“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”
(Susan Sontag)

Silence is framed; it is always a silence of something. It is absence but it is idiosyncratic absence – absence in a context, absence of a kind of sound, absence in a kind of place, generated, constructed, coaxed, or imposed.[1] To think of silence alternatively as a staple and simple absence is dangerous. It merges together the silence of the socially marginalized with that of contemplation, it divinizes suffering in its thinking of our silence before it as just as sacred as that of the believer before God.[2] At the outset, then, we conceive of silence as expressed in many distinctive forms.
I will trace three particular silences: that of Thomas Aquinas, Manuel Bravos, and Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (1951), arguing that the interaction of their soundlessness signals their interlocution. This will be a conversation between silences, for if we are to consider them each as different, we cannot only look to their expressiveness – we do not assume that each silence will reveal its distinctive nature through statement in an outward direction alone, just as we would not assume that all people would choose to communicate through writing essays. Rather, such a method, of following a conversation, allows us to see the subtle forms of communication taking place, among them the ability of silence to respond, to generate, and to redeem.
The silent conversation I will describe begins with the interruption of the theologian’s silence into the life of the silenced asylum seeker. The soundless dialogue continues with the suffering of the silenced, that which makes them silent, provoking the creativity of the artist. The artist’s work wordlessly responds, soundlessly speaking where nothing yet has been said. Finally, the silence of the art that results redeems the silence of failed speech. It declares that the silence of words is not an outright failure, but in fact the beginning of sense. The artwork’s silence in this scenario thus redeems the silence of the theologian. We will see how one silence interrupts, displaces, generates, and heals another silence; how they communicate in each other and to each other; how they remain, inescapably, forms of speech.
[1] Williams, R. (2013) “Making Representation: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language”, part of the Gifford Lecture Series, accessed 22/12/14 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ib-HOy3vtA
[2] Coakley, S. (2013) God, Sexuality, and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. p67