A Sound of Sheer Silence: The Furtive Passage of the Divine in the Music of Fools 1

Presented at the International Conference of

The University of Nottinghams Centre of Theology and Philosophy,
The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition, Universalism,
Rome Italy, September 1, 2008
by
J. David Belcher
The extraordinary, which cannot but flourish, takes on the allure of a song,
where the elementswater, air, fire, and earthdance through the canopy of
heaven. That love which is not of this world, and that the Cross reduces to a
question, dwells in stark silence, so respectful of our decisions. Ineffable to our
learned discourse, that love passes without difficulty along our ways, as soon as
a soul, intoxicated by its presence, lends it its lute to disappear.
Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross2

I
The following is a musing, almost meandering, theological reflection on a dual
facet of human life: the interpenetration of quiet and noise, of speech and the place at
which words fall dumb, of music and silence. Implicit to this apophatic-like questioning
(which ultimately reposes in the interrogation mark of the Cross), is a sub-reflection on
the intersection of faith and reason, a thread running underneath the notes as a soft pedalpoint. However, I have chosen not to speak of the latter quite so explicitly for two
reasons. First, it is just such an overt operation that my reflections seek to subvert, albeit
in the most subtle manner. There exists a danger of over-suggestion intrinsic to such
questions, especially inasmuch as there can be a tendency to migrate toward and rest at

I am indebted to Joshua B. Davis, Nathan R. Kerr, Alex Andrews, Anthony D. Baker, and Jodi L.A.
Belcher for conversations over much of what follows.
2
Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans. Jacquelyn Porter, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
(New York: Fordham, 2002), p. 36, my emphasis.

Belcher, 1

one or the other pole of either faith or reason, specifically in order to distance oneself
from the other pole.3
Secondly, it is the very nature of my reflectionsalready in some sense
musicalto bring into question the specifically speculative mode of discourse.4 It is
not my intention to suggest that speculation in se is questionable, or even to reduce
reasons capacities. Encounter with the ineffablerepresented below by musics silent
Charm, and the silence that issues from the cross of Christ, respectivelyis an encounter
that does not so much defeat reason as it reveals its infinite bounds. But, in so doing, the
very interminability of any reasonable operation lays bare reason itself before a mystery
that sings to us in silence, and that paradoxically calls us beyond what reason cannot say
precisely because it can say everything.
In what follows, then, I will attend to the mystic operation where the aesthetic
and ethical gestures collide, to borrow from Michel de Certeau.5 By way of analogy, I
will place Stanislas Bretons analysis of the fools of the cross in the register of
Vladimir Janklvitchs casting of music as a kind of silence which attenuates the logos.
3

In other words, I have found that it seems rather difficult for this particular conversation to avoid the equal
obfuscations of fideism and ratiocination. And thus the stated purpose of the conferencethat is, to
rethink how faith and reason mutually indwell one another, so to speakis laudable.
4
Though I do not here give away my hand, so to speak with respect to the complex relation between faith
and reasonat least not explicitlyit is perhaps a helpful key to this basso continuo to consider what I am
doing here as more consonant with the spirituality or historical-contextualist reading of Aquinas in
Dominique Chenu than with the neoscholasticism and Wolffian rationalism of Reginald GarrigouLagrange. On the bitter dispute between Chenu (and others) and Garrigou-Lagrange (and others), see
Fergus Kerrs excellent tale in, A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents International
Journal of Systematic Theology 8:2 (April 2006), pp. 128-48, and there esp. pp. 141-48. Obviously I would
agree with Kerr that Chenus appeals to context, historicity, and existence (over immutability, essence, and
universalism) are only as strong and consistent as they are given over to the rigors of close, philosophical
scrutiny; despite Kerrs reservation, however, I simply find that Chenu grasps a basic point about faith and
reason that must be registered in such a way as to be given priority.
5
Michel de Certeau, SJ, The Mystic Fable, Volume 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans.
Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 197. And in their collision, Certeau
continues, they reject the authority of the fact. They are not based on it. They transgress the social
convention that wants reality to be the law. They oppose to this an atopical, revolutionary, poietic
nothing, without whichthere are nothing but bodies and a brutishness. They consist in believing that
there is some other, a foundation of faith, ibid.

Belcher, 2

Both gestures signal not simply a forestalling, but a reduction of rational discourse by the
insinuation of an ineffable passage, a divine music wherein loquacity and long-winded
discourse are themselves reduced to a whisper by this very interrupting and enchanting
silent music, but which nonetheless does not end in a fulfilled silence.6 Thus will I tie
together the poetics of Bretons fools, who radiate only the beauty of that to which they
have become attracted, the cross of Christ, and the passing breeze of Janklvitchs
silent music. This paper is but a gesture centralized around St. Pauls statement that the
one who wishes to be wise must first become a fool (1 Cor. 3:18), only here I will suggest
that the poetics of Bretons fools is the charm of an enchanting melody, the furtive
passage of the divine on tiptoe. The audible silence of musics charm just is the foolish
ethical gesture to which the cross beckons its followers.
Just as music is not something to be described or spoken of, but something to be
done, to be performed, so is the melodious silence that issues from the cross of Christ a
call that engenders love, and thus a call that can only be truly heard as it is enacted in
liturgy and doxology, with our bodies as instruments lent to its tune. This paper is only
successful, therefore, as it is a form of self-effacement, a stumbling point of the finger to
a beyond that cannot be here inscribed, but can only be encountered as it is embodied.
II
When we attend a concert, with the darkness of evening already biting at our
heels, we are perhaps already engaged in conversationin any case, when we enter the
hall, the noise of idle chatter, the cacophony of ramblings over the most quotidian of
vagaries soon envelop us. Perhaps we speak already in anticipation of what we are about
6

Fulfilled silence is David Bentley Harts phrase, and is used to describe the music of Richard Wagner in
his The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), esp. the
chapter on creation, pp. 249ff.

