Lest The Truth Be Too Hard

Without truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language clear and firm.   The line separating the true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an indepen­dent foothold over against silence.

Language becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world of truth.

The word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I began discussing this quote from Picard yesterday, but found there was more to say about it than could fit into a single blog post. Yesterday I focused on the first two paragraphs, highlighting the necessary relationship of ‘language’ and ‘truth’, and how the loss of that connection, rather than liberating us to be tolerant and inclusive, actually reduces all communication to the base level of naked power struggle and manipulation.

The other side of this, though, is this final paragraph, where Picard emphasizes once again the role of silence in our lives, this time as a necessary counterbalance to the passion for truth and its expression.

For me, this means we need to listen deeply to one another. In the clamorous world of competing ideologies, political and social agendae, and world building projects of all kinds, we need all the more to seek out and embrace ‘the world of silence’, the world where I am not simply trumpeting my views to the world via social media or whatever other platform or pulpit I have, but where I in turn actively listen to that which is not me, that which is other from me.

Not simply so I can spot the weaknesses and fallacies of this other and tear it down with relish, but so that I hear the truth that, indeed, the other has to offer, even if I do disagree with them on the vital point.

This is not mushy moral relativism. I will never seriously consider that I may be wrong on the subject of, say, abortion, or contraception for that matter, or the nature of marriage, or the absolute obligation to care for the poor, or any one of a dozen other matters. For that matter, I am quite certain of the truth of who Jesus is, what the path of eternal life is, the nature of the Church and its necessity for salvation, and so forth. But because I have such opinions and hold them most strongly, believing them to be not simply ‘my own ideas’ but the Truth about Reality—all the more do I need to really listen to those who reject those truths and have other ideas about things.

Truth needs to be balanced by silence, humility, listening, or it devolves quickly into a harsh and hard doctrinarianism. Listening applies not only to listening to another person, although it is that for sure, but listening to the silence of the world, to one’s own heart, to the voice of God, ultimately, shrouded in mystery as that is.

Without this commitment to listening, the words we speak and the truths we advance are doomed to be unpersuasive and fall on deaf ears. Furthermore, even if we are in fact ‘right’ about various matters, the refusal/inability to listen, to have silence as the necessary counterbalance to our speech, dooms us to fall into the trap of arrogance, anger, pride, and a half-dozen other related vices. Being right can become more important that loving our neighbour, and that is a grim mistake indeed.

Language, truth, and silence together yield a very deep humility, a commitment to truth that does not make us into Pharisees or inquisitors or bullies, a commitment to silence and contemplation that is not a retreat into self-absorption and complacency, a commitment to speech and communication that is not merely a parade ground for the ego. And this is more and more the urgent call of our times, when all of the above is all too common. The world is full of people blaring their views at top volume and shredding everyone who disagrees with them with savage ferocity. Picard’s little book on silence and speech offers deep wisdom to offset this most modern mess, and we do well to heed him in this matter..

At War With Oceania, Again

Without truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language clear and firm.   The line separating the true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an indepen­dent foothold over against silence.

Language becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world of truth.

The word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I’ve had this quote staring at me on my computer for quite awhile now. Of course, this used to be my normal way of blogging – provide a quote, discuss the quote, and I still like to do that  on occasion.

This section of Picard’s book, which I have excerpted from time to time on the blog, is very much in his typical style—not so much a tight logical argument as a sort of meditative series of assertions around a subject—language, truth, and silence—to draw the reader into contemplation of these things. It is an unusual way of writing, but very effective.

A week or so ago I wrote a post wondering what the meaning of the word ‘gender’ was, in light of the breakdown of normative, anatomy-based male-female gender polarity. I don’t especially care to revisit that subject—one of the simple facts of my life is that, while I barely have time to maintain this blog, I really don’t have time to engage in long debates on-line around controversial and complex matters.

But this question of language and its relationship to truth is the deeper question yet, it seems to me, in this and in many other tough questions of our day. And this is why we cannot skip those hard philosophical matters in service of some apparent good done to others.

