The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Sarah

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Father, why did you give the book only three stars and not five stars? Well, firstly, it was not out of a lack of respect for His Eminence. He is clearly a man who loves the faith, who has suffered a lot for the faith, and has the genuine piety of a devout Catholic. It was just that his piety is at times accompanied by doctrinal ambiguities, which is a major fault in someone of his high position in the Church. Secondly, it was not because I did not like parts of the book. On the contrary, there were several passages that were not just good, but were excellent. Here are three in particular:

1. Reverence – on several occasions, His Eminence roundly criticizes the lack of reverence in modern Catholic liturgies and emphasizes the transcendence of God and our corresponding need to humble ourselves and even prostrate ourselves before almighty God. This is a message that the Catholic world desperately needs. Here is an example:

“God is great. God is beyond contingencies, God is immense. It is true that I would never automatically use the word ‘familiarity’ in speaking about God. When you are familiar with someone, you take almost every sort of liberty, and you are less careful about your gestures and words. It is not possible to allow oneself to behave that way with God, even though he is our Father.” (p. 206)

2. Poverty – the Cardinal’s perspective on poverty is a wholly supernatural one and it was very refreshing to hear him set the record straight on the true attitude of a Catholic toward poverty. Here is what he says:

“I am surprised by the way in which poverty is understood in the world today, and even by many members of the Catholic Church. In the Bible, poverty is always a state that brings God and man closer together. The poor of Yahweh populate the Bible. Monasticism is an impulse toward God alone: the monk leads his life in poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, and lives on God’s Word in silence. Perversely, the modern world has set for itself as an odd objective the eradication of poverty. Above all, there is a kind of disturbing confusion between misery and poverty.” (p. 168)

3. Inculturation – again, His Eminence hits the nail on the head when he states that the liturgy must not adapt itself to cultures, but cultures must adapt themselves to the liturgy, which transcends individual cultures. The liturgy must form people in the worship of God; it is not there for them to choose how they want to express themselves in their relationship with God. Here is part of what Cardinal Sarah says on this question:

“I am an African. Allow me to say it clearly: the liturgy is not the place to promote my culture. Rather, it is the place where my culture is baptized, where my culture is raised to the height of the divine. Through the Church’s liturgy (which the missionaries brought everywhere in the world), God speaks to us, he changes us and grants us a share in the divine life.” (p. 225)

Despite these positive aspects of The Power of Silence, there were three other things that I found disappointing, such that I wavered between giving the book two or three stars. I would have given it 2.5, if possible. Here are those three things:

1. Piety without doctrine – there are many beautiful passages about the fruitfulness of silence in approaching God and the damaging effects of noise. However, the presentation is not orderly and it lacks intellectual discipline. There is a lack of clear definitions and distinctions. The reader needs to be told that not all silence is good. The Buddhists have silence, the Quakers have silence, the Quietists have silence, but their silence is different from the silence of the authentic Catholic contemplative. Why? Because they have the wrong idea of God. Unless one is grounded in a proper understanding of who God is (dogma) and how He is to be sought (proper methods of prayer), then one will easily go astray in one’s practice of silence. Buddhists are definitely not “encountering God” in their silence. But the reader is never told this and may walk away with the impression that all silence is good, no matter how it is practiced, that it is some sort of panacea. This need for a proper understanding of God in order to orient prayer correctly, which is not mentioned in the book, at least as far I could tell, brings me to the second point.

2. God – The Cardinal makes some ambiguous statements about God, in his treatment of the problem of evil, that can be misleading. He speaks of how the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas justifies God’s “silence” at the Holocaust by saying that God suffered by it. Cardinal Sarah rightly points out that this is to take away God’s omnipotence. But then he goes on to try to find a way to say that God suffers by man’s sins, to try to allow Catholics to think of God as being vulnerable in order to help them deal with the evil in the world. “To believe in a silent God who ‘suffers’ is to make the mystery of God’s silence more mysterious and more luminous, too” (p. 92). For me, this is a dangerous anthropomorphizing of God that sacrifices doctrine for piety. It does not make God more luminous, but more human, and so less God.

3. Ecumenism – another manifestation of the book’s lack of clarity, mentioned in point 1, is in the Cardinal’s willingness to cite all manner of authors and sources, without cautioning the reader that some of those sources are dangerous. He quotes Teilhard de Chardin once and Thomas Merton many times, but does not warn the reader that these authors made strange amalgamations of modern thought and Catholic thought. Chardin married naturalism with Catholicism; Merton married paganism and Catholicism. These marriages were unnatural and contrary to the Church’s true marriage with Our Lord Jesus Christ. The fact that the Cardinal quotes them without warning the reader again gives the impression that, as long as you favor silence, no matter what you believe, you will find God. But this is simply not the case. Likewise, I was confused as to why the Cardinal would cite approvingly a parable from the “tradition of mystical Islam” (p. 160), without any warning that Islam is a false religion, and so giving the impression that doctrine is not important.

4. The liturgy – I know, I only said three points, but in fact there is a fourth. This concerns the Cardinal’s unwillingness to take a stand in favor of the traditional liturgy. “I refuse to waste our time pitting one liturgy against another or the rite of Saint Pius V against that of Blessed Paul VI. Rather, it is about entering into the great silence of the liturgy; it is necessary to know how to be enriched by all the Latin or Eastern liturgical forms that give a privileged place to silence” (p. 134). This statement is massively disappointing and confirms the reader in the impression that the Cardinal has turned silence into something that is good in itself, without considering the orientation of the one being silent. He seems to think that if we simply add silence to the New Mass and face ad orientem, if we make a “reform of the reform”, then everything will be good. Of course, that is not at all the case, because of the doctrinal problems of the New Mass. The Cardinal seems to imply that examining the doctrinal differences between the New Mass and the old is a waste of time. But the destructive influence of the new liturgy cannot in any way be reduced to the fact that it lacks silence, far from it!

Besides this, I did appreciate the passages of the abbot of the Grande Chartreuse, Fr. Dysmas de Lassus. He articulated the teaching of the Church more clearly. The passages about the life of the Carthusian monks at the charterhouse helped me also appreciate better, I think, how those monks were able to invent such a fantastic liqueur as chartreuse. For those who made it all the way through The Power of Silence, I would invite them to treat themselves to a taste of yellow or, preferably, green chartreuse. In silence, of course.




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