Belcher, 3

to hear and thus hurl into our informal loquela some previous performance. Yet, a faint
signal, a caution to bring conversation to an end, the violinist sounds the first concert A
or B-flat for the preparatory attunement. Whatever else is sure, when the conductor
raises his baton to silence the dissonant scowls and crashes of the orchestra, our words
also find themselves finally reduced to a whisper, if not utter silence.
The above image poses two conceivable ways of relating musics relation to noise
and silence. In the first place, we may tend to think of music as an islet or oasis of noise
surrounded by a double silence that threatens each shore: one silence that gives birth to
musics torrentsignaled, indeed, by the conductors raised batonand another which
returns music and the audience to the nothingness of everyday life. Vladimir
Janklvitch describes the music of Claude Debussy in this way. In Pellas et Mlisande,
for example, there is a symmetry of beginning to end, where the first act begins with a
mysterious noise in the lowest registers that announces the storm to come, while the
silence at the end of act 5 arrives by the obstinate horizontal monotone of a dominant
pedal, so that nothing remains but sand and silence.7 According to this view, because
death looms on the horizon of life itselfjust as life is first birthed from out of the chasm
of nonbeingmusic, as something similar to life, is isolated, between beginning and
end, in the immensity of nonbeing.8
7

Vladimir Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), p. 133, p. 134. Cf. also Janklvitch, Pellas and Pnlope, trans. Arnold I. Davidson and
Nancy R. Knezevic, Critical Inquiry, 26:3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 584-90, where Janklvitch distinguishes
Debussys music from Gabriel Faurs in a similar sense. Janklvitch is not opposing himself to Debussy,
howevereven though he considers a different form of silence, music as silence, to be more persuasive; he
will in fact find much helpful in, for example, Debussys interrupted serenade as a form of describing the
suspension of the logos. See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 141.
8
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 132. The similarities of this first view with Heideggers
understanding of Daseins thrownness into the world, and thus also as faced with the very facticity of ones
own approaching death, is striking. Sartres description of Heideggers understanding of nothingness is
telling: Here then is nothingness surrounding being on every side and at the same time expelled from
being. Here nothingness is given as that by which the world receives its outline as world, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:

Belcher, 4

Janklvitch asks us to consider a second relation of noise and silence, however.

The very opposite of the first view, music is here not an islet of noise that guards against
the sea of silence and nothingness. Rather, music is a caesura interrupting the noise of
everyday life, a momentary lacuna that mars the noisy animation of Becoming.9 In this
sense, music is itself a kind of silence, a soft but audible silence that interrupts the
incessant, noisy rumblings of life: And this continuous pedal point, this obstinate
fundamental bass skewered by momentary silence is indeed more imperceptible than the
sound of the seasilence blossoms through voids that interrupt a perpetual din.10 In this
view, music is indeed a form of noise, but noise of an entirely other order.11 Thus, music
is a kind of sonorous silence and, so Janklvitch says, one must make music to obtain
silenceand one needs silence in order to hear music.12
Musics silence demands the silencing of the logos and, above all, noisy,
ostentatious rhetoric, in order that its own melodious silence might be heard. 13 More
precisely, musics silence is the attenuation of the logos, even of reason itself, since it
insinuates itself into the sea of chatter by understatement, or brachylogy, via the silence
that always lies just beneath the noise of everyday life.14 To use Janklvitchs pregnant
metaphor: [S]ilence is the desert where music blossoms andmusic, a desert flower, is

Washington Square Press, 1966), 51.

9
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 135. It is not insignificant that caesura in musical notation
denotes a pause in the temporal unfoldingthough music of course remains irrevocably temporaland
especially indicates a pause when a breath is needed for wind or brass instruments. Music as an
interruption of the noise of everyday life is as subtle, in other words, as a brief pause for a breath of air.
10
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 135.
11
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 139: [T]here is a relative silence that consists in a change in the
order of noise being heard, a move from unformed, fortuitous din to sonorous form, just as there is repose
that consists in a change in ones degree of fatigue.
12
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 139, p. 140.
13
Melodious silence is a thinly veiled reference to St. John of the Crosss silent musicsounding
solitude, The Spiritual Canticle, stanza 15, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1979), p. 412.
14
See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 141-43.

Belcher, 5

itself a sort of enigmatic silence.15 The conductors raised baton does not merely
institute an initial silence that announces musics tempest, but serves, rather, as an
interruption of the noise of continuity. Our discourse falls silent before musics silence
because musics soft humming is only audible as our voices are quieted, reduced to a
whisper, to silence.
Even so, musics silence is not the defeat of words, of reasoning, speculation, or
discourse; it is instead their attenuation: a reduction of rhetoric, argument, and excess.
The renowned Spanish guitarist, Andrs Segovia, remarked that the reason he never
allowed his guitar to be amplified in the concert hallthough in his time the guitar was
still a very quiet instrument, and very difficult to hearwas that he wished his audience
to have to lean in a bit to listen. Musics silence softly sings to us, but with a reticence,
a held-back quality that introduces itself into reasons surfeit of eloquence16 as a quiet
invitation, a calm, but enchanting call to lean in a bit to hear its soft chant.
Like the ancient melody from the second movement of Cuban composer Leo
Brouwers Concierto de Volos, as if first the cello and then the guitar echoed, not one
another, but some distant kithara17; or like the flittering strings at the opening of Sir
Malcolm Arnolds Serenade, which are reduced to an almost-nothing [presque-rien] to
allow the gentle voice of the guitar to sing; music interrupts the din of rhetoric and
loquacious puffery in order to sound an immemorial past whose silence imposes upon
15

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 154.

