‘In silence’, wrote Max Picard, ‘there is present not only the power of healing and friendship but also the power of darkness and terror . . . which can erupt from the underground of silence . . . with the destructive and demonic power that is in silence.’1
The first form of anxiety attributable to silence, in the history of the West, was that caused by the silence of God, what Georges Simon called the ‘immense epic of God’s silence’.2 I have already referred to two great silences: that of Creation, emphasized in 4 Ezra; and the long, solemn silence created by the angel of the Apocalypse on the opening of the seventh seal, which plunged the creatures into an anxious wait for the Word. And I also discussed the silence of God in chapter 6, devoted to silence as speech, noting that, with the exception of the episode of the baptism of Jesus, although the God of the Bible did not utter words distinctly, he sometimes made his silent presence known in the form of a cloud, a light breeze or puff of wind or a range of little signs which are speech. For the Orthodox, the silence of God, silence of transcendence, is a component of his nature, which is itself essentially unknowable. And last, in the Catholic France of the seventeenth century, Pascal based his theology on the existence of a hidden God (Deus absconditus). For him, the fact that God concealed himself deliberately and remained silent was just and useful to the faithful. The very obscurity of God reminded humankind that they were sinners. The transcendent Being should be unfathomable and enigmatic. For John of the Cross, the fact that God chose to be silent gave mankind the freedom to believe or not to believe. In his Spiritual Canticle, the question he poses – ‘Where have you hidden?’ – is a cry of love.
But there is another aspect to our subject: the silence of God is also perceived and experienced as a tragedy. His silent absence casts doubt on his very existence. Or it can be interpreted as indifference, something that has been a constant source of anger since the Old Testament was written. Is the silence of God in the face of all the evils of the world, the horror of some natural phenomena, the suffering and death not proof that he does not exist? Deep in the heart of even the most fervent Christian, the silence of God creates the impression that he is absent, and leads at times to a crisis of faith.
Outrage at this silence has provoked cries of revolt. These are explicit in numerous Old Testament texts, which have been carefully listed by Pierre Coulange. Job pleads for an explanation from the Almighty. We read in Psalm 22 a cry that will later be repeated by the crucified Jesus: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? Oh my god, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not.’ Similar complaints are found in Psalm 28. And already, in the book of Proverbs (1:28), it was written: ‘Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer.’ The book of Lamentations is suffused with anger provoked by the absence of the voice of God, who conceals himself and who seems to ignore the suffering of his people. Isaiah complains: ‘Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself’ (45:15).
But the greatest outrage felt over the centuries is that provoked by the silence of God as it is emphasized by Matthew in the story of the Passion. In Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, the silence (sleep) of the apostles echoes that of God, of which Jesus will eventually complain on the cross. It is this silence that induces mortal anguish and sorrow in Christ’s soul. Coulange justly observes that the silence of God, at this point in the Passion, is the ‘focal point’ of all Scripture and all debate about the divine mystery.3
This urgent question has continued to be posed throughout history, even in the hearts of the greatest saints, as shown by the writings of Teresa of Avila and, much later, of the Infant Jesus, and then the confidences of Mother Teresa.
In the nineteenth century, it was surely Alfred de Vigny who uttered the fiercest cry of rage in response to the silence of God, without, for now, making God’s mutism proof of his non-existence:
S’il est vrai qu’au jardin sacré des Écritures,
Le Fils de l’Homme ait dit ce qu’on voit rapporté;
Muet, aveugle et sourd au cri des créatures,
Si le Ciel nous laissa comme un monde avorté,
Le juste opposera le dédain à l’absence,
Et ne répondra plus que par un froid silence
Au silence éternel de la Divinité.4
[If it be true that in the sacred garden of the Scriptures, / The Son of Man said what we see reported; / Mute, blind and deaf to the cry of the creatures, / If Heaven abandons us as an aborted world, / The just will oppose disdain to absence, / And will no longer reply except with a cold silence / To the eternal silence of the Divinity.]
This verse from his ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’, which has the title ‘Silence’, is not wholly accurate because it was on the cross that Jesus complained of his abandonment by his Father. Notwithstanding, what is striking here is Vigny’s response to the silence of God: not violent revolt but total disdain. In 1859, he said it again: ‘Behave like Buddha’, he wrote, ‘silence on he who never speaks’; and in 1862: ‘Never speak and never write about God . . . return silence for silence’; not forgetting a series of verses he wrote but never used in a poem: ‘Thus the mute heaven has not wished to say anything to us’, or ‘Bishops, take care, or silence alone will respond to the eternal silence of the Divinity.’5
The belief that the hidden God (Deus absconditus) would never break his silence, and that this made disdain the only possible reply, did not mean the death of God. Nevertheless, in his studio, before he wrote ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’, Vigny had imagined a sceptical Christ who declared: ‘I am the son of man and not the son of God’, and who cursed the whole message. That said, Vigny was not Nietzsche.
