How To Be An Agnostic
Wittgenstein remarks in another place, ‘The unutterable will
be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered.’
Needless to say, moving upon silence is not easy, perhaps
suggesting again why it is a road less travelled. We’ve talked
about the letting go to let in of meditation. Another is the
silence practised by the Society of Friends or Quakers, to
whom many who regard themselves as spiritual not religious
also turn. It’s valuable in that. However, Quaker silence is of
a different sort to that of the Catholic Aquinas and of the
Socratic mindfulness of before. The central doctrine of the
Quakers, as I understand it, is the ‘Inner Light’. This is a sense
of the divine, held collectively, that is superior to scriptures
or traditions. Meetings are conducted in silence in order to
facilitate discernment. Someone speaks when they feel stirred.
All outward forms of worship are rejected as a hindrance to
this discernment, this silence. But silence in the Catholic tra-
dition works in the opposite way. Aesthetically rich liturgies
draw the Christian into silence because God is beyond even
the very best in words, images and music that the church can
offer. It is a silence of superfl uity, not simplicity. It is rooted
in the specifi c things people have discerned of God, and the
practices – writing, performance, symbols – that have stood
the test of time, while also acknowledging that all fall short;
which is very different from short-circuiting an engagement
with those traditions in an attempt to surface perennial truths,
as if they can be readily stated.
The tried and tested way in the Christian tradition is to
approach such silence by the way of negation. This via negativa
is applied to your God-talk – to say what God is not. It offers a
method for understanding something more about the nature of
the silence itself too.
It is not, for example, the silence of the oppressed. The
oppressed are silenced in order to crush their humanity. Their
silence is neither voluntary, but is imposed by some power, nor
does it represent the inexpressible, but rather it marginalises
that which, politically speaking, should be expressed.