Speaking of the Spirit in the Silence of the Desert

In Acts 2 the Spirit descends as a tongue and stirs the crowd toward speech. In Romans 8, the Spirit intercedes in prayer with sighs too deep for words. In the first case, a bubbling forth of words. In the second, a wordless yearning. When it comes to theological speech, which befits the Spirit itself? The wordiness of inspired speech or the silence of the one who prays? Talk of the Holy Spiri strike the problem of theological language at its root. What, if anything, can be said truly of God? This paper begins from two presumptions. First, that if anything can be said truly of God it must be said in the Spirit. Second, that the Spirit is the spirit of prayer. These principles create a predicament for the theologian. The Christian spiritual tradition would seem to lead the one who prays toward a luminous vastness beyond words. Hence, the theologian who follows the Spirit of prayer steers deeper into the uncanny waters of silence, where her storehouse of words grows obsolete.

The problem is framed through consideration of two contemporary styles of theological utterance. John Caputo’s “weak theology” endeavors to follow “the faint lines of force of an event that goes under the name of God.” With allusion to Romans 8, that name is said to be “the name of a sigh, of the soft whisper of the spirit sighing, breathing over being, softening hardened hearts.” (284) In Caputo's case, the result of this sighing is plenty wordy, but in the way of Derridean circumlocution, decidedly not doctrinal elucidation. In a starkly different approach, Sarah Coakley, also beginning from Romans 8, builds toward a robust Trinitarian doctrine anchored in prayer. She stresses that “prayer at its deepest is God’s, not ours, and takes the pray-er beyond any normal human language or rationality of control.” She nonetheless grants a good deal of control to the language of Nicene orthodoxy in her unfolding of the doctrine. On the one hand, the “weak” theologian prays in Augustinian disquiet. He honestly queryies, “when we pray, ‘Come, creator spirit,’ ‘viens, oui, oui,’ what are we praying for?” He then lets fall the haunting silence. On the other hand, the systematic theologian offers a resting place in words: we pray for incorporation into the trifold life of the revealed God. She then shapes these words toward greater understanding. This paper holds these two contrasting perspectives in mind, while dwelling on their shared focal point in prayer. 

It then suggests that the problem might be helpfully reframed through attention to the desert tradition of monastic prayer. For the monastics, theological speech and imagination verge dangerously close on those arch regions of temptation: idle talk and the “thoughts” (logismoi) that wander through the mind, requiring careful discernment of their origin (most often not divine). One goal of the contemplative life, writes  Diadochos, is “to prevent the intellect from confusing its own utterances with the utterances of grace.” This principle led to some serious discretion concerning all theological talk. The desert mothers and fathers prayed at a great distance from the doctrinal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. One does not find a great deal of Trinitarian talk in the writings they left behind. One does, however, find a pervasive awareness of the Holy Spirit as the power that descends into human hearts to renew them. In the more refined theology of Evagrios, one finds an understanding of the Spirit as he “who gives prayer to him who prays” (1 Sam. 2:9). Even Evagrios, who knew the Trinitarian debates well, has exceedingly little to say regarding the Trinity. To know the Spirit, for the monastics, was to live the life of prayer. This involved silent practices of calming the passions, primarily anger and acquisitiveness. It also involved a becalming of discursive reason and imaginative insight, those activities of the intellect that the debating theologian cannot do without. 

The monastics’ aversion to theological talk is evident in the sayings. Torn between Nicene and Monophysite confessions, Abba Phocus prayed for forty days. at the end, he found himself physically placed before the doors of the Orthodox church. He did not theologize a bit. When asked for a piece of counsel, Abba Sopatrus replied, “Do not get involved in discussions about the image [of God]. Although this is not a heresy, there is too much ignorance and liking for dispute between the parties on this matter.” The monastics did not foreswear the doctrine of the church. Their prayer took place within the compass of the church and its contested teaching. Yet, prayer has a compass of its own, a silent centerpoint. When held still enough, this point may puncture the theologian’s parchment and swallow up its inky words.

What would it mean for theology to head Evagrios’s dictum: “If you are a theologian you will pray truly. If you pray truly you are a theologian”? It would not result in the "strong" locutions of the systematic theologian, too often untroubled, unhaunted, by the silent stillness that descends in prayer. Yet, neither would it result in the restless, un-knowing prayer of the weak theologian. The hesychast may welcome trials, but she does not despair of rest and peace; she may even hope for an assured, though wordless, kind of understanding. 

The paper concludes by restating the question. How might theology train itself to follow after the silence of prayer?  To this it adds an exhortation. The  guiding silence of prayer must be merged with the unsettling silences that surround us: those of voices suppressed, lives cut short, and the great silence that looms on the other side of the polycrisis, namely, the going silent of the human species, that most discursive of the animals. If theology hopes to speak truly in the Spirit it must rediscover and create practices, both solitary and communal, of entering into these two great silences—the silence of unceasing prayer and the ever-more likely silence of extinction.