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 142.
17
The kithara, not to be confused with the lyrewhich was a simpler folk instrument used in the court
was an ancient Greek stringed instrument, an early cousin of the guitar. Plato believed the kithara to be a
particularly dangerous instrument because of its capacity for polyphonic, and especially polyharmonic,
melodies. It is generally understood to have been a virtuoso instrument, and thus Aristotle also placed
restriction on its use for any educative purpose in music (because, he believed, its use lead only to the
stirring of the passions, and thus its use should only be restricted to pleasure rather than education). Cf.
Plato, The Republic, III, 399, with Aristotle, Politics, VIII.vi, 1341a17. I am indebted to conversations with
Tony Baker, who offered some prodding questions on the function of the Athenian restriction on music
against educative purposes.
16

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our voices a soft singing.18 It is thus that musics interruption takes place in the form of
the pianissimo, a hundred-thousand-fold pianissimo, so that Archangelic hands would
be needed, to extricate from the piano every infratone and ultratone taken prisoner,
and they would still be too heavy for this art of brushing lightly, for an immaterial
contact even more imperceptible than the phantom touch of the asymptote.19
By describing music as a kind of silence, and especially as brachylogy, I have no
doubt already cast musics silence over against not only words and speculative discourse,
but also certain other forms of music. Even music characterized by a kind of verbosity
falls under the interrogative shadow of musics silence. Janklvitch is extraordinarily
blunt: Grandiloquent music, resembling angry shrieks, is a form of emphatic stupidity: it
sounds empty and contains nothing but wind.20 Such rackety music (by which
Janklvitch almost always means Germanic music21) imposes a false transparency on
music by way of overemphasis, as though the significance of ones Being itself directly
corresponded to the volume of sound one emits. Furthermore, such music carries with it
a deep-seated insecurity, correlative to the first kind of silence we described earlier, like
a traveler lost in the night, who talks and laughs as loudly as possible to persuade himself
18

See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 152-53.

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 143.
20
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 149. Certain forms of discourse, and certain rhetoricians must
also be held close to mind when considering Janklvitchs meaning. There is at least an analogy, a close
resemblance, for Janklvitch, between overstated, exaggerated music and ostentatious rhetoric in
intellectual discourse and speculation. Erik Saties joke could easily be applied to many of our
contemporary public intellectuals: His strength is astonishing to little children. He shifts an enormous
stone (made of pumice), Le porteur de grosses pierres (Chapitres tourns en tous sens, 2), cited in
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 149.
21
See Carolyn Abbate, Janklvitchs Singularity, in Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. xvii: As a
French Jew, Janklvitch never forgave the Germans and could not return to their art, their philosophy, or
their music. His colleagues made their peace with Germany and re-embraced its intellectual traditions,
burnishing their reputations in embroidering upon those traditions for a new generation. Janklvitch
seldom spoke the names again and then almost exclusively with a certain scorn. For a revealing moment
of Janklvitchs lack of forgiveness for the Germans, largely the result of his unwillingness to forget the
dead, since only the victims can forgive, see his powerful, though forcefully severe, Should We Pardon
Them? trans. Ann Hobart, Critical Inquiry, 22:3 (Spring 1996), pp. 552-72.
19

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that he is not afraid, who believes that he has put deaths phantoms to flight, thanks to
this noisy protective screen.22 This insecurity of grandiloquent, brazen music functions
as a sort of garrison, guarding against the enchantment of musics silence.
Janklvitch also describes such insecuritycharacteristic of ostentatious music
as well as objectifying analysisin terms of masculine Reason, which can never
admit itself prone to seduction.23 After all, he asks, What is science for if not to
sustain us against the intoxications of night and the temptations exercised by the
enchantress appearance?24 Musicological analysis, for example, can easily become a
way of building walls, an alibi, against the power of musics Charm.25 It is not as
though all such musical analysis is suspect, of course, since musicology is often an
exponent art made up of composers26; there is still room for speculative lucidity to be
combined with creative genius.27 However, Janklvitch continues, even the composer
usually only has one mode in which to reflect upon creation: to do it.28 For the
musician knows better than any other that music is not made to be spoken of or reflected
upon, but for one to do.29 The composer is thus, according to Janklvitch,
like a singer who does not know how to speak and can only sing, or a pianist
who is asked to discuss something and who sits at the piano without saying a
word: becauseshe knows it, and each listener understands it straightawaythis
is the way she will explain herself most subtly, or best respond to our questioning.
You are going to say that this does not constitute an answer, and nonetheless this
22

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 135.

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 2.
24
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
25
Charm, which I leave capitalized throughout as does Janklvitch, is the term Janklvitch uses to
describe musics silent enchantment, borrowing from Henri Bremond. See Janklvitch, Music and the
Ineffable, p. 125.
26
Janklvitch has in mind composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Bartk, Dukas and Debussy,
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who have all provided musicological or metamusical, speculative analyses
of music in one form or another, Music and the Ineffable, p. 80.
27
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
28
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
29
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 78-9.
23

