Saturday's Silence

R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading

Richard McLauchlan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783169221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

R. S. Thomas is recognised globally as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Such detailed attention as has been paid to the religious dimensions of his work has, however, largely limited itself to such matters as his obsession with the 'absent God', his appalled fascination with the mixed cruelty and wonder of a divinely created world, his interest in the world-view of the 'new physics', and his increasingly heterodox stance on spiritual matters. What has been largely neglected is his central indebtedness to key features of the 'classic' Christian tradition. This book concentrates on one powerful and compelling example of this, reading Thomas's great body of religious work in the light of the three days that form the centre of the Gospel narrative; the days which tell of the death, entombment and resurrection of Christ.

1

DIVINE SILENCE AND THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE

This chapter explores the manner in which divine silence relates to theological language through an analysis of how reading and listening to the poems of R. S. Thomas – as an event of encounter – is able to affect our own speech about God. Rather than attempting to rehearse what Thomas says concerning silence and language (what T. R. Wright rightly calls, ‘the heresy of paraphrase’¹), I want to examine the significance of the act of reading or listening to particular poems for our own understanding and experience of these issues. More precisely, I argue that, if attentive in this act, we enter into a transformative process which is able to renew and purify our own theological language.² This transformative process is rooted in, and guided by, an encounter with the silence of God; an encounter made possible by reading or listening to the poems.

This is not to suggest that we are thereby led to a point where our theological language is finally sufficient. As with the doctrine of sanctification (which is ultimately the framework we should situate such transformation within), there is no terminus to this process – in this life at least. And to say that is also to suggest why this process is related to the day between cross and resurrection; as a journey from the old creation towards the new, it remains grounded in the narrative of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In participation with that story, there can be no avoidance of the call to go into the silence of Holy Saturday in order to attain the joy of Easter. From a Christian perspective, the silence of the poems represents – makes present once again – the silence of the Triduum’s second day. To read or listen to these poems, I therefore argue, is, in some sense, to open oneself up to the possibility of participating in, and being transformed by, a crucial, though often forgotten, aspect of the Gospel story. In response to the demands of this narrative, reading or listening serves as a way to practise entering into silence, actually to have one’s language made vulnerable and renewed.

There are two aspects in particular I will focus upon in relation to divine silence and theological language. The first aspect concerns the question of how the silence, encountered and evoked in the poems, functions in relation to the poems’ capacity to destabilise (though they are not certain to, of course) our own theological language in the act of reading or listening – and thus responding – to them. The second aspect concerns the capacity of the poems to refashion our vocabulary and – once more – the role that the encounter with divine silence, which the poems facilitate, plays within this process. I explore the way in which we are not necessarily left speechless in response to all this; the poems are capable of generating new words. Indeed, to read or hear these poems, to respond to them, is to open oneself up to the possibility of speech that is always ‘dangerous’ (Rowan Williams’s word³) but at least aware of its provisionality. Such language makes possible a richer, more appropriate vision of God and God’s activity in the world and yet is always ready, in response to that enriched vision, to leave itself behind and begin the process again. In order to give theological weight to this, these claims will be discussed in conversation with elements in the history of Christian reflection on divine silence and theological language.

~ 1 ~

‘The Gap’ (F, p. 7) provides, I think, an appropriate introduction to some of the fundamental issues at stake when considering the relationship between the destabilisation of language and divine silence:

God woke, but the nightmare
did not recede. Word by word
the tower of speech grew.
He looked at it from the air
he reclined on. One word more and
it would be on a level
with him ; vocabulary
would have triumphed. He
measured the thin gap
with his mind. No, no, no,
wider than that ! But the nearness
persisted. How to live with
the fact, that was the feat
now. How to take his rest
on the edge of a chasm a
word could bridge.

He leaned

over and looked in the dictionary
they used. There was the blank still
by his name of the same
order as the territory
between them, the verbal hunger
for the thing in itself. And the darkness
that is a god’s blood swelled
in him, and he let it
to make the sign in the space
on the page, that is in all languages
and none ; that is the grammarian’s
torment and the mystery
at the cell’s core, and the equation
that will not come out, and is
the narrowness that we stare
over into the eternal
silence that is the repose of God.

