Silence

Often in Christian History the question of the language of the Liturgy has been posed. It has been raised in terms of whether there should be a universal language, Latin, or whether the vernacular should be used. Or should a period in the development of a language be, in effect, canonized as the sacred language? This can be the question of Church Slavonic in Russia, or the preference for ‘Holy Ghost’ over ‘Holy Spirit’ in the hills of Tennessee. But the assumption is that Liturgy is made up simply of language, and yet we may press beyond this a little when we start with the realization that every spoken and proclaimed and prayed and intoned word rises out of silence. Silence is formally the ground of Liturgy, as it is of all speech and prayer, but what is the significance of this for the understanding of that prayer?

Fr. John Breck says,

proclamation and celebration of the Word must resolve into Silence… for Silence to become the matrix of revelation, it must assume its own objective reality… not merely the absence of sound.

And the Wisdom of Solomon tells us,

when deep silence enveloped all things… the Royal Word… leapt down from heaven.¹

Yet while our Christian tradition knows many considerations of silence and individual prayer (within the Eastern tradition it is at the heart of hesychasm) it seems almost nothing has been written on the significance of Silence as matrix of Word within liturgical prayer and in particular the Liturgy of the Eucharist, which is the most central expression of our prayer.

So perhaps we may suggest some possible directions for thought, and also suggest the possible significance of pursuing this thought.

To speak about Silence is to deal with something which cannot easily be discussed… “One cannot discuss it as other subjects,” as Plato says in the seventh letter,² of the ineffable. Yet perhaps, as the philosopher goes on to say, as one works with it as one can, “a flame leaps across… like a fire kindled by a spark.” We intend not so much a scholarly discourse then, but to light a spark and share its blaze.

As background we use, and suggest, the book The World of Silence,³ by the Swiss Christian philosopher Max Picard. This amazing meditation was published in 1946 and it is still almost the only serious work on Silence as such, although there are suggestive materials in Rudolph Otto’s Das Helige,⁴ and also in Thomas Merton. In Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Silence is sought… It breathes in the poetry of Rilke… of Eliot.

Now, if Silence is the matrix of the Word, then it is also there even when there is speech. It has an autonomous reality as ground of the Liturgy and is only made more perceptible by the cessation of sound. Furthermore, each person brings his interior and personal silence into the Liturgy… But our silence outside of prayer is very different from the silence of God. It is a silence based on our awareness of what we have lost and of what we have desired but never had, and of our death, and it is deeply penetrated by darkness But the real Silence, that of God, is full of Spirit and Light…

The Eucharist, completing the Mystery of Baptism, is an offering of our life, in return for the Divine Life. As we speak the words of prayer, we are also giving up our life, returning the word to God (from whom we received it) and passing into the silence which is also our acceptance of our death, of giving up our lives to God, confident that He will return Life. “This is the meaning of death,” says Abraham Heschel, “the ultimate self-dedication to the divine… This act of giving away is reciprocity on man’s part for God’s gift of life. For the pious man it is a privilege to die.”⁵ And then God returns Life to us by replacing our word with His Word. And so the heart of the Liturgy is exchange of word and silence, of our word out of our silence for God’s Word, out of the Silence which is full of Resurrection… the exchange of death and Life.

From this primordial structure of the Liturgy it follows that the contradictions of individuals which rise when we speak out of our individual silences (shot through with darkness), are resolved. They are resolved in that Word which is spoken out of true Silence, and so Community is created in Liturgy, which makes possible the speaking of word out of silence.

As we realize this depth of Silence out of which Liturgy is prayed, we realize then (not just as theory) the ‘Power of His Resurrection’ [ Phil. 3:10], which is its heart. In the words of St. Isaac of Syria:

Silence is the Sacrament of the world to come.

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There is a remarkable Buddhist text which I believe (within the light of Silence) is completed by the Liturgy, and which in turn illuminates the deep structure of Christian Liturgy. It is from the Prajnaparamita Sutra (Heart of Wisdom):⁶

Emptiness is Form!
and Form is precisely Emptiness!
This is the great Incantation!
The incantation which dispels all Fear!
Oh what a realization! [or Awakening]
All Hail! [Bodhi Svaha!]

But the conception of ‘Emptiness’ is of pregnant Silence… a matrix of Life and reality and so we may transpose… (And I have consulted on the validity of this with people who are learned in Buddhism.)

Silence is Word
and Word is precisely Silence!

And the joy of realization, whose quality of delight is evident in the Buddhist text but its source left in Mystery, is seen to be fulfilled in Resurrection and in Liturgy. For the exchange and interpenetration between emptiness and form is grounded as it is also fulfilled, in the death and Resurrection of Christ, and finds its focal point in the Chalice. But again if the Liturgy fulfills all that was sought through the ‘Gates of Silence’⁷ (Fr. Alexander Men’s title of his study of Buddhism), yet in turn the joy rising from the interchange of emptiness and form can perhaps illumine our understanding of what comes from Silence and Word… the exchanged death and Life… Oh what a realization! All Hail!