Victor Hugo’s feelings on this subject are more ambiguous. He never ceased to believe and to hope that God existed, but he emphatically denounced his silence:
L’être effrayant se tait au fond du ciel nocturne . . .
Rien ne répond dans l’éther taciturne.6
[The dreadful being is silent deep in the night sky . . . / Nothing answers in the taciturn ether.]
And in the poem entitled ‘Les Mages’:
Devant notre race asservie
Le ciel se tait, et rien n’en sort . . .
L’Inconnu garde le silence.7
[Before our enslaved race / Heaven is silent, and nothing comes from it . . . / The Unknown stays silent.
Readers of the New Testament are struck by another mysterious silence, that of Jesus on numerous occasions. During the episode of the woman taken in adultery, when her stoning is imminent, Jesus says nothing and looks the other way. This silence contrasts with the clamour of her assailants. But it is effective: Jesus delivers his message, which is to cause each of them to consult his conscience and not to proceed to the expiation laid down by the law. As we have said, silence, here, is speech that encourages interiority. In fact, from this perspective, it is the whole Gospel that take place in a context of silence.
Nevertheless, for the Christian, I repeat, the silence of God often means suffering, doubt and a questioning of faith. The disdain of Vigny is far from the only response and for many people, especially in the nineteenth century, the silence of God was proof of his non-existence. Nerval, in his poem ‘Le Christ aux Oliviers’, which appears in Les Chimères (The Chimeras), though without using the word ‘silence’, also refers to the prayer of Christ that went unanswered:
Et [Jésus] se prie à crier: ‘Non, Dieu n’existe pas! . . .
Frères, je vous trompais: Abîme! Abîme! Abîme! . . .
Dieu n’est pas! Dieu n’est plus! . . .
Tout est mort!
[And [Jesus] started shouting, ‘God does not exist! . . . / Brothers, I cheated you: Abyss! abyss! . . . / There is no God! No God now! . . . / All is dead!’]
And Jesus finally cried:
En cherchant l’oeil de Dieu, je n’ai vu qu’un orbite
Vaste, noir et sans fond; d’où la nuit qui l’habite
Rayonne sur le monde et s’épaissit toujours.8
[I looked for God’s eye, only saw a black / Bottomless socket pouring out its dark / Night on the world in ever thickening rays.]
Here, Jesus appears as the eternal victim, the sublime madman.
Huysmans, in The Cathedral, describes the suffering of an admirable Christian, the humble Madame Bavoil, in the face of the silence of God. Falling into conversation with Durtal, she tells him of her anguish: God no longer replies to her prayers. He is now silent. ‘I no longer have any converse or any visions’, she says, ‘I am deaf and blind. God is silent to me.’9 Durtal is himself racked by suffering of the same type, which in his case is not temporary:
We question the everlasting silence and none answers; we wait and none comes. In vain do we proclaim Him as Illimitable, Incomprehensible, Unthinkable, and confess that every effort of our reason is vain, we cannot cease to wonder, and still less cease to suffer!10
In the twentieth century, with the growth of unbelief, the silence of God, and the incomprehension, doubt, suffering and anger it provokes, has become less prominent in the literature. Stéphane Michaud has searched for it in three contemporary writers: Paul Celan, Yves Bonnefoy and Michel Deguy. He concludes that the silence of God is absent from contemporary poetry, which consequently ignores or keeps silent about the painful responses I have just described. Few people now ask if the silence of a hidden God is speech. More generally, poetry displays a detachment, a suspension of the ancestral links between literature and religion. Thus, in the work of Celan, writes Michaud, ‘the Silence is deafening, the Absence total’, as nothing proves the existence of a God who would remain silent before the suffering of the people.11
We need, however, to be more nuanced. Philippe Jaccottet has pondered the significance of the disappearance of religions. ‘What are we to do’, he asks, ‘in the face of this type of silence and of, almost, nothingness?’ It is for poets, he says, to ‘find the language which can express with supreme power the persistence of a possibility within the impossible’. They must ‘try to invent . . . the song of an absence’, to be those who ‘speak against the void’.12
Let us now turn to other facets of what makes the very presence of silence tragic and painful, without its oppressive aspect deriving from a form of religious impatience, anxiety or dread. Often, wrote Vigny, ‘unhappiness speaks in silence’.13 Huysmans emphasizes the depth of feeling inspired in him by the silence which resides in one’s innermost being, which emerges in moments of introspection, when ‘we peer down in appalling silence into a black void’.14 We should reflect on this fear of the silence within which leads us, today, to flee from the absence of noise and from interiority.
