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The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, by Dorothee Soelle
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Exploring the religious impulse known as mysticism - the "silent cry" at the heart of all the world's religions. Mysticism, in the sense of a "longing for God," has been present in all times, cultures, and religions. But Soelle believes it has never been more important than in this age of materialism and fundamentalism. The antiauthoritarian mystical element in each religion leads to community of free spirits and resistance to the death-dealing aspects of our contemporary culture. Religion in the third millennium, Soelle argues, either will be mystical or it will be dead. Therefore, Soelle identifies strongly with the hunger of New Age searchers, but laments the religious fast food they devour. Today, a kind of "democratized mysticism" of those without much religious background flourishes. This mystical experience is not drawn so much of the tradition as out of contemporary experiences. In that sense, each of us is a mystic, and Soelle's work seeks to give theological depth, clarity, and direction. This, her magnum opus, conjoins Soelle's deep religious knowledge and wisdom with her passion for social justice into a work destined to be a classic of religious literature.
- Sales Rank: #274365 in Books
- Color: Black
- Brand: Brand: Fortress Press
- Published on: 2001-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .77" w x 6.00" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From the Publisher
From the Foreword (pre-publication version): “What is more splendid than gold?” asked the king. “The light,” replied the serpent. “What is more refreshing than light?” the former asked. “Conversation,” the latter said. —Goethe, “The Fairy Tale”
When I began writing this book, Fulbert Steffensky read the first pages of the manuscript and spontaneously made some critical comments. I responded and the following spousal conversation ensued.
Fulbert: What bothers me about mysticism is that it’s really not something for simple folk. I can’t imagine that my mother or my father could get anything from what you’re trying to do here.
Dorothee: (humming) Into his love [In seine Lieb versenken] I will wholly plunge myself, [will ich mich ganz hinab,] my heart is to be his [mein Herz will ich ihm schenken] and all that I have. [und alles was ich hab.]
Fulbert: Piety, yes, but mysticism?
Dorothee: I suppose that mysticism is always piety, even when it takes on utterly degenerate forms such as Satanic Masses. If I understand the meaning at all of this Christmas carol by Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635), then I can also talk about syntheresis voluntatis. Your mother wouldn’t have known what to do with that, but perhaps it could be useful to her clever grandchildren, who live without Christmas carols but not without philosophy.
Fulbert: Back again to my mother. I believe that she can appropriate every sentence of the New Testament tradition as nourishing bread on which one can live a normal and burdened life. But what is she to do with the curious religious ingenuities of a Jacob Böhme, or John of the Cross? Surely, the Gospel itself deals more with the simple and sensible desires of people: to be healthy and not having to despair of life, to be able to see and hear, to live for once without tears and to have a name. It’s not about spiritual artistry but about the possibility of simply living.
Dorothee: But aren’t mystics concerned precisely with the bread of life? As I see it, the problem is that people, including your mother, but certainly her children and grandchildren, encounter not just the Gospel but something that has been distorted, corrupted, destroyed and long been turned into stone.
Mysticism has helped those who were gripped by it to face powerful but petrified institutions that conformed to society; it still helps them today, albeit in a manner that is often very odd. What you call spiritual artistry may figure in it, but the essence of mysticism is something very different. One evening, without knocking first, I entered your mother’s room. And there she was, the old lady, sitting on her chair with her hands folded--no needlework! I don’t know whether to call what she was doing “praying” or “reflecting.” But great peace was with her. That is what I want to spread abroad.
Fulbert: Perhaps my reticence towards mystics is not meant so much for them as it is for a certain craving for mysticism prevalent in the present religious climate. The high regard for categories of religious experience is in an inflationary growth rate. The religious subject wants to experience the self without mediation, instantly, totally and authentically, in the manner she or he shapes personal piety. Experience justifies substance and becomes the actual content of religiousness. And then direct experience stands against institution, against the slowness of a journey, against the crusty, dark bread of the patient dealing with oneself. In this craving for experience, everything that occurs suddenly and is direct rather than institution-mediated becomes ever so interesting; everything that’s oriented to experience and promises religious sensation. I know, genuine mysticism is completely different from this. But that’s how it’s perceived.
