Saving By Silence

In last week’s post, I made reference to Marcus Pound’s condensation of the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, as a way of highlighting how our resort to symbol and language - and its tendency towards reductionism - hollows out and kills the profundity of things and of subjects. I contrasted this with Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism, in which true profundity of being is found in a presence that he calls “the beyond of thought”, and by extension, of symbol and language. This “being beyond thought” is not something that we can attain for ourselves, but has to be the fruit of the saving work of another that is truly “being beyond thought”, namely God. More specifically, it is the “being beyond thought” who is the Divine Word, found in the person of Jesus Christ.

This may all sound a bit abstract, but I tried to concretise it by making an oblique reference to a section of my book Redeeming Flesh, and I thought it would be good to follow up on that post by sharing a section of that text here. That reflection on that presence that embodies a restored subjectivity, such that it is the being beyond word thought, became part of my chapter on the Stations of the Cross, in which Mary meets with her son Jesus on the way to Calvary.

As I argued in the book, what struck me about this station is that this is the first time in the Stations that Jesus meets someone who is a distinct subject (there are references to Pilate by name in the first station, but I argued that his a false subjectivity, since he was beholden the whims of an impersonal mob calling for Jesus’ death).

Further in the station, I say that Mary’s distinction as a subject:

…is not to any special status on her part, but because of the saving power of God. Mary is thus human, but she is also the prototype of a humanity saved from its sin by Christ. Thus, Mary's subjectivity is a subjectivity restored in Christ. (81)

The evidence for this redeemed subjectivity is found in a subtle point within the Station itself, for Mary’s encounter with Jesus is one where no words or symbols (signs of the reduction of things and subjects) are exchanged. Instead, there is silence in the encounter. However, it is not silence as a negative absence. Instead, I argued that:

…there is nothing but the sheer presence of Christ before one of God's creatures. More than any word or signifier, it is this presence of the incarnate logos, the ground of all being, that in turn brings what Conor Cunningham calls “being [… that is] the beyond of thought”. Jesus saves all creatures in the way He saves Mary, through a restoration of the profundity of a creature's being…God saves by restoring the self back to the self. (81)

Although it is my own work, revisiting this is a good reminder for me as we enter the season of Lent. For I see an invitation to step out of my immediate context, flushed and saturated as it is (and thus as I am) by the tsunami of words and symbols (much of which is geared towards typecasting, accusation, slander and incitement towards violence), and enter into a silence in which I may encounter the person of Jesus, that “being beyond thought” whose saving action restores me back to myself.

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