I believe it is worth underlining what is possible here… it is not simply a possible more-or-less exact analogy between the Buddhist thought and the structure of the Eucharist in its depth, but also the illumination of the Liturgy which the awareness of its philosophical depths bring. For at least some minds it may be a way of joining understanding to faith, in a flash of realization. ‘A flame leaps across…’

Liturgy then, is Silence and Word. The Hassids said that God wrote the Law in Black Fire on a ground of White Fire and that at the end it will be seen that the true Law is in the White Fire as well as in the Black. In Liturgy, God speaks His Word of Black Fire on the ground of His Silence… which is White Fire.

So finally, let us suggest some consequences of these things. Perhaps they can be the technical consequence, if one may so express it, of seeking to restore more spaces in our prayer where Silence, which underlies the whole Liturgy, is apparent. In the Eastern Liturgy we may say that there are moments of this sort at the Great Entrance (especially in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts), but not many such moments. The liturgy of Taizé⁸ in the west is an example of a modern Liturgy which seeks to set word in a space… to make Silence manifest. In the west also, the whole cult of the Adoration takes place within the context of Silence and I would suggest (against some modem western scholars who regard it as anti-clerical, which of course has been the normative eastern thought also), that it is this which suggests that it comes from the heart of Liturgy.

There can be, anyway, in the celebration of Liturgy a discovery and remembering of Silence which is reflected in the celebration, in the priest’s serving and in the choir and through the whole… and this without any specific reordering or reforming of the Liturgy.

Isaiah cries,

Woe to those who join house to house and field to field until there is no space remaining.
[ Isa. 5:8]

This may be applied also to the running of word into word without space. For although the Silence remains (as we said) behind and under the words, the problem is that in this way of praying an attitude is reflected… the attitude that the words themselves are the whole of the prayer. From this profound misunderstanding there arises then an absolutizing of the forms of the words… perhaps of the liturgical language but in any case of the externality of the word of prayer. The Prophet Isaiah goes on to say that those who buy all of the properties so that there is no space between will be left in a terrible solitude. We may, allegorically, but surely truly, say that those who absolutize the form will be left with empty churches and the solitude of their false absolutism. At the same time, the restoration of the awareness of Silence as underlying Word, opens the way to freedom from this inauthentic absolutism, just as in dogmatic theology the apophatic principle—itself a theology of silence—frees us from false contradictions in our understanding of doctrine.

Then, more deeply, as we discover that Silence is not first of all that of personal prayer (and Hesychia) but… while it is that, is that as deriving from… the Silence which together with the Word is the heart of Liturgy, we will find that the end of all personal spiritual quests, and the resolution of all our impossible contradictions (‘the great incantation which dispels all fear!’) is here at the beginning of everything… at the Lord’s table, gathered together. Here it is at the place where all Christian prayer begins… ‘In the beginning is my end,’ says the poet T.S. Eliot, expressing this, and,

The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered, gate…⁹

The Gate of Silence.

And this becomes, as we have said, the ground of that self-discovery and self-disclosure of the Church which is Community. Community made possible by the deep structure of Prayer, of Silence before the Word, and of Word from Silence…
May the Holy Spirit grant that as we consider these things which indeed ‘are not like other things,’

A flame leaps across!

And (Eliot again)

(Light) has answered… to Light
and is Silent…
the light is Still.¹⁰

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Heron

Emptiness and Form, Silence and Word.
Gabriel Marcel hesitates to accept
silence as more than absence, emptiness
as more than negation… How shall I not
hesitate?

“Look at the bird!” a woman cries.

There in a shallow pond is a small heron…
a snowy egret… moving its long legs deliberately
through the water and then poising, white and crested,
itself beyond doubting in that moment, both
Form and Emptiness.

It is Silence.

It itself is Word.

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from the book Theology of Wonder, ISBN: 1891295179

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Footnotes

¹ Wisdom 18:14-15

² The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ISBN: 0393974294 gives the following bibliography for Plato:

³ The World of Silence, ASIN: 0895269392

⁴ The Idea of the Holy, ISBN: 0195002105

⁵ from Death as Homecoming published in Jewish Reflections on Death, ISBN: 0805205160

⁶ The Heart Sutra

⁷ Очерки отечественной истории, ISBN: 5-85050-288-2 [Russian only, and out of print]

⁸ http://www.taize.fr/

⁹ from Four Quartets, No. 4, Little Gidding, V

¹⁰ from Four Quartets, No. 1, Burnt Norton, IV

Author: Bishop Seraphim (Sigrist)