Dorothee: I’m also concerned when immediacy becomes the chief category. I think that the great figures of the tradition of mysticism have chewed on some of your crusty, dark bread. As Huxley once said, there is no “instant Zen-Buddhism.” The “now” of the mystics is an experience of time that is no common experience. This has nothing to do with a teenage sense of life, the “right this moment” of wanting a certain kind of sneaker or ice-cream.
I cannot agree with your covert pleading for the institution--as if the bread it baked were edible! I think there must be a third entity, next to voguish “religious sensation,” and the homespun institutions that are in charge of such things. You are seeking something like that yourself, except that you call it spirituality.
Fulbert: When I speak of spirituality I always rule out the ideas of particularity and extraordinary experience. It’s the name, more than anything else, that makes “spirituality” so alluring. What spirituality itself actually is has much to do with method, order and repetition. It’s a matter of constituting the self, in the midst of banality and everydayness. And everyone who is not utterly beaten down by life can work at it. Spirituality is not a via regia, an elevated pathway, but a via laborosa, a labor-intensive regimen for determining one’s own vision and life-options. And so I stick doggedly to the notion that something is important only when it’s important for everyone.
But it’s possible that in mysticism, what manifests itself in dramatically concentrated form and artistic expression, so to speak, is what constitutes the nature of piety and faith. This would mean that mysticism may in fact be neither the road of all nor of many. Rather, it may be that in poetic density the nature of a faith that is meant for all is revealed within mysticism.
Dorothee: My most important concern is to democratize mysticism. What I mean to do is to reopen the door to the mystic sensibility that’s within all of us, to dig it out from under the debris of trivia--from its self-trivialization, if you like. An older woman in New York told me about meeting a guru. When she told her black minister about this, he asked only one question. It’s a question I too want to ask: “Didn’t he tell you that we’re all mystics?”
About the Author
Dorothee Soelle studied philosophy, theology, and literature at the University of Cologne and served as Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City from 1975 to 1987. Among her most influential writings are Christ the Representative (1967), Suffering (1975), To Work and to Love (1984), and Theology for Skeptics (1994). Soelle is a peace and ecological movements activist and lives in Hamburg, Germany.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Introduction (pre-publication version): Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places? —Rumi
For many years I have been drawn to and borne by mystical experience and mystical consciousness. Within the complex phenomenon of “religion,” they appeared to be central. All living religion represents a unity of three elements that, in the language of the great Catholic lay-theologian Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925), we may designate as the institutional , the intellectual and the mystical . (Cf. I 3.2) The historical-institutional element addresses itself to mind and memory; in Christianity it is the “Petrine” dimension. The analytical-speculative element is aligned with reason and the Apostle Paul. The third element, the intuitive-emotional one, directs itself to the will and the action of love. It represents the “Johannine” dimension. The representatives of all three elements tend to declare themselves to be absolute and to denigrate the others as marginal; however, without reciprocal relationships among the three elements, religion does not stay alive. Reciprocity between! institutional, intellectual and mystical elements of religion may take the form of polarization, or, the exchange may be dialectical.
What enticed me to the life-long attempt to think God was neither the Church, which I experienced more as a stepmother, nor the intellectual adventure of a post-Enlightenment theology. I am neither professionally anchored nor personally at home in the two institutions of religion—the church and academic theology. It is the mystical element that will not let go of me. In a preliminary way, I can simply say that what I want to live, understand and make known is the love for God. And that seems to be in little demand in those two institutions. At best, what Protestant theology and preaching articulate in what they designate as “Gospel” can be summed up as: God loves, protects, renews and saves us. One rarely hears that this process can be truly experienced only when such love, like every genuine love, is mutual. That humans love, protect, renew and save God sounds to most people like megalomania or even madness. But the madness of this love is exactly what mystics live on.
What drew me to mysticism was the dream of finding a form of spirituality that I was missing in German Protestantism. What I was seeking had to be less dogmatic, less cerebral and encased in words, less centred on men. It had to be related to experience in a two-fold sense of the word: how love for God came about, and what consequences it has for life. I was not looking for what Thomas Müntzer refers to as “made-up, fictitious faith,” that is, something that is fine for the head and keeps the institution functioning. Instead, I searched for the mystical element of faith; in the Bible and other sacred writings, in the history of the church, but also in the everyday experience of lived union with God or the divinity. The distinction between the ground of being perceived in personal terms, or, in transpersonal terms, need not occupy us here. For are “mindfulness” or “pure attentiveness” of Buddhist tradition not other words for what the Abrahamic traditions call “love for God?”
