Michael Amaladoss S.J.
Abstract:
God seems to be silent when people like Jesus or Job appeal to him in the midst of suffering. Sometimes people who want to speak about God are obliged to be silent because God is not accessible to the senses and to conceptual reason. The mystics assert that God is beyond all that we say about God. So before God we can only be silent. The Chinese and Indian traditions also affirm such a epistemological apophatism. But Buddhism may go a step further and assert even ontological apophatism because there is neither a fixed object about which one can speak nor a fixed subject which can speak. So silence reigns.
Theology refers to talk about God and a theology of silence, on which I have been asked to reflect, will have to talk about silence in relation to God. Silence is understood as the absence of speech. It can be mental (thoughts) as well as physical (words). In the context of a conversation, silence could be the absence of a response for whatever reason and in whatever way. In the following pages I plan to focus on three areas. Sometimes God seems silent when the humans seek to speak to God. Secondly, when the humans seek to think of or to speak about God rationally, they eventually have to fall silent because God is beyond what they can think or say at that level. God transcends language, concept and reason. But God seems accessible to imagination, emotion, energy and intuition. The fact that we cannot speak about God or reach out to God through language and reason does not mean that we cannot experience God in other ways. Thirdly, God may also transcend our experience. We experience God as emptiness, as nothing, as nirvana or sunya. Let me now explore these three dimensions of a silent God.
1. Michael Amaladoss, S.J. , born in 1936, is from Tamil Nadu, South India. At present he is the Director of the Institute of Dialogue with Cultures and Religions, Chennai, a PhD research institute of the University of Madras. He is also Secretary of ‘Jesuits in Religious Studies’ in South Asia and Editor of IGNIS – a review on Ignatian spirituality. He has a doctorate in systematic theology from the Catholic Institute, Paris and an honorary doctorate from Regis College, Toronto. He also has a PG diploma in South Indian Music. In the past, he has been a professor of theology at Vidyajyoti College of Theology in Delhi and Editor of Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection; a visiting professor in various theological institutes in Manila, Thailand, Paris, Bruxelles, Louvain, Berkeley, Washington DC, Cincinatti; the President of the International Association of Mission Studies; a consultant to two Pontifical Councils at the Vatican and to the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches; and an assistant to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus. His special interests are Indian theology and spirituality, and dialogues between Gospel, culture, religions. Authored 31 books, edited 8 books, about 450 articles in various languages (and some of his books have been translated into other languages).
The Silence of God
The normal experience of religion is the ongoing contact of the humans with God. God is experienced as creator and savior. Prayer is seen as talking to God to praise, thank, ask for favours and say sorry for sins. God is close to us, guides us and meets our needs. God also speaks to us through prophets. God manifests God self to us in wondrous deeds of creation, protection and salvation. But the Bible also presents to us instances when God is silent. God’s silence is all the more striking when we are expecting God to ‘do’ something to help us, based on our past experience of God. For a Christian the most striking example of God’s silence is when Jesus on the cross cries with a loud voice: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46) In hind sight we can say that God will raise him up again on the third day. God does answer. But at the moment God is silent. As a matter of fact, God’s silence, with its refusal to intervene, leads to the death of Jesus, silencing his own praying voice. Silence leading to silence or silence responding to silence. Jesus had experienced this silence of God already the previous night when he prayed in Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” (Mt 26:39) No answer from God is forthcoming and Jesus’ prayer concludes the second time “Your will be done”. He will say later on the cross: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” (Lk 23:46) Silence between God and Jesus hides an exchange of love that will fructify as new life. The silence therefore is full of promise and hope, not of despair. The two thieves illustrate the two different reactions possible. Silence becomes meaningful in a context of hope.
We see this same phenomenon earlier in the Bible. Job loses everything, not only his family and possessions, but his own health and a body that is wasting away. He laments: “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.” (Job 19:7) But his hope does not disappear. “I know that my Redeemer lives… then in my flesh I shall see God.” (Job 19: 25-26) In Psalm 44 we hear the voice of Israel that feels abandoned in the face of its enemies: “You have rejected us and abased us.” (Ps 44:10) But the last word is one of demanding hope: “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever!” (Ps 44:24) Sleeping obviously implies being silent. But the Psalmist hopes that it will pass. As a matter of fact, God may not appreciate such loud lamentations. So he commands: “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Ps 46:11) Here again, human silence must respond to divine silence, but a silence pregnant with hope. In the dialogue between God and the humans silence can be as significant as speech. God’s silence can have two different reasons. One reason is that the people have not been responding to God’s command and obeying God. So God is silent and God’s help is not forthcoming while they are suffering in various ways. God’s silence then is a call to conversion. A second reason is that God’s silence is a kind of test. Job has been faithful and even the misfortunes that befall him do not shake his faith and trust in God. God’s silence then tests and proves Job’s faithfulness. When God seems silent the humans may tend to fill the empty space with speech. But people who know better, animated by hope, will keep silent and wait.
