Crossing Silence 
Dr. JOHN C. McDOWELL
New College, University of Edinburgh

[As delivered at the Society for the Study of Theology, at the University of Newcastle, 9th April 2003]  

There is always one storyteller, one survivor, one witness to revive the murderous past if not the victims.
[Moshe, in Elie Wiesel, The Oath, 237]

It seems recently that there has been an “apophatic rage” in theology.  This paper constitutes an early set of reflections engendered not only by the theological culture of silence being entertained, but also by Grace Jantzen’s recognition of the gender-significance of debates on theologies of silence; by the politics of silence shaped by late-capitalist market economies, as lamented by the likes of Zygmunt Bauman; and by the silencing of opposition to recent aggressive American and British foreign-policy through calls for “patriotism” and “sacrifice” (in their own way, rather thinly disguised rhetorical euphemisms).  
	I will briefly examine here four types of silence:  enforced silence, primal silence, corrective silence, and flourishing silence.  But, while these suit my purposes of assessing a range of sources of silence, they cannot cover all the available options, and do not intend to suggest any comprehensive taxonomy of silence itself.  

A Silence to Vanquish the Spectacle of the Idol 
In his Tambach lecture of 1919 Karl Barth declared that “We are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed.”  Partly through engagement with Franz Overbeck (a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche), Barth sets as his main task a vanquishing of the shadows cast by these idols – and this in the name of a proper account of human flourishing, one that lives within the tension of having to speak about God while yet being unable to do so.  
By way of engaging in this iconoclastic project one can and must ask ‘what kinds of idols are being worshipped in the spaces opened by silence?’, and ‘who do these silences profit?’  As attention to the multiplicity of ‘silence’ testifies, not all silences are the same.  

Enforced Silence 
The Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh houses a Millennium Clock.  The images are revealing of the designers’ vision of the millennium past.  Several figures appearing tortured prop up its highest points, as if raising their voices into the heights of heaven, or perhaps forming the pinnacle of modernity’s construction of its own upward rise.  That the figures are not named is significant.  In one sense they are the faces of countless millions whose way through modernity line its golden stairways and whose names have been violently denied to posterity’s memory.  The particular people have been rendered mute in their own right, reduced to statistics (as the millions who died), and reduced further to mere general signs (the dark icon of the C20th).  The one bearing the star of David on his body darkly testifies to this last form of reduction.  
	Elie Wiesel’s own body bears a scar of his experiences of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  “The tatoo ‘A-7713’ etched in his skin serves as a constant reminder that his fiction is horribly real.”  It is a physiography of silence, the silence enforced on those categorised as ‘the Jews’, or simply as ‘other’.  His own experiences enforced a further silence concerning these events for almost a decade afterward.  For Wiesel, this afterward is the silence of the ‘living’ dead, for as he later shockingly describes in a haunting figura, after his camp ‘liberation’ (if such a word could even be appropriate for one whose memories have forced him to become living dead) “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.”  When Wiesel’s corpse is revived he begins to speak in a richly significant way of his time when his, the Jewish people’s, and even creation’s, day descended “into one long night”.  
	In this night there are no shadows of idols.  It is too dark for that.  Instead the systematic inversion of the religious in De Nuit’s portrayal of the Nazis serves to suggest that the time is one of false gods all the way down.  It is the Nazis who now “become the measure of all things”.  It is they who now hold in their hands not merely the power of life and death but the very capacity for the “degradation of death” itself through their mechanising of corpse production.  It is they who now force the desire of death on, reverse the evolutionary process of, and undo the divine creative process for, a great many of their prisoners.  And all the while Wiesel’s God is silent.  Once the stars, signs of hope and humanity in the narrative, hide there is no light to brighten the mood.  The only light is that of the flame emanating from the crematorium’s chimney, the pillar of flame that would take them to the land promised in the imposed eschatological covenant aptly designated as ‘the final solution’.  A survivor of the black death once poignantly wrote:  
And in many places … great pits were [continually] dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. … And I … buried my five children with my own hands. … And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.  
	For Wiesel it is the end of the world as he had known it.  The visio of his mirrored self-examination renders him deadly silent.  
All that was left of the Holocaust victim and for the … survivor was silence – not the mystical silence of Eliezar’s youth, but a polluted silence, because millions were ‘forgotten by God, forsaken by Him….’ …Language had been corrupted to the point that it must be invented anew, but this is an impossible task.  Language had to be purified somehow:  ‘This time we wrote not with words but against words,’ says Wiesel.  
	Wiesel’s purifying move “against words” from the mid 1950s onward, however, constitutes his active refusal to let the Nazis have their way with silencing the Jews – he aims to do his best to speak for them in their stead, by making them present in the only manner now available through written testimony to them beyond any desire for self-concern.  As he later reflects 
Now I was not anxious to be an accomplice. … Finally I understood:  I am free to choose my suffering but not that of my fellow humans. … Not to cry out against their misery was to make it all the heavier.  
Graham Walker, Jr., claims that Wiesel is “concerned that the survivor become the vehicle or medium through whom the dead can again speak.”  This act, albeit a fragile one, is that of what Edith Wyschogrod names the “heterological historian” who, while recognising a scission between herself and the victim, nevertheless narratologically refuses to evade “the demands of alterity”, “her covenant with the dead others”.  