Maeterlinck, with his usual acuity, highlighted a number of reasons for this fear of silence. It is because of its ‘sombre power’ that we feel such a ‘deep dread of silence’ and its dangerous effects. We can, at a pinch, bear silence in isolation, our own silence, but the silence of many, silence multiplied, and above all the silence of a crowd, is an unnatural burden, its inexplicable weight feared by even the strongest characters. This is why we spend so much of our lives seeking places where silence does not reign. As soon as two or three persons are gathered together, their first thought is of banishing ‘the invisible enemy’. ‘Of how many ordinary friendships’, asks Maeterlinck, ‘may it not be said that their only foundation is the common hatred of silence!’15
Many great works of literature testify to the various forms assumed by the fear of silence. I will attempt a partial list, which may seem fragmentary. If the serpent inspires such unease and has personified the spirit of evil, it is because it is an utterly silent creature, as Milton suggested. In a memorable phrase, Pascal described the terror he felt before ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’. Senancour drew close links between silence and boredom, anticipating a very contemporary concern. When Obermann left particular places, it was because of ‘the weariness of their silence. They do not speak loud enough for me’, he said. ‘We have abandoned the turmoil of the town; the silence which encompasses us seems at first to impart a constancy and inflexibility to the hours which would be depressing to the man accustomed to the methods of a rapid life.’16 In the country, the days seem longer than elsewhere. The grim silence can be frightening. Baudelaire described the unease that can be created by a persistent silence, like that which reigns in towns on Sundays, when the urban machine grinds to a halt.
From a quite different perspective, Byron and, thirty years later, Vigny praised the tragic heroism of a stoical silence. The wolf in one of the latter’s poems knew how to die mutely and convey his message: ‘Suffer and die in silence’, like me; for ‘silence alone is noble; the rest is weakness’.17
In the middle of the twentieth century, Saint-Exupéry made his readers feel the tragic silence of a lost aircraft. He enumerated all the emotions surrounding it, in particular the anguished silence of those waiting for the plane, distraught. He describes ‘that silence that grows more painful minute by minute like a fatal illness’.18 From the same tragic perspective, we should consider the silence of the eve of battle, and the lull before the storm of an attack.
This is what Julien Gracq described as the ‘silence of catastrophe’; though we should not forget, from a very different perspective, the dread aroused on certain occasions by nocturnal silence, especially in the minds of children, before the stillness and the emptiness of night, waiting for the first light of dawn.19
This brings us to the unavoidable subject of the silences of the approach of death: those of the sickroom, of the death chamber and then of the tomb. Georges Rodenbach frequently returned to the affinity between silence and sickness. In a poem to which he gave the title ‘Les malades aux fenêtres’ (The sick at the windows), he sees these men and women as both victims and high priests of silence, better able than others to penetrate its essence.20 In a sort of ‘thaumaturgy of silence’, through the intermediary of the invalid, the diversity of the noises is modified from within. The silence comes over them, it guides them towards death but, at the same time, it allows them to experience its most eminent dignity.21
‘It is as though’, wrote Max Picard, ‘silence, driven away from everywhere else, has come to hide with the sick. It lives with them as if in the catacombs’; ‘the illness came, followed by the silence’, he continues, and ‘the silence is . . . today. . . uncanny, for it . . . now . . . lives with the sick.’22
I will quote just two examples of the evocation of the silences of the deathbed. That of Monsieur Ouine in Bernanos’s novel was extremely confused. The silence of his last moments, as we have seen, was like ‘a tangle of snakes’, a way of avoiding understanding, an education in nothingness. The silence of the death throes of Monsieur Ouine is also a way of teaching how to mock death, beyond which, it says, there is nothing.
In his novel Der Tod des Virgil (The Death of Virgil), Hermann Broch devotes many pages to describing the advance of silence in the mind of the dying poet, and the progress of ‘silence to the interior of silence’.23 When, in the novel’s fourth part, the silence of the imminent death becomes clearer, Broch writes: ‘The audible had sunk back into the un-manifested . . . a new silence set in – more than the absence of noise – a second and more intense silence on a loftier plane, shallow-waved, gentle, slab-shaped and smooth, like a reflection of the water’s mirror above which it was laid.’24 From this point, Virgil has the feeling of being sheltered in a ‘silence that was immutable, and yet already ready to be absorbed by a new silence, prepared for an even greater silence’.25 The poet then wonders, was he ‘in a void, excluded from all inner and outer realms of being?’26 Next there resonates, explodes, the Word, which dissolves and abolishes the world, soaring above the void, beyond the expressible and the inexpressible; and then, the last line of the book: ‘Incomprehensible and unutterable for him: it was the Word beyond speech.’27 This chimes with the intuition of Péguy that there can be no speech during paradisiacal eternity because speech can register only in time.