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mute answer is a response, and an unusually eloquent one, the drastic, manual
response of the musician.30
Music is thus drastic not gnostic, as it is an act that exceeds saying, because it exists
from out of an entirely different order than that of words, discourse, and rhetoric.
Despite its excess, however, music does not come to us from some other realm; it
is not supernatural.31 Music is, rather, an audible, acoustic phenomenon that takes its
place alongside other noises (to use inadequate spatial imagery) and thus music insists
that it occupy vibrating space alone, excluding other sounds.32 The music critic who
thus wishes to find reasonable structures or latent meanings in the piece of music,
and who subsequently attempts to listen carefully for something, for anything in the
piece, is duped. Because music exists only within a specific instant, as it is performed in
a concrete moment of times becoming, to grasp after it can lead only to a prescription of
significance before in the form of metaphysics, or after in the form of moral
meaning.33 Musics silence interrupts such attempts in the between and thereby escapes
the procedures of circumscription and interpretation.
Technical and speculative analysis are, then, no more than means of refusing to
abandon oneself spontaneously to grace, and abandonment is the request that the Charm
makes of us.34 For those who refuse the Charms gentle request in this way, musics
mystery nonetheless lends itself freely to ensuing analysis, even as it escapes the
procedures of objectification and circumscription: One can make notes say what one
will, grant them any power of analogy: they do not protest. In the very measure that one
is inclined to attribute a metaphysical significance to musical discourse, music (which
30

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 81.

See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 151.
32
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
33
Cf. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 102-103.
34
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 102.
31

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expresses no communicable sense) lends itself, complaisant and docile, to the most
dialectical interpretations.35 It is only the metaphysician, not the musician, who wishes
to make of music an anterior harmony or celestial music, anterior to sensible
perception, coming to us from some other realm.36 While the Celestial Kitezh, for
example, is indeed a city invisible to the eyes, it is nevertheless not inaudible, since
Rimsky-Korsakov is, after all, a musician and not a Neo-platonic mystic.37 Because
music does not communicate meaning, it cannot be dissected by speculative analysis. It
is just such an operation of analysis that music interrupts, in fact, and that it subtly
subverts.
As a polite interruption of lifes perpetual din, music gently suggests itself, yet its
gentleness does not reduce its power to enchant us with its Charm. It is crucial to note
the character of musics enchantment. The Charm of silent music has a power to
imprison us with its grace, even to drive us mad; it is not, however, incantation or black
magic. Incantation, which is the music of Odysseuss Sirens, works by deception,
promising a miraculous cure or a perpetual ecstasy,38 or an eternalizing apotheosis that
removes us from our very finitude by its rapture, only to crash us on the rocks of despair
and nothingness. The Charms silent interrupting music, however, is only ever a
medicineAristotles pharmakeias charin39in a qualified sense. Musics powers to
enchant us are in the end not physical but spiritual, the accompaniment not cause of

35

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 11, and see n.42 below.
Janklvitch has in mind Clement of Alexandria and Saint Augustinethe English mystic Richard
RollePlotinus, Music and the Ineffable, p. 10.
37
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
38
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 127.
39
Aristotle, Politics VIII.iii, 1337b; and, see Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 128-9.
36

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serenity.40 Music is thus more the laetitiae comes, the companion of joy, and only the
medicina dolores, the medicine of sorrow, as it rekindles a spark for joy.41
Musics Charm, like a subtle inspiration, is not a state, but a point of grace:
Musical rapture is an escape from immanencebut it also does not breach that wall; it
merely makes an opening, similar to the opening cleared within our human condition by
an innocent, highly fragile emotion, caritas.42 Contrary to the intoxication of the Sirens
represented perhaps by the heavily embellished turn of phrase, or the clever rhetor
musics Charm does not confer wisdom by its enchantment, but engenders hope, joy, and
love. There is thus a transcendence to musics enchantment, but its transcendence
perforates our very condition as human, cutting through our very finitude. We only hear
this kind of music as it takes place within a specific point in time, in a specific place,
within finite becoming. The half-hour of the sonata or string quartet can be a dangerous
half-hour because musics Charm has the capacity to penetrate our finitude and carry us
away to a beyond, if only for a few instants. However, this happens only inasmuch as we
give ourselves over to its Charm when it arrests us, like the surprise of grace in a
lightning flash the instant we are intoxicated by what seem whispers from a distant land.
Musics silence thus arises quite suddenly, at the brink of mystery of the
ineffable, where the vanity and impotence of words have become all too obvious.43
Music is itself ineffable, then, in that it escapes our grasp as it comes to us, like the
40

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 128: [F]or music does not make miracles, does not cure
plagues or snakebite; music cannot make grain grow, or rain fall. Music does not change owls into
princesses or bring back a departed lover; music does not literally make others submissive or assuage their
desires. Chopins Berceuse is not good for literally putting little children to sleep, nor will Faures
Barcarolles help gondolas glide over the water, nor will Polonaises lead actual squadrons as they march,
and Valses are not to be danced to.
41
Laetitiae comes, medicina dolores is the inscription on the lid of the clavichord in Johannes Vermeers
painting, The Music Lesson (c. 1662-1664), and also the title for the final section of Janklvitchs
penultimate chapter, The Charm and the Alibi, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 125-29, esp. p. 128.
42
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 127.
43
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 141.

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mystery of grace. Music does not bring us before the brink of death, but before life, a
future unknown to us, whispering of loves promise. The ineffability of this music can
thus be distinguished and even opposed to that which is untellable or unsayable. Death,
for example, is untellable, since there is simply nothing to say in the face of the shadow
of non-being itselfit bars us from its mystery.44 The ineffable, on the other hand,
cannot be explained because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it.
Such is the mystery of God, whose depths cannot be sounded, the inexhaustible mystery
of love, both Eros and Caritas, the poetic mystery par excellence.45 The ineffability of
musics silence is a positive plenitude. According to Janklvitch, the ineffability of
silent music is, then, an inexpressive espressivo,46 unable to be expressed for the very
reason that it is capable of being infinitely expressed! Ineffability is, therefore,
distinguished from untellability in exactly the way that enchantment differs from
bewitchment or incantation. Completely contrary to the hypnotic trance, ineffability, like
the maieutic questioning of a Socrates, provokes bewilderment, a loss of words.47
When words are arrested, Janklvitch says, one has no choice but to sing.48 The
ineffable does not present a road-block to reasoning, but rather a detour by its very
inexhaustibility.
Musics enchantment does not, like the Sirens soft song, deceive, however.
Nevertheless, to the one who is only bewitched by the powers of reasons capacities vis-vis the ineffability of musics silence, music quietly gives in, and allows such
operations to proceed, for there will indeed be things to be said (or sung) about the
44

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 72.