The first thing to note is the structure of the poem.⁴ In its tall, thin form, ‘the tower of speech’ (an allusion to Babel, of course) is instantiated on the page. Crafting the stanza-break – if that is what it is – in such a manner, however, means that Thomas creates the visual effect of the tower in a state of precarious balance; it totters on the edge of destruction, as it were. Interestingly, the break functions quite differently on an initial reading of the poem, particularly if one simply begins at the first line without attention to the overall form of the words on the page. The primary sense of the opening stanza encourages the reader to view this break at first as an intimation of the gap between humankind and God, which is being encroached upon by human words, and is thus putting God’s sovereign transcendence in danger. However, once the visual effect of the break is seen in the context of the poem’s overall form, as that which threatens to topple the tower of human words, the conceptual subversion that takes place in crossing the stanza, from God’s ‘nightmare’ to God’s ‘repose’, is made emphatic. We, as readers following this progression, move from a world in which human words (and therefore our words) seem infinitely capable – capable even to grasp, to endanger, the divine – to a world where, in fact, it is human speech, our speech, that is the truly endangered reality. Where initially it seemed vulnerability lay with God, we now realise that genuine vulnerability resides (literally, according to the second stanza) with and in our words, our theological strivings.

Silence is crucial here. The central break in the poem, creating an empty white space on the page, places a silence at its heart, the ‘chasm’ of which Thomas speaks. Such a space in the middle of the poem reveals a silence at the core of human words. It is a gaping witness to what Thomas calls, ‘the sign in the space / on the page, that is in all languages / and none’⁵ and to ‘the blank still / by his name’.⁶ So it is a silence with the capacity to remind us of the vulnerability of our words about and for God. A disruptive silence, then, but one which does not seem to obliterate our speech completely: the way ‘bridge’ and ‘He’ are formally held together, and what is indicated in the word ‘bridge’, implies something of this sort. In fact, the christological resonances surrounding Thomas’s image of ‘a chasm a / word could bridge’, where the rhythmic emphasis is thrown upon ‘word’, tentatively suggest that it may be through the Incarnation (and therefore God’s Word, not ours) that our words still stand, if only just.⁷ Once again, the anthropomorphic presentation of a ‘God’ endangered by human words is subverted. This of course raises a question about how we are to understand the relationship between God’s Word and God’s silence. I will return to this later in the chapter.

While the silence created by the stanza-break witnesses to, and is, a silence in our language, the way in which each line visibly reaches out, at differing lengths, into the silence of the page’s white space witnesses to, and is, a silence bordering our language.⁸ The relentless enjambment, which serves to cut the words and their sense off before they have reached completion, connects silence and linguistic limitation. Human words come up against silence and fall back upon themselves. As Thomas writes in another poem (‘Neither’, NTWF, p. 58): ‘You have given us the ability / to ask the unanswerable question, / to have glimpses of you / as you were, only to stand dumb / at the limits of our articulation.’⁹

Thus far I have focused on the disruptive element of this encounter with silence, but ‘The Gap’ also suggests that these openings onto silence are actually where we encounter something of the divine, where ‘we stare / over into the eternal / silence that is the repose of God.’ The multivalence of the word ‘still’ in the earlier quotation, for example (besides the senses of ‘remaining’ and ‘unmoving’), means it could be understood as both a photographic still and even a still used for distillation. Indeed, the emphasis that the word carries at the end of the line encourages one to read it as a noun. The adjective ‘blank’ and the lines that follow favour the photographic interpretation, which could therefore allow us to infer that the silences ‘by his name’ – the white blanks of the paper itself – actually function as representations of God in their very emptiness. To read it (slightly against the grain of sense but nonetheless validly) as a still for distillation would similarly suggest that God may somehow ‘come forth’ from these blanks, these silences. The point I want to make here is that, since silence is not simply being referred to in the poem but is actually confronting us in its words and beyond its words, the event of reading and, to an extent, listening to the poem is itself an event of encounter with God’s silence. The words of the poem become sites where we may ‘stare / over’.

