Power of Silence

The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicholas Diat, translated by Michael J Miller, 244 pages

In this remarkable book-length interview, Cardinal Sarah launches an assault against the "empire of noise" that, he warns, threatens to colonize our minds and souls.  Sarah's message is equal parts admonition, exhortation, and challenge.  In his view, modern man is sunk in a sea of noise both as the result of his membership in a society driven by mass consumerism and as a deliberate choice to narcotize himself from the problems of thought.  As the power of noise has grown, so our public life has become increasingly dominated by the "raving madness" of demagogues and activists.  Meanwhile, the "buffered self" is insulated against the transcendent by a cocoon of noise.  Truth, goodness, and beauty cannot be seized - they must be received, and this requires contemplation, and contemplation requires silence.  Modern man's bottomless appetite for novelty alienates him from the eternal and enslaves him to the ephemeral.  

Worse still is modern man's sense that he himself must be a noisemaker, the consequence of a fixation on action at the expense of contemplation, on doing at the expense of being.  This preoccupation extends even to prayer and the liturgy, driving out all sense of mystery and the sacred with banal talk and insipid music.  Cardinal Sarah finds in the silence of the Divine the meekness of God and the root of human freedom.  In silence we participate in the silence of the Incarnation, of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Gethsemane, the silence before the Sanhedrin, Herod, and Pilate, and finally the silence of the cross and the tomb, and in that silence we encounter a God who suffers with us and for us.  Silence is at the heart of communion and therefore of all authentic community - it is in silence that we offer ourselves and in silence that we accept what is offered us.