When language is no longer flowing from truth, when there is no longer a concern for the rigorous application of reason to the words we use to make sure that we are talking sense, then language not only ‘collapses’ as Picard says, but in the wreckage of its collapse the remaining shards of language only serve one purpose, and that is the acquisition and maintaining of power.

George Orwell had it all figured out: 'we have always been at war with Oceania'. So did Plato, in his controversies with the sophists. When words are no longer at the service of attaining truth, then they are only good for attaining power. It really is one thing or the other. Moral relativists who are uncomfortable with claims of absolute truth and our capacity to know the same have to confront that a world in which we cannot know the truth is a world where whoever has the loudest voice (and perhaps the money and guns to back it up) imposes their ‘truth’, or at least their agenda on the rest of us.

Power and its misuse as tyranny has always been with us. The mythical caveman with his club was not so much winning a debate with his inarticulate grunts, but rather taking a more direct approach with things.

I would argue that the whole project of civilization is the counterbalancing of power politics and dominance by the disciplined and ordered pursuit of truth. The speaking of ‘truth to power’ is not something invented in 1968, but is the key act which prevents our world from descending to the brutality of tyranny.

And that is why assaults on free speech on the one hand, and assaults on assaults on reason and disciplined debate on the other (the various schools of critical theory and deconstructionism that explicitly assert language to be naught but a tool of power and privilege) are a return to barbarism, and must be vigorously resisted.

That is what Pope Benedict meant when he talked about the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, and his words have become no less relevant in the ten years since he introduced that phrase.

I will get back to the second part of Picard’s quote tomorrow (sorry, Monday Psalter fans!), about silence as the counterbalance of truth-language. But for now, the main point I am making is that words matter, and it matters that our words make sense, and if we abandon the serious duties of truth and coherence we are opening a Pandora’s box of jackbooted nonsense—truth coming from the barrel of a gun and two plus two equals five because I say so and I have the power now, sucker. That kind of thing is what we have to fight against, and it is indeed more and more the way of our post-modern discourse.

The Place of Silence, and the Tragedy of Its Loss

In the modern world language is far from the world of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine—that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise. 

We no longer have definite silence and definite language, but simply words that are being spoken and words that have not yet been spoken—but these are present, too, standing around like tools that are not being used; they stand waiting there menacingly or boringly.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I’ve been periodically including bits and pieces of this luminous book on the blog lately. There is something deeply apt about reflecting on the need for silence and the poverty of language that does not come from silence, while writing on the noisy, clamorous, and garrulous world of social media.

More and more in my own life, I see what a prophetic woman Catherine Doherty was when she opened the first poustinia at Madonna House. Poustinia, for those unfamiliar with our MH ways, is a Russian word meaning ‘desert’, but which in the Russian spiritual tradition is a place—a room or a small cabin—where someone goes to be silent, to pray, to read the Scriptures and nothing else, to fast. In the life of the MH community, many of us go to poustinia one day a week, or every other week, or less frequently. A few of our members live in poustinia several days each week--a contemplative presence in the midst of this very active community.

In the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council was opening, Catherine sensed that the greatest need for the Church and the world in years ahead would be silent, listening hearts, that in these years of revolutionary change in society and in the Church we would need to go into deep silence and allow God to shape our words and our hearts there.

Poustinia is precisely this place where silence becomes not a mere break in noise, not a mere pause for breath between our words, but a Place unto itself, a reality in itself filled with meaning and import.

I believe firmly that there is a greater need for poustinia in the world in 2014 than there ever has been. The technological revolution has created a world that is literally filled with noise, with words. Children today can grow up, if there parents choose to allow them, without virtually no silence, no empty space in their lives, as the constant hum and beep and swirl of electronic devices fills up every solitary second of our time.

The loss in this is calamitious. Interiority, depth of reflection, capacity to know and hear God, ability to create a unique word of one’s own—all washed away in the constant stream of information and entertainment coming to us through incessant social media and games.

Essentially what is lost is our humanity and its deepest expressions. We are reduced to the level of the animal, constantly responding to stimuli, driven by raw desires and instinct. Worse yet is our reduction to consumers, where everything and everyone is made into an object for our use, stripped of any transcendent personal value in the process. This is worse than animalistic; it is in truth demonic.