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
46
See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, pp. 16-76.
47
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 72.
48
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
45

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ineffable until the end of time. But, we must ask, Who can possibly say, Now,
everything is said? No. No one, ever, will be done with this Charm, which interminable
words and innumerable musics will not exhaust, where there is so much to do, to
contemplate, to say.49
On the other hand, the one who does not take flight at musics enchantment
which imposes on our voices the sustained, faintly solemn intonations of singing and
does away with telling or sayingthis one rejects all forms of discourse, reposing
instead at the borders of silence, in the pianissimo of musics silence. Ironically, then,
the refusal of loquacious puffery for a reticent not-saying can often be more persuasive
than saying everything.50 The seemingly infinite capacities of the logos instills a desire to
say everything, to go on and on, all of which are brought in question by the ineffability
of musics silence, softly reducing ostentatious discourse by the murmur of a beyond that
can only be received as it is performed.
III
It is striking how closely musics silence resembles, if only analogously, the
silence in which the divine is at times revealed to us, especially in the silent lament that
sings from the cross of Christ. Note the gospel depiction of the condescension of the
eternal Logos, his leaping down from heaven into Gods ecstasy-in-Incarnation51
and, ultimately, crucifixion. The Fourth Gospel tells us that Jesus Christ is the logos
ensarkos, the living Word of God, who embodies the inexhaustible self-communication
of the Father, who is Gods infinite self-giving for the life of the world, and upon whom
the Holy Spirit rests and in whom she pleasingly abides. The Triune life of mutual
49

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, ibid.
51
John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christs Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980), 6.
50

Belcher, 13

indwelling, interpenetrating, and self-bestowing love radiantly shines forth in this one.
Nevertheless, the tale continues, this is also the very one who was brought to nothing on a
Roman tree, the same one who was reduced to a spectacle, with the mordant message,
Behold the King of the Jews! denominating his frail and battered body. The Logos, in
whom all the fullness of divinity was pleased to dwell bodily (Col. 2:9), is reduced to
weakness, nothingness.
In all its nakedness, the cross of Christ is, to use Stanislas Bretons phrase, a sign
of contradiction.52 Breton points us to St. Paul, who in the first epistle to the Corinthians
describes the Word of the Cross [logos staurou] as foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to those being saved the very power of God (1 Cor. 1:18). It is just the
place at which the coming forth of Gods Word is negated, says the Apostle, that Gods
power and wisdom are displayed most resolutely. In the eyes of the wisdom and powers
of this world, howeverto those who are perishingit is utter foolishness.
Recall in Marks Gospel that Jesus self-oblation is made a mockery by the
guards: that God, the King of the Jews, would renounce himself utterly, to the point of
emptiness, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:8) is a joke, something which seemingly begs
for derision. As Saward comments, the Gospels show that what the world finds most
absurd and ridiculous is self-oblation, the renunciation of self-protection. The crucified
God-Man is made game of, a subject of satire (illuserunt ei, Vulgate Mark 15:20).53 A
stumbling block to the Jews, who seek theophanic signs and wonders displaying the
power of messiah, and foolishness to the wisdom of the Greeks who seek a

52
53

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 3 and passim.

Saward, Perfect Fools, p. 6.

Belcher, 14

communication of meaning and wisdom, the logos staurou inserts itself as a mark of
interrogation upon all such discourses of desire.
Logos staurou, the Word of the Cross, is less a Word that belongs to the cross, or
a divine message of which the cross is a cipher, than it is a Word that unveils the cross
before us. By reversing the function of the genitiveas Breton suggests is the fine
point of Pauls exhortationthe phrase is considerably more disturbing: The Word that
is crossed.54 For Breton, the true radicality of Pauls statement is borne out in the
rupture of the cross, in which the very idea of a divine Self becomes null and void.55
For, the nude sign of the Word of the Cross effectuates a transcendence of the Logos by
setting it over against the paradoxical figure of the servant who is obedient to death, even
to death on the Cross.56 The cross is thus the intersecting point of two Pauline
pericopes, which respond to and complete one another: the Corinthian text that
highlights folly, and the Philippian text that places accent on the infirmity of the crucified
one.57
Bretons translation of the Apostles phrase as the Word that is crossed thus has
unsettling consequences, especially insofar as not only the traditional understanding of
the logos as the infinite and unifying, inner principle of all logoiwhich are themselves
the inner principles of all finite thingsbut also the logos itself is brought under
question. A double paradox ensues: For, if the eternal Word of God is itself crossed, then
all our human words would also be placed under its mark of interrogation, reduced to
faint whispers before the profound ineffability of the crossed logos;58 at the same time,
54

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 1.