The Silence of the Humans
A second kind of silence has to do with the human process of knowing. The Greek philosophical tradition considers that the humans are rational beings. It is through reason that the humans come to know the world outside them. The human senses reach out to the material world around them. Reason abstracts concepts from those sense impressions. These concepts mediate a relationship between the intellect that knows and the objects that are known. When the relationship is adequate the objects known are declared to be true. Human reason can also reflect on the data so acquired. For example, looking at the world reason can conclude that it must have a Creator. The truth of the Creator, of course, is not directly known, but is arrived at through reasoning. The process of reasoning also projects an idea of the Creator. Compared to the finite world, its Creator is considered infinite. So the humans begin describing God through analogical language. God is supreme Being, infinitely powerful, good, merciful, loving, etc. This supreme Being is not accessible to our senses, not to our limited reason. We know what is goodness, power, etc in the world around us. We simply affirm that God is infinitely good and powerful. Do we really grasp or know or understand this infinite reality?
Some philosophers answer this question affirmatively. They write elaborate treatises on God. Using logic they come to all kinds of conclusions. But modern philosophers, however, beg to differ. They assert that humans can only know the material world through their senses and affirm it as true. They see no real reason to affirm the existence of anything beyond the material world. If anything like that is affirmed, it is only a logical, not a real entity. It is true. It is not knowable. Our attitude towards such imagined objects can only be silence. Some will say that such non-material realities, like God, do not exist. This is atheism. Others would say that if such realities do exist we do not know them in the normal, rational way. So we cannot say anything about them. This is agnosticism. Some people today do not believe in God. If there is any talk about God they can only be silent. Some of these people may be very vigorous in their denial of God. They want to affirm their autonomy and freedom. They see any power superior to them as a threat and deny it. This is a negative kind of silence, a denial of knowledge, a refusal to speak. This silence is not theological but ideological, based on materialism and rationalism. By starting with the idea that only the material world is real, God is already excluded. Efforts by modern philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Luc Marion to make space for God through phenomena like ‘trace’ and ‘icon’ do not seem sufficient to escape this negative silence since they seem to accept as evident the basic materialism and rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Sometimes a denial of God may be emotionally charged. We have referred above to the story of Job. We have similar stories today: people who incur losses of property, who lose loved ones to sudden or incurable disease or accident, who are severely handicapped, etc. They are angry with God. Some may deny God too. There is a lot of suffering in the world. If God is good then God should remedy it. If God does not remedy it, then either God is not good so that he does not want to or God is not powerful so that he cannot. Such a God is not needed, they conclude. This also is an attitude of silence with reference to God. It is often an angry, bitter silence. This is also a negative silence. But such anger need not lead to denial.
The Silence of the Mystics
There is a third kind of silence that we see among the mystics. They have an experience of God that is supra-rational, intuitive, emotional, intellectual. Being supra-rational it is also beyond language. One does not speak about it in a rational way using concepts. At this level, one is silent. But one seeks to express it through symbols that refer, not to God’s being, but to God’s actions in history and in the lives of people and communities. The Muslims have a litany of 99 names for Allah. The Hindus have litanies of a thousand names. No one name alone is adequate. If we take each name separately all that we can say is “It is not this, it is not that” – neti, neti, as the Indians would say in Sanskrit. God is the unknown, so that at the level of speech one can only be silent. God is not an object of knowledge, if we only look at what reason can give us. But God can be experienced, related to, loved and even spoken about in symbol and metaphor, which open visions without borders, without objectifying God. Let us listen to the mystics. Given the limitations of space I shall refer only to a few of them.
