Review of Saturday’s Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchlan

Saturday’s Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchan, (University of Wales Press, 2016) £85

In the Easter Triduum silence is the in between time. The Friday cry “It is finished” is history, and the Sunday announcement “He is risen” is unspoken. A hiatus has opened with no promise of closure. For the first disciples, there was no guarantee there was anything, anything at all, after the finished work of burying Jesus and sealing the tomb. Holy Saturday is the time and place of waiting, silence, numbness, when thought falters, hope retreats, and words dare not break the silence for fear of confirming the worst fears.

1. S. Thomas’s poetry has long been recognised as the poetics of divine presence and absence, of speaking and silence. God and the ways of God in the theopoetics of Thomas is a mystery which is inevitably elusive and even intentionally evasive of human grasp. This book approaches Thomas’s poetry by way of a theology of Holy Saturday, a recognition that the work of the priest poet can be read as a way into, and beyond, the paschal mystery of Christ incarnate, crucified and risen.

Throughout, McLauchlan brings Thomas into conversation with three theologians all of whom have thought deeply and long about Holy Saturday as an essential stopping place in the narrative of the Gospel. In that silence in which there is no guaranteed future, the stillness beyond agony finally exhausted in death, the utter self-giving of God resides in the patient waiting that precedes without anticipation or certainty, the next movement and the next word.

Hans urs Von Balthasar argues powerfully throughout his book Mysterium Paschale of Saturday when “God falls silent in the hiatus…and takes away from every human logic the concept and the breath.” The Cross and Resurrection by Alan Lewis is in its own right a remarkable journey of the mind and heart of a theologian writing of Holy Saturday from within his own paschal story of terminal illness. Easter Saturday is for Lewis a powerful metaphor of our society as ”an Easter Saturday society, in the throes, wittingly or not, of its own demise.”  The third participant in McLauchlan’s conversation is Rowan Williams, and especially Williams’ fascination with, and insistence upon, the strangeness of God.

The chapter on ‘Divine Silence and Theological Language’ weaves an analysis of several of Thomas’s poems into a discussion about the limits, necessity, moral seriousness and ultimate inadequacy to its Subject of all theological language. This chapter points the way through the book. McLauchlan quotes Janet Soskice in support of the limits of language to describe that which transcends description: “The apophatic is always present with the cataphatic, and we are in danger of theological travesty when we forget that this is so.”

What Thomas’s poems are determined to avoid, hence their portrayal of the elusiveness, even intentional evasiveness of God, is just this falling into ‘theological travesty’ as the outcome of prematurely claimed certainty. Poems such as ‘Nuclear’, ‘Shadows’ and ‘The Gap’ are explored in conversation with modern theological voices equally diffident about the propensity of theological language to try to say the unsayable, as if God could be contained in human discourse without remainder. Easter Saturday rebukes what P T Forsyth called ‘the lust for lucidity’; it is a bleak reminder of Saturday silence as a time and place stripped of all meaning. And when the silence following death by crucifixion intimates the silencing of the Logos, language itself is eclipsed by silence as the communicative mode of the Word by whom all things were made. As to whether the creative Word will once again be heard?

The whole book is written along similar veins, as the poems, and not only the individual poems, but the poems read together and interpreted inter-textually, are used to explore the dimensions and “resonances of history’s most profound silence.” Reading the poems, argues McLauchlan, is a spiritual discipline, an entering into the deepest mystery and farthest echoes of the Word made flesh, crucified and buried, and utterly alone on Easter Saturday. Such reading can be transformative, but involves a pilgrimage along the via negativa, a willingness to bear the abysmal silence that has no guarantee of resurrection or of creation made new. Thomas’s poetry and its implied theology, is “resistant to our controlling tendencies, our desire for speedy resolution and instant meaning.”

The silence of Holy Saturday portrayed in the style, layout, blanks and words of Thomas’s poems, becomes for McLauchlan the ultimate silence which gives meaning to all silences between words. Easter Saturday resonates throughout creation, and vibrates as unresolved mystery within all attempts at articulation, explanation and communication. The “sign in the space / on the page” provides a glimpse “of the repose of God”. In the Concluding chapter the question is asked about whether the paschal dimension of silence can be represented in forms of art other than words. For example, Michaelangelo’s Pieta, Bach’s Mass in C Minor, a Rothko series, or the music of Messiaen. McLauchlan thinks it can be, and is, and such spiritual discipline through the arts challenges our preconceptions and refashions our vision. The last sentence of the book explains the author’s burden in writing of Thomas as he does: “As all Christian renewal is forged through cross, grave and resurrection, that transformation through silence is a transformation achieved through the silent second day, through the silence of Holy Saturday.” (129)

The book presupposes some familiarity with the concepts and concerns of contemporary theology, and assumes a willingness to read the selected poems in the company of a perceptive commentator, and to do so without interrupting the flow with questions which inevitably surface. This is a particular interpretation of Thomas, an experiment in listening stereophonically to the words and the silence between words. It is also an invitation to the spiritual discipline of reading this particular poet who is now content with divine absence, and now complains of it, for whom ambiguity is all but a theological principle given the limits of language and the constraints of human flesh.

Those familiar with Thomas’s poetry will love this book, if they can afford its price. It is carefully argued, theologically attuned to contemporary angst and questionings, alert and fully engaged with modern theology, and it executes well the inter-disciplinary conversation between literary analysis and theological understanding. It has a superb and wide ranging bibliography, an index, and rich endnotes some of them quite extensive with further comment.