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 96.
56
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 1.
57
See Breton, The Word and the Cross, p.83ff.
58
Once again, it is helpful to keep in mind our comments above about the nature of ineffability in
Janklvitch, inasmuch as such a silencing of the logos is not reduced to the status of untellability, or the
55

Belcher, 15

that which attenuates and crosses all logoi is itself a Word, the eternal Logos. Just as
with Janklvitch, for whom the ineffable is manifest in an attenuation of the logos, so in
Breton the ineffability of the logos is marked by its annihilation, its kenosis.59 The
infinite self-communication of the divine proceeds as a Word, and paradoxically enters
the condition of ineffability at that nude and sublime point where it is emptied. God, in
other words, speaks what is most truthful singing to us softly in the faint melody that
gently issues from the wood where the Son of God and Son of Man was reduced to
nothing.60 Gods chosen mode of communication is silence, just as when Pilate asks of
Jesus, What is truth? to which Jesus only response is a double silence, that silence
which allows us to hear truths somber whistling, and the silence that is itself the truth.61
Indeed, because the shadow of the Cross is cast on all things, not only does the
Cross reduce the logos to ineffability, but, Breton notes, being itself is placed under the
judgment of the montological force of the Cross.62 As Paul puts it, God chose the
things that are not in order to reduce to nothing the things that are (1 Cor. 1:26:
implicit nihilism of a negative theologyit is, rather, a profoundly apophatic moment of excess, a positive
plenitude, as we shall see below. In my estimate, Breton seems to mean something very similar to what
Janklvitch means by the term ineffability, though at times he seems to use the term to mean something
more akin to what Janklvitch terms, untellability. Because they are saying virtually the same thing, I
will use ineffability throughout in the above sense as it is drawn out in Janklvitch.
59
And I would note here that the true ineffability of the divine for Breton, just as for Janklvitch, is not in
a negative bar to knowledge of divine being, but in the positive plenitude of Gods self-giving and
outpouring love in Jesus. As Mark A. MacIntosh so helpfully puts it: [T]he mystical is not simply the
ineffable incomprehensibility of God (no matter whether that incomprehensibility is thought of in ancient
Neoplatonic terms or modern post-Kantian ones); rather what is most mysterious is not the divine being per
se but precisely the infinite self-giving of God which is the fundamental characteristic of the divine Trinity
and is enacted in history in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of
Spirituality and Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 44.
60
I have reverted to language close to Janklvitch here, by use of adverbs such as softly, and gently.
And while it is true that Breton often uses language that is much more rupturing, nevertheless, when he
comes to speak of the foolsas I will also do belowthe song that they hear issuing from this profound
mark of interrogation is as soft as a passing breeze. The gentleness of silence should not be confused with
a light-hearted, wafting intoxicationlet us not forget that silence itself can be deafening.
61
Thanks to Alex Andrews for pointing this brilliant insight out to me. See also Janklvitchs comments
about the way in which music does not answer our deepest moral and metaphysical questions, choosing
instead to offer its own melodious silence as a reply.
62
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 43.

Belcher, 16

 , ).63 Breton is clear, however, that

Pauls opposition of the things that are and the things that are not, or being and nonbeing, does not reify the ineffability of the logos staurou into a formal ontology. It is,
rather, because the Word of the Cross opens up a Krisis in its hearers, a decisionseparation,64 that the division between being and non-being which the Cross effects
and which is tantamount to the division between salvation and perditionis
determined dynamically, in relational response to the Cross. What this means is that
though the Cross stands as a spectacle in the world, it is not reduced to this exhibition,
but exceeds it, and precisely in the work that it evokes in those who lend their bodies as
instruments to its sorrowful refrain.
There is a kind of dialectical opposition that opens up between those who decide
for and those who decide against the cross. To those who are being saved, or those
who see in the Cross the very power of Godthereby overcoming appearances65that
same power becomes the basis of their very existence. To those who are perishing,
however, who can only see in the cross misery and insignificance, the wealth and
wisdom they heap on themselves ironically constitutes the limits of their prison and the
true extent of their fall.66 Fidelity to or rejection of the Word of the Cross is not simply
a decision, but an act that determines exactly that by which one has existence.

63

Though Breton is obviously in part indebted to the Neoplatonics for his understanding of montology,
particularly Proclus, it could equally be argued that he is simply utilizing to the Pauline language of
. Indeed, the real question is whether the specter of Schellings interpretation of as
potential non-being, or pure, indeterminate form seems not to be present in Bretons understanding of the
montology or Nothingness of the cross, a specter that seems still to haunt Janklvitchwho wrote his
dissertation on Schellingas we will see below.
64
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 54.
65
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 8. We could connect this with Bonhoeffers break with the world,
once again, to move beyond the decidedly Neoplatonic elements that persist in Bretons appeal to a
movement beyond appearances.
66
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 7.

Belcher, 17

Bretons debt to Proclus and the Neoplatonists (via the influence of Jean
Trouillard67) emerges into view here. According to Breton, via Proclus, the soul must
move through the levels of existence, separating itself from all the evidence of custom
and appearance, such that the soul posits itself in all the conditions of its existence.68
There is thus a nothingness that is interior to the soul and corresponds to the
indeterminate nature of the One: This understanding of the One as the germ of nonbeing, beyond every determination, allows for authentic creation.69 The souls act of
fidelity to the cross, then, is a constitutive and creative act, for Breton.
The division is not decided, however, on purely subjective terms, as though the
soul could merely will existence or non-existence with respect to the cross (and it is here
that Breton moves beyond the Neoplatonists70). Fidelity is not a question of capability at
all, in fact; one cannot give of oneself to the cross merely by an act of caprice. However,
one may give of oneself to that which seizes by surprise, by a gift of grace. Thus Breton
interconnects the Corinthian passage with Pauls Christ-hymn in Philippians, for it is only
by bringing an end to willing that one may offer fidelity to the cross (voluntarism seems
to have no place in Bretons conception). The cross as the excess of the logos conjoins
with kenosis as the excess of all willing in the act of faith, that is, in Gods faithful act in
Jesus Christ, on the cross. An act of fidelity to the cross is, therefore, an imitatio Christii,
67