St. Gregory of Nyssa (c.335-c.395) evokes Moses, probing deeper than what can be observed, reaching out to the ‘invisible and the incomprehensible’ and seeing God. But it is “seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness.”2 Dionysius the Areopagite (early 6th cent.) addresses the Trinity: “Lead us beyond unknowing and light,… where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence… Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen they completely fill our sightless minds with treasures beyond all beauty.” (p.86) Jan van Ruussbroec (1293-1381) speaks of a person meeting God as “an ample light, shining out of God’s Unity, reveal(ing) to him darkness, bareness, and nothingness.” (p. 193) An anonymous writer (16th cent.) evokes a ‘cloud of unknowing’ between God and us. (p. 255) St. John of the Cross (1542-91) writes to a Carmelite nun: “Our most important task consists in remaining silent before this great God, silent with our desires as well as with our tongue. He understand only one language, that of silent love.” (p. 331) Let us note that silence at the rational-conceptual and even intellectual level does not exclude a direct contact and experience through love. Such quotes from mystics in the Christian tradition can be multiplied. A final reference could be made to the story about St. Thomas Aquinas who, after his learned treatises on God, had a vision and stopped writing. The general consensus is that God is beyond reason and intellect, but accessible to experience through love.
2. Cf. Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman, OSB (eds), Light from Light. An Anthology of Christian Mysticism. (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), p. 49. The following quotations are also from this collection. Page numbers are given within brackets.
The Eastern Tradition
In the Chinese tradition the Tao-te Ching starts with the affirmation: “The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name.”3 It admonishes: “He who knows does not speak, He who speaks does not know.”4 It says further: “We look at it and do not see it: Its name is The Invisible. We listen to it and do not hear it: Its name is The Inaudible. We touch it and do not find it. Its name is The Subtle (formless).”5 The basic lesson of Taoism is that you seek to live in harmony with the Tao or the Way of nature and avoid unnecessary speculations. The fact that the Absolute, if one can call it that way, is not a ‘Being’ but a dynamic Way is significant. It is not something that you can objectify and speak about. It is a dynamism that moves you. The important thing is not knowing it, much less speaking about it, but living in harmony with it.
In the Indian tradition the philosopher-theologians use the phrase ‘neti neti’ – ‘not this, not this’ to indicate that none of the names and attributes that we can think up about the Absolute can directly apply to It. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: “The Spirit is not this, is not this. He is incomprehensible.”6 “He knows all, but no one knows him” says the Svetasvatara Upanishad.7 The Katha Upanishad affirms: “The Atman is beyond sound and form, without touch and taste and perfume. It is eternal, unchangeable, and without beginning or end: indeed above reasoning.”8 There is also a tradition that the Atman or the inner Spirit is experienced in deep sleep9, that is when all the senses and other faculties are silenced and even dreams do not occur. It is in absolute silence that the Atman manifests itself or is experienced. Litanies of a thousand names are used to praise God, but with an awareness that God transcends all of them. God does manifest Godself in human or other forms in history. But God is beyond them. This is indicated by speaking about Saguna and Nirguna Brahman, that is the Absolute with and without qualities. The Nirguna Brahman transcends everything and, at the same time, is immanent in everything. It cannot be objectified. One can only be aware of it. The technique of the yoga is used to withdraw the mind from all distracting thoughts and emotions so that in the ensuing silence, the Light shines in all its brightness and fullness.
The Absolute/God is Silence
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad tells us of a conversation between the sage Yajnavalkya and the king Janaka. The king asks the sage: “What is the light of man?” The sage answers: “The sun.” The king pursues: “What happens when the sun sets?” The sage: “The moon.” The dialogue proceeds leading from the sun and the moon to fire, voice and the soul. The soul itself is rooted in the Spirit. This is the advaita or non-duality of which the Upanishads speak. The Absolute/God and the world are not-two. They are not one either. The ‘self’ of the human does not see the Absolute as an ‘Other’ but as a deeper ‘Self’. The ‘Self’ is not a ‘S/he’ or a ‘Thou’, but a deeper ‘I’. As Paul says: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2:20) The ‘Absolute’, therefore, is not an object that we can see, touch, etc. We cannot speak about it. We cannot speak to it. We can only be aware of it and experience it. It is compared to the light which we cannot see, but in which we see other things. We read in the Katha Upanishad: “There the sun shines not, nor the moon nor the stars; lightnings shine not there and much less earthly fire. From his light all these give light, and his radiance illumines all creation.”
3. The Tao texts are taken from “The Natural Way of Lao Tzu” in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 139.
4. Ibid., p. 166.
5. Ibid., p. 146.
6. The Upanishads. Translated by Juan Mascaro (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 142. The Upanishads are reflexive texts that date back to the 5th century BCE.
