God Speaks Within: From Mystical Vision to Devout Listening

ABSTRACT

In the Bible, the human God-relationship is typically established through and by the phenomenon of “calling”. However, for much subsequent theology, this has been displaced by “vision”, “taste” or “feeling”. Referring to the notion of an inner word, the paper follows Kierkegaard's treatment of silence as, alternatively, a mode of inattention and attention to such an inner word. With Heidegger, the paper turns to the notion of vocation, both as in the discussion of the call of conscience in Being and Time and the poetic vocation exemplified in the figure and poetry of Hölderlin. Finally, it considers the possible difference between such a poetic vocation and a divine calling.

KEYWORDS:

• Kierkegaard
• Heidegger
• de Sales
• silence
• language
• the Word

Acknowledgements

The author has developed the themes in this paper with wider reference to further aspects of Scripture, philosophy of language, ethics, and prosaics in his A Rhetorics of the Word. A Philosophy of Christian Life Part 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Notes

1 Augustine, Confessions, 9.10.

2 Plato, Phaedrus, 247.3.c-d.

3 Gregory of Nyssa.

4 Ibid.

5 The tendency to conflate silence and apophaticism is evident in the title and several of the essays in Davies and Turner.

6 A useful anthology on the theme of silence is William Franke’s two-volume. As Franke points out, silence does not only cover the kind of wondering adoration we are considering here, but may also relate to situations of God’s experienced absence, as in the poetry of Paul Celan. Such silence is also a theme in the poetry of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. See MacLauchlan for an illuminating discussion.

7 Sales, Traitté de l’amour de Dieu in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, 6.1.

8 Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, 4.14.

9 Sales, Traitté de l’amour, 9.9.

10 Fénelon, vol. 1, pp. 589–90.

11 Bergamo, p. 13.

12 Fénelon, vol. 1, p. 590.

13 Ibid., p. 594.

14 Søren Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller 1 in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, p. 166; Trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong, Either/Or I, p. 168.

15 Kierkegaard, En Literair Anmeldelse in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, pp. 98–9; Trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong, Two Ages, p. 104.

16 Ibid., p. 93 (E. Trans., p. 98).

17 Kierkegaard, Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 11, p. 17; E. trans.from G. Pattison, ed. and trans. Kierkegaard’s Spiritual Writings, p. 185.

18 Kierkegaard, Lilien paa Marken, pp. 18–19 (E. trans., pp. 186–87).

19 Ibid., p. 22 (E. trans. p. 191).

20 See Chrétien, p. 39.

21 Kierkegaard, Lilien paa Marken, p. 24.

22 Merton, p. 112.

23 Heidegger, “Mein liebes Seelchen!”, p. 87.

24 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 275; E. trans. E. Robinson and J. Macquarrie, Being and Time, p. 320.

25 Heidegger, Sein un Zeit, p. 277/ Being and Time, pp. 321–22.

26 See my Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 78–83.

27 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”, pp. 5–6; E., trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, p. 6.

28 Heidegger, “Der Ister”, pp. 5–6; E. trans. p. 6.

29 Heidegger, “Der Ister”, p. 6; E. trans., p. 7.

30 Heidegger, “Der Ister”, p. 7; E. trans., p. 8.

31 Heidegger, “Der Ister”, pp. 182ff.; E. trans. pp. 126ff.

32 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz. Gesamtausgabe, p. 39; E. trans. J. Stambaugh, Identity and Difference, pp. 31, 94.

33 Sophocles, p. 148.

34 Heidegger, Einführung, p. 155.

35 Ibid., p. 166.

36 Ibid., p. 167.

37 Ibid., p. 167.

38 Ibid., p. 167.

39 Heidegger, Hölderlins, p. 30.

40 Quoted from M. Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’ in M. Allott (ed.), Matthew Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Oxford Poetry Library], 1995, lines 33–4.

41 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 24.

42 Ibid., p. 27.

43 Ibid., p. 28.

44 James Demske points out that Sophoclean tragedy to which Heidegger appeals also offers a poetic understanding of death that is without religious consolation but does articulate a sense of reverence for Being. See Demske, pp. 116–17. See also the concluding comment of Steiner’s, p. 150: “There are meaner metaphors to live by”.