From 1959 to 1967 Breton met nearly every Saturday with Trouillard, Dumry, and Combs to read
Neoplatonic texts and discuss their contemporary implications, Jacquelyn Porter, Translators
Introduction, in Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. xiii; and cf. Porter, Stanislas Bretons Use of
Neoplatonism to Interpret the Cross in a Postmodern Setting, The Heythrop Journal 39 (July 1998), pp.
264-79, and there p. 3, where Porter lists the dates for this reading group as, From 1959 to 1968.
68
Porter, Translators Introduction, p. xiii; and Porter, Bretons Use of Neoplatonism, p. 4.
69
Porter, Bretons Use of Neoplatonism, p. 5; and see Breton, Ngation et ngativit dans loeuvre de
Jean Trouillard, in Actes du Colloque de Neuchtel. Proclus et son influence, ed. G. Bass et G. Sel
(Zrich: ditions du Grand Midi, 1987), esp. pp. 87-88; Breton, Rien ou quelque chose (Paris: Flammarion,
1987), passim; and Breton, Philosophie et Mathmatique chez Proclus (Paris: Beauchesne, 1969).
70
For Neoplatonism, the indeterminate nature of the souls interiority is pure will (as well as pure intellect
in the unity of mind), and thus receives form in the act of willing itself. For Breton, however, the act of
fidelity to the cross is that point at which willing ceases.

Belcher, 18

that is, that place where one finds that Christs cross has come between me and the
world, that He is in the middle, and thus everything must be handed over, everything
must go through Christ.71 Jesus singular dispossessive act of faithfulness evokes in his
followers an imitative movement of dispossession, self-effacement, and an embodying of
what can no longer be said, but can only take on the allure of a song.72
St. Paul describes those who would hear this faint music, the divine whistling like
the wind, and respond to its call with their self-effaced work, as fools. To give fidelity to
a sign of shame and contradiction is in fact an assault on reason, an extravagance that can
only lead to ruin, the most profound sort of foolishness. Because St. Pauls fools for the
sake of Christ give of themselves to the foolish sign that is the cross, they are in fact
marked by the very poverty and foolishness to which they give their fidelity. In order to
become wise with Gods wisdom, and powerful with Gods power, Paul tells the
Corinthians, you must become fools. At that point where the logos and all willing are
transcended by the cross as the sign of contradiction, the dispossessed fools themselves
become that same divine song, like variations on a theme that is not to be laid down, nor
uttered, but embodied, so that by lending their bodies to the divine hand, they might be
like the vibrating strings of an instrument, witnesses to the very power and wisdom of
God displayed in the folly of the cross.

71

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, trans. Martin Kuske and Ilse Tdt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), p. 93, p. 96. Such a break with the world, which recognizes that the deed
is done (p. 94), is manifest, for Bonhoeffer, in baptism: Christ the mediator has stepped in between me
and the world. Those who are baptized no longer belong to the world, no longer serve the world, and are no
longer subject to it. They belong to Christ alone, and relate to the world only through Christ (p. 208), and,
Those who are baptized are baptized into the body of Christ. Christ has come to them, taken their life into
his own, and thus robbed the world of its possession, (p. 238).
72
For an excellent account of the ecclesias non-identical repetition of the apocalyptic singular
historicity of Jesus Christ, see Nathan Kerr, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian
Mission, Veritas, eds. Peter M. Candler, Jr., and Conor Cunnigham (London: SCM, 2008).

Belcher, 19

The fools existence is thus distinguished from both the powers of this age, and
those who have become hypnotized by the wisdom of the powers for the very reason that
their entire existence derives from the nothingness of the Cross of Christ, and from a
dispossessive act of fidelity to the same. The fools rest their faith upon and have their
dwelling placesin that hollow of the rock where the Cross beckons to them.73 In
imitation of Christ, but of a sort characterized by pure transitivity, these fools wander
through the world entirely dispossessed. Though the logos staurou thus reduces all logoi
to ineffability in face of its mystery, the transitive modus operandi of the fools does not
reduce to ineffability, or to the mere silencing of discursive speech, since in fidelity to the
nothingness that issues from the Cross like a sweet fragrancethe freedom of a passing
breeze, a lingering melodythese vagabonds comport their bodies in such a way as to
speak with the body, to make understood that which it [the body] does not understand,
but which passes through it and makes it felt.74
The fools thus effect a bodily conversion of the ineffable. Fidelity to the Word
of the Cross, which confounds that which is by the weakness of what is not,75 does not
leave the fool content to dwell in a divine stasis, merely enraptured by a negative
incomprehensibility, like Deaths untellability. The plenitudinous nature of the ineffable
opens a hiatus, which reveals that what can be said must rather be passed over in silence.
Because the Cross casts its shadow on all things, the fool passes through the things that
are in abandon to the things that are not. The theater of the fool is thus a spectacle of
self-giving love: these madmen give of themselves to the care of the poor, the widow, the
orphan, in short, those who do not exist according to the world. As Saward intimates,
73

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 34.