7. Ibid., p. 90.
8. Ibid., p. 61.
9. Ibid., p. 124.
dialogue proceeds leading from the sun and the moon to fire, voice and the soul. The soul itself is rooted in the Spirit 10. This is the advaita or non-duality of which the Upanishads speak. The Absolute/God and the world are not-two. They are not one either. The ‘self’ of the human does not see the Absolute as an ‘Other’ but as a deeper ‘Self’. The ‘Self’ is not a ‘S/he’ or a ‘Thou’, but a deeper ‘I’. As Paul says: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2:20) The ‘Absolute’, therefore, is not an object that we can see, touch, etc. We cannot speak about it. We cannot speak to it. We can only be aware of it and experience it. It is compared to the light which we cannot see, but in which we see other things. We read in the Katha Upanishad: “There the sun shines not, nor the moon nor the stars; lightnings shine not there and much less earthly fire. From his light all these give light, and his radiance illumines all creation.”11
In the advaitic or non-dual tradition the opposition between the ego and the Self (Absolute) is transcended so that there is no question of speech. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explains: “For only where there seems to be duality, there one sees another, one feels another’s perfume, one tastes another, one speaks to another, one listens to another, one touches another and one knows another. But in the ocean of Spirit the seer is alone beholding his own immensity.”12 The Absolute is not silent. It is SILENCE. Raimon Panikkar has said:
“If we are able to perceive the silent dimension of things we shall be able to become aware of the Divine, not only because the Divine is hidden in Silence, but because the Divine is Silence… Silence is not the negation of Being; it is not Non-Being. Silence is the absence of everything, and ultimately an absence of Being. It is anterior, prior to Being… In a word, to become aware of the silence of Being and the absence of the word is close to discovering the divine dimension”13.
The Silence of the Buddha
The Buddha refused to speak about God/Absolute. He neither affirmed nor denied the Absolute. He saw around him people suffering from illness, death, want, etc. His aim was to liberate the humans from this experience of suffering. He diagnosed desire as the cause of suffering and suggested that freedom from desire is the way to peace. He saw the world and everything in it as imperfect and impermanent, constantly changing. They are also inter-dependent. There is no ‘thing’ or ego (subject) that stands apart. Everything is a network of relationships. He did not believe in a network of ‘beings’ underlying this phenomenon of changing relationships. They were not experiential. There were no objects out there to be known. There were no subjects – egos – as fixed reference points who can be considered agents of knowing. There is life, there are ‘things’, there are persons. But everything is changing, in movement. There is nothing to cling to.
“Only suffering exists, not the person who suffers; there is no one who acts, only the acts exist. Nirvana exists, but not the person who seeks after it; the way exists, but not the follower of the way”14.
10. The Upanishads, p. 133-134.
11. The Upanishads, p. 64.
12. Ibid., p. 137.
13. Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being”, (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 2010), p. 324.
Is there anything or anyone beyond this ever changing universe? We do not know. When others raised questions like this he kept silent. Nirvana has been variously translated as extinction, emptiness, void, nothingness. These negative terms refer, not so much to what Nirvana is, but to what it is not. In epistemological terms it will be ‘Silence’. It is described thus:
“There exists, O monks, such a state in which there is neither earth nor sea, nor air; where there exists neither infinite space nor infinite consciousness and not even emptiness, neither sensation nor non-sensation; where there is neither this world nor another nor both together, neither sun nor moon”15.
The Buddha certainly agreed with thinkers in other religions that our own means of knowing are limited. So we have no means of knowing and affirming anything beyond the world that we actually know. All that we can say, then, is “not this, not this.” This is epistemological apophatism. Raimon Panikkar suggests that what the Buddha is affirming is ontological apophatism 16. Not only our epistemological, but also our ontological categories do not apply here. The Absolute is not an object that we can know and speak about. It transcends our capacities for knowing and affirmation. But the situation is that there is no subject either. According to the Buddha there is no ego, but only a bunch of relations. The Absolute too is not a ‘subject’ in our sense. It is not something or someone that we can relate to from our present position. Then we will bring it down to our level. So, not only phenomenologically, but ontologically too, all that we can say is ‘not this not this’. So the Absolute can be said to be ‘Silent Emptiness’.
We have reached the heights of philosophical-theology. We can compare this to some of the non-theistic philosophies of today. But Nirvana is not nihilism. The best is to keep silent rather than try to describe it. Life goes on as before. But one learns to live without ‘clinging’ – in silence.
14. Visuddhi-magga, XVI. Quoted in Raimundo Panikkar, The Silence of God. The Answer of the Buddha. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989), p. 41.
15. Udana, VIII, 1. Quoted Ibid., 42.
16. Cf. R. Panikkar, The Silence of God, p. 102.