Meanwhile, silence beckons us. Poustinia, however we may find our way of expressing that, beckons us. A place, a way of being, that is so utterly simple: simply me, simply God, simply nothing else. And yet in that simplicity a whole world is restored to us—the world of real values and real personal engagement. The world where, in the words of W.H Auden, “Everything is a Thou and nothing is an It.” 

Technology tends to invert that so that everyone is an ‘it’ and never a ‘thou.’ The conversion to silence is one that I believe we all need to make, and the need for it may only grow more and more urgent in the years to come. May we all find our way to the world of silence and let it teach us what it has to teach.

The Tightrope Walker's (Inter)Net

Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive.  Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.

This repudiation of silence is a factor of human guilt, and the melancholy in the world is the outward expression of that guilt. Language is surrounded by the dark rim of melancholy, no longer by the rim of silence.

Silence is present in language, therefore, even after language has arisen out of silence. The world of language is built over and above the world of silence. Language can only enjoy security as it moves about freely in words and ideas in so far as the broad world of silence is stretched out below. From the breadth of silence language learns to achieve its own breadth. Silence is for language what the net stretched out taut below him is for the tightrope walker.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I wanted to return to this book, which I had blogged about a while back. This really flows out of yesterday’s post, in which I decried the level of anger and vitriol in so much of our public discourse today, and particularly in the discourse that occurs online, even among Catholics and other Christians who really should know better.

Yesterday I didn’t want to just add my angry voice to the din, so connected all of this to Teresa of Avila’s famous prayer ‘Let nothing disturb thee.’ I believe that the degrading of our public discourse into polarized anger and name calling, etc., bespeaks of a loss of interiority, a spiritual malady that ultimately has little to do with the issues of the day and more to do with a loss of what is to be our true focus and priority—God and our communion with Him.

Picard speaks here of this, masterfully linking the degradation of speech and discourse to the loss of silence. His words here are so clear that I hardly know what to add to them (the whole book is like that – luminous thoughts flowing one after the other like a clear stream of insight and truth).

Silence as the ‘net’ of tightrope walking language, words becoming harsh and aggressive when they only come from other words, the loneliness of words that do not come out of silence, the melancholy of the world that is full of such words.

We really do have to take this to heart—his insights ring so very true, and the decades since he wrote this book have only amplified and confirmed the truth of his insights.

So, silence. Where is silence in our lives? Do we find it; can we? We all know there are people in situations where silence is not going to happen much. Mothers with lots of small children are not going to have too many silent moments. But even there—I always think of a friend of mine, homeschooling mother of a large brood, who would have a ‘silent reading’ period in her daily curriculum. The older kids had their books, the  little ones would look at picture books or color, the baby would (hopefully) be napping, and silence would reign for a period in this large and normally noisy Catholic family.

In other words… it’s possible. And for those of us not surrounded by toddlers, it is certainly possible to carve out spaces for silence in our days. We just have to want to do it, and make the necessary arrangements. We can indeed decide to surround our language and our noise with the great rim of silence, and even in our busyness to cultivate inner silence, a interior disposition of listening and receptivity, non-judgment and contemplation. 

This is that ‘disciple’s tongue, so that I may know how to respond to the weary’ that Isaiah 50 writes of. Language born in the womb of silence, language that comes only slowly and with great care from a deep well of repose—ultimately, from this whole business of ‘Let nothing disturb thee… all things are passing… God never changes’ that Teresa of Avila wrote of.

We really do need this, more and more urgently all the time. When Catherine Doherty began to establish poustinias in the 1960s she was truly prophetic, seeing that the lack of silence was in fact the deepest poverty of all in our affluent society. And her final book—literally her last word in a lifetime filled with words and language—was on the silence of God as the wellspring of all words and all love.

So there we are—what else is there to say? Without silence, listening, peace of spirit, our words are clamorous, empty, vain, angry, and ultimately fruitless. And if we truly are lacking that inner peace, perhaps it is better for us to remain silent rather than crowd the world with our fruitless speech.