<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="css-1nupfq9">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-rhetjd">
<address class="css-10d1jpn"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/29/silence-christian-history-macculloch-review">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/29/silence-christian-history-macculloch-review</a><br>
</address>
<h1 class="css-10d1jpn">Silence: A Christian History by
Diarmaid MacCulloch – review</h1>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-zjgnrw">
<div class="css-1uix35z">
<div class="css-yx10il">Clerical abuse, the Holocaust … the
church has often stayed silent. Stuart Kelly is impressed by a
rich, robust study of Christian quietness</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-pn0kqp">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-1qvfpal">
<div class="css-osrmer"> <source media="(min-width: 1020px)
and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25), (min-width:
1020px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)"> <source
media="(min-width: 1020px)"> <source media="(min-width:
660px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 660px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)"> <source
media="(min-width: 660px)"> <source media="(min-width:
480px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 480px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)"> <source
media="(min-width: 480px)"> <source media="(min-width:
0px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 0px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)"> <source
media="(min-width: 0px)"></div>
<span class="css-l6t30p"><figcaption class="css-xe26t6"><span
class="css-1vo1rhq"><svg width="11" height="10"
viewBox="0 0 11 10"></svg></span></figcaption></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-pn0kqp">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-1qvfpal"><span class="css-l6t30p"><figcaption
class="css-xe26t6"><span class="css-1f2y4fi">Piety or
concealment? … silence is not always golden in the
Christian church. Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP</span></figcaption></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-1aul2ye">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-ss9mnu">
<div class="css-1pykr4h">
<div class="css-fj5ypv">
<div>
<address aria-label="Contributor info"
data-component="meta-byline" data-link-name="byline">
<div class="css-1sq67yf"><a rel="author"
data-link-name="auto tag link"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stuart-kelly">Stuart
Kelly</a></div>
</address>
<div class="css-1kkxezg" role="textbox"><span
class="css-nyo8hb">Published on </span>Fri 29 Mar
2013 08.01 GMT</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="css-1uuhxtj">
<div class="css-1olk8yb">
<div class="article-body-commercial-selector css-79elbk">
<p class="css-182kmce"><span class="css-hi9njr"><span
class="css-jwwgxz">C</span></span><span
class="css-182kmce">hristianity 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.</span></p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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"; <a
href="http://www.eckhartsociety.org/" title=""
data-link-name="in body link">Meister Eckhart</a>
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, <em>Fear and Trembling</em>,
under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.</p>
<span id="sign-in-gate"></span>
<p class="css-182kmce">Diarmaid MacCulloch charts this
problematic and often contradictory relationship
with aplomb in <em>Silence: A Christian History</em>.
Expanded from his <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBByJepyEw&list=PLEA9467E8E8D991AE"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Gifford
lectures</a>, it is, as one might expect of the
author of <em>A History of Christianity</em> and <em>Reformation</em>,
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."</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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.</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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.</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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 <a
href="http://www.polari.org.uk/" title=""
data-link-name="in body link">polari</a>, 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 <em>4'33'</em>' turned into a
hymn.</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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 <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/religion/9780099524038/the-case-for-god-what-religion-really-means"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Karen
Armstrong's <em>The Case for God</em></a> and <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/religion/9781851689736/god-a-guide-for-the-perplexed"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Keith Ward's
<em>God: A Guide for the Perplexed</em></a>. 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<em> Tao Te Ching</em> opens "The way
that can be spoken of is not the constant way; the
name that can be named is not the constant name."</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">MacCulloch delicately balances
the attractions of the <em>via negativa</em> 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?</p>
<p class="css-182kmce">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. <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/dec/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview31"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">George
Herbert</a>'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".</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 31-07-2020 18:44, R.O. wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e601b6a2-3454-57ff-3982-6f76e7feadac@ziggo.nl">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p><img alt="Silence: A Christian History: Amazon.co.uk:
MacCulloch, Diarmaid ..." class="n3VNCb"
src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1btyfeYESL.jpg"
data-noaft="1" style="width: 496.945px; height: 780px; margin:
0px;" moz-do-not-send="true"></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">_______________________________________________
D66 mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:D66@tuxtown.net">D66@tuxtown.net</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66">http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>