Christian AgnosticismHowever, and this is Aquinas’s point, it is not simply true that
nothing can be said about God. Everything possible, or at least
a fair summary of everything that is possible, must be pursued
before the move into silence.
This silence is of a certain sort: it is not empty but full; it is
not a silence in which anything goes but in which nothing goes;
it is not a place of resolved or dissolved argument but of irre-
solvable, indissoluble argument. Aquinas was not silenced but
he was drawn into silence, having spoken much. This kind of
silence, then, requires much to be said because it must be the
right kind of silence. It is a point at which someone arrives; their
mind then ‘moves upon silence’ in W.B. Yeats’s lovely phrase.
It is worth adding at this point that this spiritual silence is
subtlety different from the philosophical silence remarked
upon by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, where the comment we
referred to before appears. His point there is a specifi c one about
philosophy, to say nothing except what can be said with clarity.
If you can’t do that, then ‘one must pass over in silence’. What
this kind of silence does is try to show the limits of a certain
kind of philosophy, to narrow it down. If the same principle
were applied to religious discourse then it would imply that the
‘big’ questions were quite possibly empty. It’d be silence as a
refusal, which spiritual silence is not.
This Wittgenstein recognises elsewhere when he remarks on
what it is to talk about the unutterable, to move towards a spirit-
ual silence. Take something simple, like describing the aroma
of coffee to a friend. It is very hard to describe, or at least all
descriptions will carry their own inadequacies – bitter, strong,
sweet, nutty? Philosophically, you might say, the aroma of
coffee is imprecise, and so, to a certain kind of analytical philos-
ophy, it’s not a good philosophical subject. But in life, the inad-
equacies inherent in our describing coffee – the silences – don’t
mean we don’t talk about it. We rather look at our friend as we
talk, who affi rms, or questions, or denies. The aroma of coffee
can’t quite be told, but it can be shared. This is the showing
not telling point, which the search for the divine is like. As