" – and God as 
silence: St John of the Cross wrote "Silence is God's first language"; 
Meister Eckhart <http://www.eckhartsociety.org/> thought "nothing is so 
like God as silence". Søren Kierkegaard, the greatest Christian thinker 
of the 19th century, published his meditation on the Sacrifice of Isaac, 
/Fear and Trembling/, under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.

Diarmaid MacCulloch charts this problematic and often contradictory 
relationship with aplomb in /Silence: A Christian History/. Expanded 
from his Gifford lectures 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBByJepyEw&list=PLEA9467E8E8D991AE>, it 
is, as one might expect of the author of /A History of Christianity/ and 
/Reformation/, intellectually robust, and without the prevarications and 
self-qualifications that sometimes stymie academic prose. Indeed, 
MacCulloch is by turns precise, poetic and righteously indignant. In the 
introduction, for example, deploying a judicious use of understatement, 
he writes: "Those who have a particular reverence for the Church in 
communion with the Holy See will no doubt feel that I have been unduly 
hard on it. If they do, my regrets are not very fulsome."

MacCulloch divides his inquiry into four stages. First he discusses the 
depiction of silence in the Bible – in the Tanakh, with its insistence 
on the dumbness of idols, and in the New Testament, culminating in the 
very odd reference in Revelation when, at the opening of the seventh 
seal, there is silence in heaven "for about half an hour". It also 
examines the competing claims for the role of sound in worship, with 
speaking in tongues and reverential silence occupying opposed positions. 
The second chapter covers the rise of monasticism, making a bold claim 
for the continuing influence of the mystical writings once attributed 
to Dionysius the Areopagite.

There are two points worth raising here. First, that the idea of 
"negative theology" (describing God in terms of what may not be said 
about him) provides one of the book's unifying threads. And second, that 
the schism in the church after the Council of Chalcedon in AD451 was a 
major turning point in ecclesiastical history. One of the disciplinary 
canons accepted by the western church thereafter concerned limitations 
on the ability to accuse a bishop of wrongdoing, the spirit of which 
haunts the modern church. The third section continues the story into the 
Reformation, where again the doubleness of sound and silence plays out; 
from the foundational "speaking out" of Luther to Zwingli's anxiety 
about music, from Quaker quietism to evangelical testifying.

The final section is the most provocative. MacCulloch turns to the less 
edifying uses of silence: the silence surrounding the Holocaust, 
slavery, clerical abuse; the silencing of non-heterosexual, non-male 
voices within the church. There is an astonishing cadenza on 
"Nicodemism", the term Calvin derived from Nicodemus, who only dared 
visit the tomb under cover of darkness. While it has a clear historical 
sense in the use of dissembling under unpropitious political 
circumstances – Protestants under Mary, Catholic recusants under 
Elizabeth, the "Family of Love" under everyone – MacCulloch extends the 
usage to analyse the Nicodemism of gay Anglo-Catholics, a kind of 
liturgical polari <http://www.polari.org.uk/>, which was ironically 
threatened by increased liberalism in other parts of the church. Again 
it is worth noting that, taking one informed statistical guess, 
practising Nicodemites in the form of Christians in China and the Asian 
subcontinent, make up 6% of the world's population – the fifth largest 
religion in their own right, as MacCulloch observes. He ends with an 
inspired image – the radio wild-track (radio producers record silence on 
location, as every silence is subtly different. When the presenter stops 
speaking, there is a quiet that is not a silence, an absence full of 
unnoticed presences, all the chirruping, clicking, wind-sighing that we 
don't hear but notice when they are gone). As silences are different, 
the wild-track is the theological equivalent of hearing the presence 
surrounding absence; John Cage's /4'33'/' turned into a hymn.

Negative or apophatic theology has become the apologetics of choice in 
the modern age, best summarised by Johannes Scotus Eriugena in the ninth 
century: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what 
He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He 
transcends being." It underpins both Karen Armstrong's /The Case for 
God/ 
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/religion/9780099524038/the-case-for-god-what-religion-really-means> 
and Keith Ward's /God: A Guide for the Perplexed/ 
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/religion/9781851689736/god-a-guide-for-the-perplexed>. 
As MacCulloch is writing a "Christian history" of silence it perhaps 
excuses not further investigating the role of negative theology across 
religions: how does Christian apophasis relate to the Jewish version 
exemplified by Moses Maimonides, or the Islamic Mu'tazila school (who 
tried to reconcile rationalism and negation), or even the Taoist 
version: the/Tao Te Ching/ opens "The way that can be spoken of is not 
the constant way; the name that can be named is not the constant name."

MacCulloch delicately balances the attractions of the /via negativa/ 
with a concerned awareness that retreat from the world can also be a 
capitulation to its power and prejudices, a spiritual solipsism. To that 
extent, silence here functions as a metonym for the wider Christian 
paradox of engagement with and withdrawal from the world. Can these 
positions ever be reconciled?

Pascal wrote that "all of man's misfortunes come from one thing, which 
is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room" (a tribute, in part, to his 
affiliation with Jansenism). It may be that in sitting quietly, as 
with the wild-track, one can hear not only the clamour in its full 
glaring cacophony, but also the overlooked and whispered as well. 
Retreat might be the clarification necessary for an eventual 
making-heard and speaking out. George Herbert 
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/dec/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview31>'s 
first poem entitled "Prayer" captures that ambiguity as a positive force 
– prayer is "reversed thunder"; it is "church-bells beyond the stars 
heard". The precision of detail that silence allows is best expressed 
in another phrase from that poem: "heaven in ordinarie".

On 31-07-2020 18:44, R.O. wrote:
>
> Silence: A Christian History: Amazon.co.uk: MacCulloch, Diarmaid ...
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20200731/7e0bcf50/attachment-0001.html>