Often an expression like “longing for God”—which could be a different rendering of “mysticism”—evokes embarrassment; yet, tradition declares that our greatest perfection is to need God. But it is precisely that longing that is taken to be a kind of misguided indulgence, an emotional excess. In recent years, when two of my women friends converted to Roman Catholicism, I could not approve. In the first place, the denominational divisions of the 16.century are no longer substantive for me. Secondly, in the Roman institution—with its unrelenting “nyet” to women, to a humane sexuality and to intellectual freedom—I only find in double measure the coldness from which both my friends were fleeing. But what these women were seeking they found, above all, in the liturgy of the Catholic church. They experienced being made to feel at home through mysticism. That is what I am looking for, too and that is what this book is about.
The history of mysticism is a history of the love for God. I cannot conceive of this without political and praxis-oriented actualization that is directed toward the world. At the beginning of the seventies, I wrote Die Hinreise [E.t. Death by Bread Alone; the German means “the journey towards somewhere/something;” transl. note], a book with autobiographical undertones. Many of my friends on the political and Christian left became worried. “Dorothee is leaving,” I heard them say in Holland, “will she ever return?” But that was not my worry; what I was particularly trying to do was to hold together what Roger Schütz, the founder of the Protestant monastic community in Taizé, calls “lutte et contemplation,” struggle and contemplation. I did not want to travel on two distinct pathways. What in the late sixties we named “politicization of conscience,” at the time of the Political Evensong of Cologne, has in the meantime become widely generalized. More and more Christians and post-C! hristians understand the connection between setting out and then coming back again (Hinreise and Rückreise.) They need both.
There has been very little examination of the relationship of mystical experience to social and political behaviour. Social-historical enquiry always recedes—especially in today’s mysticism boom—in favor of a “perennial philosophy” (to borrow the name of Aldous Huxley’s famous anthology), a way of thinking that is above time. It looks at God and the soul alone, without any social analysis. To say the least, such an approach is an abridgment. What interests me is how mystics in different ages related themselves to their society, and how they behaved in it. Was the demeanor of flight from the world, separation and solitude adequate for mysticism?
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful farewell gift
By Kerry Walters
Dorothee Soelle's "The Silent Cry" appeared shortly before her death, and it's a fitting swansong for a theologian who spent her entire life exploring and living the intersections between action and contemplation. Her exploration of mysticism accomplishes three goals. In the first section of the book, Soelle works out a general definition of mysticism, arguing that it is a sensibility all of us possess even though it's rarely appreciated (much less cultivated) by either society or institutionalized religion. Her reflections (chapter 4) on mysticism's essentially uncommunicable insights into God and reality, and hence its search for a "new language," are particularly good. In the second section of the book, she explores five foci of mystical experience: nature, erotic love, suffering, community, and joy. Each of these contexts can birth awareness of the Beyond that is also Present. The chapter on eroticism is especially insightful. But it's in the third section that Soelle comes into her own and offers truly original and masterful work. Here she argues at great length for the thesis that mysticism isn't at all a private, individualistic mode of experience, but in fact is a mode of social resistance and liberation. Her position might be called "liberation mysticism." Of particular interest are her discussions of voluntary simplicity and nonviolence.
All in all, a fantastic book. It's a very nice complement indeed to Evelyn Underhill's classic study. Thanks, Dorothee!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Longing for the Divine: Questioning of Instituted Religion
By Dr. Samuel Mahaffy
This is a work of great depth that will deepen your longing for the Divine. It may also lead you to question presuppositions we make in faith traditions. In this work, Dorothy Soelle speaks with the genuine voice of the mystic. We do well to leave the towers and edifices of religious institutions and journey to the wilderness to listen to such voices.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Profound writing
By James H Smith
I've read through this book and really like the concepts presented by Soelle. She's a mystic and radical in the best sense. I'm reading it again, slowly to savor her astute observations. Definitely recommended reading for "followers" of Jesus, but it will upset most Christians...
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