It is worth pausing here briefly to raise, with due respect and caution, a point of disagreement with Raoul Mortley, that formidable scholar of the history of the via negativa. At the end of his magisterial From Word to Silence, Mortley argues for the total incompatibility of words and silence, and refuses to accept the idea that gaps between words may act as projectors into silence. He states that silence:

simply cannot be achieved, or suggested, by speech, painting or anything else. It either is, or is not. Any attempt to create silence through art would be a cacophony. It could be argued that in the interstices between words lies silence; that in the gaps, the visual arts can create silence. But this is never the case. The gaps between words may contain silence, but the words themselves bind with each other and look to each other: the only use for silence here is that it creates the possibility of words. The divisions provided by silence make the creation of words possible, but the purpose of this form of silence is actually the bringing into speech!¹⁰

It seems unclear why the gaps between words must only function as that which creates the possibility of words. Our reading of ‘The Gap’ suggests, instead, that it is in fact the case that, to reverse Mortley’s claim, words can create the possibility of silence.¹¹ From silence we may plunge back into words but that does not mean that somehow the silence we travel through to get to further words therefore ceases to be silence. Moreover, I would argue that the memory of silence continues to ‘echo’, as it were, as we return to speech. As we shall go on to see, it is even possible for words to bear silence within themselves: the silence of what is not being said. But I leave further exploration of this until section two. Nevertheless, as we continue, my reasons for disagreeing with Mortley on this point will become more evident.

Returning to the argument so far, I have suggested that an encounter with silence in the very form and words of the poem serves to make vulnerable our theological speech and, simultaneously, reveal something of God. The poem speaks ‘in such a way as to open up what is not said. And the unsaid is reality as the manifestation of God’.¹² Because this ‘opening up’ actually takes place in the event of reading, we, as readers, are brought to participate in the reassessment of theological language – including, therefore, our own speech about God – through an encounter with divine silence. The former event is made possible by the latter.

Before I expand on the theology of some of this, I want to turn briefly to a poem written before ‘The Gap’, entitled ‘Nuclear’ (TWI, p. 19):

It is not that he can’t speak ;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t ;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognise

as speech. We call him the dumb
God with an effrontery beyond
pardon. Whose silence so eloquent
as his? What word so explosive
as that one Palestinian
word with the endlessness of its fall-out?

Once again, Thomas utilises the break between stanzas to great effect. To read across this break is to be brought into the process of recognition, to which Thomas refers. That is to say, the way in which the words ‘as speech’ are delayed (we must first cross the white space of silence on the page before we read them), not only illustrates the process of coming to recognition of God’s speech through and in silence but allows us to participate in the process. The stanza-break functions in such a way that it raises the question of whether we are to ‘recognise’ (and therefore to re-cognise, to think through afresh) the blank space itself, its silence, ‘as speech’. What, on an initial reading, is a suspension of sense between stanzas becomes, on a second reading, once we have read across the break, a delivery of sense in the silence of the white space. This re-reading is part of re-cognising silence. And for one who listens to the poem being read, having just heard that God speaks ‘at times / when we are not listening’, and because our listening is usually focused on the words of the poem, the silence between stanzas becomes an occasion to practise a new type of listening. In this way, a refashioning of our reading and listening habits occurs as we engage with the poem, allowing us to participate in the reinterpretation of God’s silence as speech. It is now possible to see why having one’s language made vulnerable – as may occur in reading ‘The Gap’ – is not the end of the process; rather, it prepares the way for transformed speech about God and his silence. We may now tentatively begin to speak about God’s speech in and as silence.

~ 2 ~

The last three lines of ‘Nuclear’ suggest a possible direction for how we might theologically substantiate what has been said so far. What took place in the Incarnation, and the narrative that followed it, is still being ‘worked out’, we might say, or experienced in history. The nuclear metaphor of course undercuts any attempt to conceive of this in sentimental terms (and we may re-read the poem, particularly the earlier suggestion that God is not malicious, in a way that sees it tinged with irony in light of the last three lines),¹³ but it nevertheless emphasises the all-pervasive nature of the Incarnation. It is effective – in a rather disturbing manner, so the metaphor suggests – in our own histories. It is therefore possible to see not only the poem itself as an aspect of this ‘fall-out’, but also the participative, transformative process of reading and listening to the poem[s], which I have been outlining above. There is some justification, then, to speak of our wrestling with the words and silence of these poems as a participation in the out-working of the Christ-event in history (and the negative overtones of the imag...