Belgian dominican Ignace D’hert crossed the channel to complete his doctorate in Oxford in the early 1970s under the supervision of (now Cardinal) Timothy Radcliffe OP. During that time D’hert developed an intimate personal and intellectual relationship with the Regent of Blackfriars Oxford, Cornelius Ernst OP. The resulting dissertation expresses and expands upon many of Ernst’s intriguing ideas which were elsewhere left incomplete. D’hert gathers and employs Ernst’s various categories for the purpose of developing a Wittgensteinian ontology as a medium for theology. In this process, D’hert unites contemplative practice with mystical theology as he re-articulates the nature and function of faith-language today. This function, D’hert claims, is primarily one of making space for silence—the silent space of love. He states that “Faith-language must attempt to create a sphere of silence, of pregnant silence, where man can hear God’s mystery speak for itself.”[i] Expressed apophatically, there is a ‘hole at the centre of the fan of theological meanings,’ which means that “For theology, there is only the ‘struggle’ with language, ‘Aber die Tendenz, was Anrennen, deutet auf etwas hin.’”[ii] ‘Only by means of using language, of inventing new language-games, of drawing attention to subtle distinctions, etc., can one allude to that mystery.’[iii] So while it is only by means of language that silence can be created, it is in that silence that we ‘hear’ the inarticulable ‘meaning of meaning.’.
This outworking of Ernst’s ideas is mirrored in Rowan Williams 2013 Gifford lectures, published as the Edge of Words.[iv] Williams too draws substantial inspiration from Ernst’s occasional and underdeveloped ideas in his exploration of meaning and the limits of language, a study which also culminates in a meditation on the nature of silence. Although Williams gives significant credit to Ernst, there is no mention of D’hert’s thesis, despite their arrival at quite similar places. Drawing attention to the particular places in which language ‘breaks down,’ Williams presents a natural theology in which the indeterminacy and excess of language suggests an anthropology and ultimately a theology built around speech. But Williams clarifies, “If we say (if we say) that we must stop talking here, we are not saying that there are signs that cannot be talked about, but identifying how we talk about them — i.e. by indirection, by allowing the pause of inarticulacy, by gesturing to the difficulty, perhaps ultimately by simply saying nothing.” [v]
In 2014, just the following year, Stephen Mulhall delivered his Stanton Lectures, which were the first major treatment of ‘grammatical Thomism.’ Published as The Great Riddle,[vi]the study develops a reading of Wittgenstein and Thomistic analogy as expressed in David Burrell and Cornelius Ernst’s contemporary Herbert McCabe. Although Mulhall was unable to engage Williams’ series directly in the lectures, he addresses it briefly in an appendix and then again in a comparative essay published in Mikel Burley’s edited volume Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics, [vii] to which Williams also contributed. In that essay, Mulhall expresses a strong affinity between his and William’s approaches and stated aims, with some disagreement over one crucial question: just how much continuity can one draw between the everyday failures of language and the specific failure of language about God? For Williams, the failure of ordinary descriptive discourse pushes us towards what he calls, somewhat misleadingly, ‘representational’ language. For Mulhall, though, it is not that talk about God pushes us into a different linguistic register, or even a linguistic register that makes a different kind of sense, say obliquely, it is that talk about God functions precisely by its refusal to make sense.
This paper will analyse the dialectical role of silence and speech in regard to the function theological language in these three thinkers. Although there is significant affinity, there are subtle but important differences in the way they articulate this fundamental relationship at the heart of human speech and just how it expresses, or more specifically fails to express, divine reality. All three draw upon poetry and literature to draw attention to the cracks or gaps which occur in ordinary human speaking and their relation to those particular places where divine speech breaks through as particular instances of silence.
[i]Ignace D’hert OP, Wittgenstein’s Relevance for Theology, (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975): 139.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] D’hert, 140.
[iv] Rowan Williams, Edge of Words (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
[v] Ibid., 164
[vi] Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle (Oxford: OUP, 2015).
[vii] Mikel Burley, ed. Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
This paper compares the dialectical relationship between speech and silence in the writings of three thinkers. The first, Ignace D’hert OP, was a student of Cornelius Ernst OP in the 1970s, himself a student of Wittgenstein. D’hert’s dissertation develops Ernst’s ideas into a Wittgensteinian ontology, concluding that the function of faith-language is the production of pregnant silence. Similarly, Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures, inspired by Ernst’s writings, begin with a Cavellian account of language and culminate in a theology of silence. The following year, Stephen Mulhall delivered his Stanton Lectures on ‘Grammatical Thomism’ that develop the thought of Herbert McCabe OP, Ernst’s Dominican contemporary. Also attending to the failures of language, Mulhall presents his own account of the function of theological language, which he compares and contrasts with Williams’ in a subsequent article. Despite significant convergence between these three accounts, it is well worth examining just where and when they diverge.