Primal Silence 
George Steiner similarly refuses to separate fiction and truth-telling, speaking of the possibility of art’s “interrogation” of life, functioning as “a sharply political gesture, a value-statement of the most evident ethical import”.  Moreover, what drives Steiner’s 1969 collection, Language and Silence, is a sense of word-loss, of the corruption of language.  However, unlike with Wiesel, Steiner comes precariously close to a vacant silence at important points, one that does not reveal and therefore does not take responsibility for those silenced.  
	The particular conflict between Moses and Aaron Steiner presents in Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses und Aron as one of irreconcilable versions of language’s positioning before whom or what (that is the question) it worships.  Aaron is the eloquent one, the “soaring tenor” who is able to express his God-talk through exuberant tones.  Moses, on the other hand, can only speak in a highly cadenced, formal discourse, a form of stylised song-speech (Sprechstimme), a discourse that is shocking in its being unable to give musical form to his vision.  It is with Moses, and in particular with his sense of imagistically undistorted revelational immediacy, that Steiner’s sympathies lie.  
…Aaron diminishes or betrays Moses’ thought, that in him which is immediate revelation, in the very act of communicating it to other men. … Words distort; eloquent words distort absolutely.  
	Notably in his essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner senses that the manifestation of presence becomes more pronounced the more language fails.  Theologies attuned to an iconoclastic apophatic could agree that “speech so precisely fails us”.  Yet Steiner’s emphasis lies on the disjunction, or competitiveness of human and divine discourses rather than on the plenitude of God’s being God, for example, and that God the God of the covenant.  As Graham Ward surmises from the Ockhamist deontologisation of words and metaphysics of linguistic atomism that underlies this account, “God is now encountered on the far side of language and knowledge.”  
	This is the silence of a pronounced loss (loss of self without recreative return, loss of alterity before God), emptiness (emptying the space of the created), and isolation (isolating the self from discursive formation and relations of différence in an indifference).  This Romantic strain of word-loss, enforced by his reading of the post-Shoah loss of trust in the word, is reiterated and highlighted in Steiner’s assessment that “music is, in the final analysis, superior to language, that it says more or more immediately.”  This is a discourse so full of itself that its subject needs no time for others, and is a subjectivity that has little that can resist consumerism’s fetishisation of the privatised self or prevent silence from dissolving into a ‘stillness’ that speech with others can only but disrupt.  In short, it is a discourse that finds it difficult to provide the momentum for a hope that is more than Steiner’s sheer act of will or arbitrary fiat of a Pascalian inspired wager on transcendence.  

Corrective Silence 
Donald MacKinnon’s reading of Schoenberg’s piece differs at certain intensively crucial points.  Aaron’s error lies not the attempt at public communication, but, despite his pastoral concerns, in yielding to the pressure of the demand for a visible and comprehensible form of the restoration of “the old gods”.  It is the particular materially precious bovine Bild that is the distortion.  MacKinnon’s interest, then, lies less at the level of language than of that represented, less on the medium than on the message.  Aaron’s god “is wonderfully made to measure”.  
	“Although we can say nothing of the god whose commandments he conveys,” Moses, in contrast, “knows that the god of the Aarons of this world is no god at all.”  “[T]he god they embody … will indulge them in ways that will ultimately undermine and pervert their sensibility….”  The calf anthroporphism, then, really is a construction of the people, an object of their revelry, and thereby rendered impotent in criticality.  In short, this god cannot stand over against the people as Other, but becomes indistinguishable in its properties from them, in fact the culmination of their thoughts and desires.  In theological significance, learning here from Moses, MacKinnon asserts that “Always agnosticism was judged less perilous than anthropomorphism.”  Yet MacKinnon’s apophaticism is a carefully qualified negation:  
The kind of God that we approach by the pitiless negation of all that we find ourselves moved to say about him easily emerges as a God whose infinity renders him indifferent to the very distinction between good and evil on which Moses lays such weight.  
	This God of negativity verges on becoming a morally absent space at the heart of human performance, a conceiving of divine différance in terms of indifference.  Moses, it seems, is no less guilty of anthropomorphism than Aaron.  
	Thus when MacKinnon concludes with the comment that “It is therefore only within the context of the most rigorous discipline of silence that we dare think of such a reality [divine love]” the kind of silence he has in mind already moves beyond the empty silence of a Steiner.  MacKinnon has in this context already mentioned “the strange and perhaps hardly explored silence of Christ in his passion.”  Is christology, then, the site of hope’s birth?  This would suggest that MacKinnon’s talk of the “primacy” of the apophatic needs to be qualified so that the ways of negation and affirmation are not imagined to be sequential or independent.  

