On Silence and Speechlessness

On Silence and Speechlessness

My fondest wish when I wrote my little essay was that others would comment, so that I would be able to learn more.  My fondest wish has been been granted several times already.

The following comment  (by PB) fills out my scant knowledge of the history of apophasis.  It also gives us a much fuller grasp of “silence”, of “speechlessness” by pointing us past the phenomenal.

Karen Armstrong has long been a favourite of mine because of the depth, accessibility and inclusiveness of her writings.  It was a treat to be introduced to William Franke.

Your essay nicely captures the rise and fall of reason, logic, language, science, and fundamentalist religions, all handmaidens to the ego, in their attempts to define religion, God and humans in their fullness.

Science et al focuses on the phenomenal. They are, by definition, incapable of dealing with that which is beyond the phenomenal. They focus on measuring, comparing and contrasting, in other words, dualism, and are incapable of dealing with Oneness or One without an other, aka God.

Jesus, of course, pointed this out, in reminding us to “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21 KJV).

It is only at the outer limits of quantum mechanics where sense perception gives way to more subtle avenues that science and religion meet and agree. Your essay touches on this on page 7 and again on page 10. Any other scientific approach results only in an infinite regression, at best, in its attempts to explore religion and God.

Rendering unto Caesar is also the essence of apophatic theology. Indeed, the term “apophatic theology” is an oxymoron because this approach implicitly rejects theology and philosophy as paths to God.  Instead it invites the practitioner to directly experience the Divine and how it flows through and informs the universes and all in it.

Apophatic theology denies that aspects or attributes said to be of God as are actually indicative of God.  Its approach assumes that God is ineffable and that attempts to apply human characteristics to God, such as existence or non-existence, are not only inadequate but misleading.

Because God is indivisible, everywhere all the time, attempts to ascribe attributes to God are only references to an aspect of God as perceived by humans who have locked themselves into the notion of a phenomenal world.

The idea of apophatic “theology” is to eliminate that which God is not and also to eliminate related ways of characterizing God until there is full intuitive or contemplative awareness of God directly.

This method of non-identification with God qualities includes a gradual non-identification with the qualities of phenomenal world. It seeks not only to eliminate all limiting concepts about God but also to eliminate all limiting ideas about the seeker, including a consciousness that limits wisdom.  Apophatic “theology” is the process establishing a change in the consciousness of the seeker so that he/she becomes aware that they already are that which they seek.   

Your essay refers to all this either directly or indirectly.

This spiritual path is known variously as the Via Negativa path of Roman Catholicism; the Jnana Yoga path of Hinduism; the Lahoot Salbi  path of Islam, found principally in the Shia and Sufi paths; the Ein-sof aspect of Judaism, plus Buddhism and Taoism or Daoism.

The Via Negativa path to the Divine has been practiced for many millenia by all religions. It is the mystical or contemplative approach to the Divine leading to the common core of all religions. 

I’m not sure that I agree that apophatic theology began with Denys the Areopagite as stated on page 3. That certainly isn’t true for non-Christian religions. For Christianity there are the earlier examples of the desert fathers and the hesychasm tradition as well as the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Throughout the essay are references to apophatic theology’s emphasis on self-emptying and speechlessness and on the ineffability, incomprehensibility, inconceivablitiy, unsayability, of the Divine:

On page 2 you mention that negative theology is “an admission at crucial moments that we simply do not know” and that apophatic comes from the Greek meaning “unsayable”.  Being “unsayable” does not mean that we are not capable of full awareness of the divine. 

On page 3 you reference Karen Armstrong’s citing of a Chinese sage that negative theology “enables a person to step outside the prism of ego and experience the sacred”.  But on page 4, Armstrong is said to remark that the reduction of talk to silence is really what theology is about. This latter idea is only partially true because silence is only an avenue that gets the core apophatic process started that leads to direct experience of the sacred.

On page 5, an attempt is made to equate kenosis or “self emptying” with being speechless. But self emptying refers not only to speechlessness but also to having no mental content, in other words, adopting a consciousness radically different from that employed when dealing with the phenomenal world.

Hinduism and Sikhism have a concept of Anhad Naad,  silent sound or unstruck sound. This “sound” without an external vibration is the sound of the cosmos and human consciousness. (Sikhnet and The Hindu Forum of India Divine) From this comes OM or AUM that not only codifies the ineffability of the universe but also the chanting of which changes and attunes the consciousness so that one becomes aware of this unstruck sound and of God.

Zen Buddhism has its own version of this. The answer to the famous koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is God Consciousness.

Your essay points out that the tension or paradox between knowing and self-emptying or between knowledge and direct experience or direct apprehension is resolved by William Franke’s observation of the two limits of language and that root of language is beyond words. Franke’s comments lead to the concept of the ineffability of humans and provides a direct link to the ineffability of the Divine and the correspondence of humanity with the sacred.

Franke argues that a “richly diverse world” has unity of love or compassion. But love, unity, and compassion are our egoic perceptions of the presence of the Divine in ourselves and our phenomenal worlds. Such adjectives are the opposite of via negative and keep us from the divine.

Your essay effectively skewers deism and its egocentric origins, which along with science and economics are in the process of causing the disappearance of humanity through greed-driven climate change.

The stress of extinction may be the spur to taking a renewed interest in apophatic theology.

Apophatic theology provides a remedy to egoism but is not new.  The post-modern rise of apophatic theology reflects the sentiments of the song, Everything Old is New Again, by Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager:

            Don't throw the past away


  You might need it some rainy day


                                                Dreams can come true again


                                                When everything old is new again

One can only be unmindful of one’s sacred nature for so long. Ultimately, our spiritual core makes itself felt. We may try to hang on to our initial glimpses of the sacred but assigning descriptors to them. That is kataphatic theology. By definition, it is about something and so always keeps us separate (and estranged) from that sacred something. It is only later, that some decide not to apply descriptors but rather to experience the sacred in all their moments on earth.