A book review & its echoes within Lacan's body of work
Julia Evans
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
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/29/silence-christian-history-macculloch-review
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 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.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.