Flourishing Silence 
Steiner’s Romanticism constructs an exitus from and a reditus to a silence beyond the corruptions of language’s materiality, consequently leaving little to positively articulate in-between.  In contrast, Christian traditions at least begin not with the absoluteness of this kind of silence at all.  The Logos spoken into the void by the God of Genesis, in the Fourth Gospel becomes God’s eternal Word, intrinsic to God’s very Self.  The anti-Arian parties of the fourth century emphasise the sense of this eternal uncreatedness of divine Self-expression, and of the differentiatability of the eternal divine relationships.  Implicit at least in these forms of reasoning is the notion that “In the beginning” is not silence, as if creating is necessary to heal the pain of divine solitude, but divine conversation.  According to Nicholas Lash, “God does not say many things, but one.  That is not an arithmetical statement, but a reading rule”.  It is in, through, and from this one thing (“In the beginning was the Word”) that creation itself is spoken (“All things came into being through him”), participating within the peacefulness of divine intercourse (“in him was life, and the life was the light of all people”).  
	Genesis testifies to a pervasive corruption of language’s capacity to bear divine peacefulness.  Silence in Eden is transfigured into a hiding from God.  But worse is to follow – Cain’s face turns against his brother in a raging act of other-silencing fratricide.  Language’s God-like status of being able to speak right and wrong, and the further falling from language’s peacefulness through eradicatating otherness, leaves Babel’s noise but around the corner.  The very attempted ascension of discourse bears the erasure of the uniformity of capacity to converse and of the sound of particular voices.  God’s conversation-creating Word of judgment (it is good) now is constrained to articulate a No (it is [no longer] good) within God’s Yes (but it still remains that for which the covenant God has promised to be responsible).  
	It is through this corruption of language, and its darkening silences (“the darkness”, Jn. 1:5), that God incarnates the creative Word – the self-expressed divine responsibility and healing.  This Word too is spoken against by the darkness, and rejected as appropriately bearing the true Word of God (Jn. 1:10f.).  In a final act of constructive self-determination the logoi violently speak over the Logos in an excluding and silencing act against the Other.  The irresponsibility to the Logos of the divine Other constitutes the very self-annihilating silencing of creation itself, the undoing of its creative ground in whom it is spoken – for while one may speak for oneself, one may not speak oneself absolutely.  Eberhard Jüngel argues that “God … has no place in our language.  He is not met with, he has no topos.”  No topos, that is, other than the cross and grave.  
	And yet, or even so, the Fourth Gospel articulates, God comes to speech through and in spite of the chiasmus, eschatologically healing speech (‘returns’ to speech, the eschatological reditus).  God is life-givingly faithful to God’s gravely silenced Word, the Word that now bears the scars for all eternity (Pascal), the Word whose resurrection light serves to lengthen “the shadow of the Cross.”  Through and in spite of this, Lash announces, “we may, nevertheless, learn to speak again.”  That speaking again, however, never positions us to be able to speak the Logos ourselves.  The Word’s prophetic power is exerted on our discourse, sublating possibilities of possessability and setting our speech against itself – our stammering and fragile speech must figure with the furious cries of longing ‘Come, make gods for us’ [Ex. 32:1], and ‘Let him be crucified’ [Matt. 27:22, 23], and the various ranges of complicity in the ‘Yawohl, mein Führer’.  
	God is not the object of our silences, as if the referentiality of silence is any less idolatrous than the referentiality of our prolixity or the silence idolising of Jesus’ dead face, but rather the one in whom and in address to whom we learn to desire responsible healthy silences.  As Wiesel articulates, “There is a healthy silence, Sinai, and an unhealthy silence, that of chaos.”  The privatised silences of “well-heeled individualists”, consumerist societies’ weapons of mass distraction, can be displayed as void, as chaotic necrophobic ways of forgetting possibilities and actualities of the rupture of others.  
	Testimonies of cataclysm, Langbein observes in a subversion of Hebrew cultic atonement imagery, brings us to the point of admitting that “I live, because others died in my place…”  I can be silent because others, who were deemed as ‘other than us’ by their silencers, were silenced in my place.  In other words, one cannot be silent before God by being silent before the enforced silence of the neighbour, by having an allergic reaction to alterity.  This would be a double silence for those silenced.  Instead, the summons to response-ability is to risk oneself in an interrogative  testimonial (indeed, even a textimonial) politics of Christian remembering.  
The enacted testimony of Christian remembering moves, then, from a vision of hospitality-inducing image of, in the words of David Burrell, “friends in conversation”.  This pneumatically engendered hospitality sees the lion of Judah lying down with the lamb of God in peace, and the silenced creation bearing eloquent witness not only to the No of the cross but the Yes of God’s love.  For now, this flourishing remains a regulating horizon of divine possibility, a task to be performed in hope through all the dark places of this world.  

Dr. John C. McDowell
New College, Edinburgh
4th April 2003