What we call the ‘silence of death’ – the ‘miserly silence and massive night’ of Mallarmé28 – has meaning only for the living. But the period after a death involves a range of silences, now shrouding death, sustained by memory. First, wrote Maeterlinck, there is the silence of ‘the chamber where someone will never speak again’.29 I quote by way of example the ‘little mortuary’ in which lay the mother of the man Albert Camus called ‘the outsider’, and into which the inmates of the old people’s home ‘came gliding silently before slumping in their chairs, gloomy and silent’.30
Then there is the awareness of the silence of the familiar things of the deceased person, like the lute of Geneviève Roussel, dead in the full bloom of youth, which so moved the poet Malherbe in the early seventeenth century. Now hanging sadly on its hook, the instrument was gradually being covered with dust, while a spider, little by little, spun over it its ‘powdery web’.31
However, it is probably the tomb most of all that brings out the feelings aroused by the silence of the dead, heightened by the memory of their voice. This theme is so common in literature and the plastic arts that I shall quote only one example, that of Victor Hugo, so strongly did he feel the silence associated with the death of his daughter Léopoldine, which he calls the ‘vast and profound silence of death’.32 There remained the hope expressed by the ‘bouche de l’ombre’ (mouth of shadows) of his poem, because everything in the universe speaks:
Crois-tu que le tombeau, d’herbe et de nuit vêtu,
Ne soit rien qu’un silence?33
[Do you believe that the tomb, covered by grass and by night, / Can be nothing but a silence?]
And, remembering his daughter: ‘Oh! que de fois j’ai dit: Silence! elle a parlé.’34 [O, how many times have I said: Silence! She has spoken.’]
In Les Rayons et les Ombres, after the death of his brother Eugène, Hugo pondered the meaning of death, and those sounds capable of breaking the silence of the tomb:
Tu n’entendras plus rien que l’herbe et la broussaille,
Le pas du fossoyeur dont la terre tressaille,
La chute du fruit mûr! Et par moments le chant dispersé dans l’espace,
Du bouvier qui descend dans la plaine, et qui passe
Derrière le vieux mur!35
[All you will now hear is the grass and the bushes, / The step of the gravedigger that makes the ground tremble, /
Ripe fruit falling! And now and again in the air, the song, / Of the herd who descends to the plain and who passes / Behind the old wall!]
I will end my book with greatest and most tragic silence of all, that which will reign when the Earth is dead, when its dissolution will be accomplished in silence, the day evoked by Vigny ‘when everything will fall silent’. Let us read ‘Solvet seclum’, one of the Poèmes barbares of Leconte de Lisle:
Tourments, crimes, remords, sanglots désespérés,
Esprit et chair de l’homme, un jour vous vous tairez!
Tout se taira, dieux, rois, forçats et foules viles,
Le rauque grondement des bagnes et des villes,
Les bêtes des forêts, des monts et de la mer,
Ce qui vole et bondit et rampe en cet enfer,
Tout ce qui tremble et fuit, tout ce qui tue et mange,
Depuis le ver de terre écrasé dans la fange
Jusqu’a la foudre errant dans l’épaisseur des nuits!
D’un seul coup la nature interrompra ses bruits.
[Torments, crimes, remorse, hopeless tears, / Flesh and spirit of man, one day you will be silent! / All will be silent, gods, kings, criminals and vile crowds, / The raucous growling of prisons and cities, / The beasts of the forests, of the mountains and of the sea, / What flies and bounds and crawls in this hell, / Everything that trembles and flees, everything that kills and eats, / From the earthworm crushed in the dirt / To the thunder raging in the darkness of night! / Suddenly nature will interrupt her noises.]
This will happen ‘when the World . . . stupid, blind, howling its last . . . against some universe immovable in its strength shall crack open its old and miserable crust’. Then, ‘its impure dross shall fertilize the furrows . . . where worlds are germinating’.36 Leconte de Lisle knew nothing of the big bang and its noise, or the expanding and retracting universe, but he presented, perhaps better than anyone before him, the inexorable destruction of our planet and the tragic silence of its débris.