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 33.
75
Breton, The Word and the Cross, ibid.
74

Belcher, 20

The holiness of the fool shows itself in his solidarity with the outcasts of society; he is
not content with social work but identifies himself completely with the wretched of the
earth. The beggar, the leper, the prisoner are not simply cases to be helped but brethren
in whom Christ is present and waits to be served. According to Breton, the fools
abandon to the nothings in this world is very much an abandonment to the universal
I of Christnot to be confused with a transcendental or absolute Egowhich is
enigmatically present in every poor or outcast person who has not yet been allowed the
full humanity of justice.76 Fidelity to the cross of Christ is in fact fidelity to the neighbor
by overflowing love.
Of course, the fools love is of the most foolish sort! A judgment on all power,
the fools embodied proclamation of the Word of the Cross is like a mark of
interrogation, a gentle irony, an ironic smile, Breton saysor, like Janklvitchs
reticent music that interrupts the perpetual din of noisy life with a gentle, but
enchanting silence. Would not the prime example of foolishness be, then, the irradiating
beatitude of St. Francis of Assisias if in human guise there passed among us I know
not what flower of the field?77 St. Francis exudes understatement, concision, the very
embodiment of brachylogy: In contrast with so many who strain their voices to shake
the powers, he guards against shouting.78 The life of Francis is a refusal of power and
garrulous wisdom, like a breeze passing through institutions that would reduce the power
of the Cross to a statuesque ousia.79
IV
76

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 137.

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 36.
78
Breton, The Word and the Cross, ibid.
79
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 76: Terror of moving sands has hardened into rock the soil of our
ground. Thus by turning our back upon the Cross we have changed it into a marble statue.
77

Belcher, 21

As we have seen, the coming forth of the divine Word in its very annihilation
performs a similar function for Paul as Janklvitchs description of music as a kind of
inexpressive espressivo.80 The Word of the Cross, like musics Charm, conveys
somethingsomething altogether general,81 since it is only connected to the
particularity of its audible imprint, its passage in the becoming of timebut in a way that
speaks only ambiguity, not babble or confoundedness, but an expression that opens itself
to interpretation, like Boschs The Garden of Earthly Delights, only to divert.82 The
Charm of music and the logos staurou equally invite interpretation, but only as
diversionary ruses that lead in numerous, infinite directions. If a hermeneutics of
speculation can lead only into the endless chasm, on the one handthe immeasurable
labyrinth of meaning, with each passage leading to such brilliant transparency of detail
it is, on the other hand, only by embodying, by creatively re-enacting what one hears that
the general emotion conveyed there is received as some communicated meaning,
issuing forth like an enchanting Word, or a silent music from some distant land, invisible
to the eyes, nonetheless audible. The work only makes sense in its reception as
performance; the anterior and posterior objectifications are but fleeting attempts at
grasping the ungraspable between. Thus, the poetic character of this reception is utterly
80

See p.12 and n. 46 above

See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 57, Music signifies something in general without ever
wanting to say anything in particular, and esp. p. 75: As an ineffably general language (if such is what
language should be), music is docile, lending itself to countless associations. Roussel attached the name
Evocations to three orchestral images inspired by India: but music, with its double meanings, its
readiness to oblige the most diverse interpretations, will evoke just as easily anything it pleases us to
imagine. Sometimes music guides us, murmuring something, suggesting some unknown locale evoked in
some passable way. The lake at Wallenstadt, the evening in Grenada, a mysterious name is whispered in
our ear. Canopus, which rattles the poetic imagination, and yet, the name says to us, to our soul: choose
your chimera, imagine what you will, anything is possible.
82
Michel de Certeau, SJ, The Mystic Fable, p. 52: The secret of The Garden is to make you believe that it
possesses some sayable secretor rather to promise one secret (meanings hidden from the understanding)
in place of another (the enjoyment given to the eye). It paradoxically engenders its opposite, namely the
commentary that turns each form into script and wants to fill that entire colored space with meanings to
make it into a page of writing, a discursive analysisA senseless beginning causes the discourses of
meaning to be produced.
81

Belcher, 22

ineffable, though not in the sense of untellable, because an infinite amount of

significations are disposed by musics, by the Words enchantment. It is ineffable in the
sense that it cannot be properly circumscribed; it is an infinite dissemination of
meanings superfluity.
In taking up such a view of the ineffablewith musics silence and the Word of
the Cross, respectivelyJanklvitch and Breton each tread closely to Neoplatonic, and
ultimately Idealist paths. For Janklvitch, music seems to be akin to a Plotinian pure
form (or pure indeterminate potentiality) that resides in mystical ecstasy beyond the
logos, so that it says to us, choose your chimera, imagine what you will, anything is
possible.83 Its ineffability lies in its infinite depth, such that the positive plenitude of this
almost-nothing [presque-rien] can be unfolded in innumerable directions. Similarly, for
Breton, the ineffability of the Word of the Cross reveals a nothingness at the interior of
the soul, such that by affinity with the One, the soul becomes the self-causing agent of its
own actions, and creatively constitutes its own existence in those actions. Though many
elements still persist, Breton ultimately moves beyond the Neoplatonists (and so also
beyond Janklvitch) by redrawing the ineffable around the lines of dispossession, of
kenosis, and the end of willing.
What must be said, as above with Bonhoeffer, is that the fool is not the cause of
her own actions, but is a creature who stands for that very reason before the cross as one
who only receives life, joy, and love from another. The cross stands as a mark of
interrogation on all that is, but it is a sign of an accomplished factthe deed is done
in Gods faithful act in Christ. What is called forth in the fool who would empty herself

83

Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 75. For Janklvitchs own debt to Neoplatonism, see especially
his Plotin, Ennades (1, 3): Sur la dialectique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1998).

Belcher, 23

and follow after its burning edge in the sands of time and the exigencies of history is thus
only ever a repetition, in Kierkegaards sense: it is by dispossession, by un-handing
myself to Christ who is in the middle, standing between me and my world, that I am
free to receive my world back, transformed. It is the very depth of this mystery of the
cross that it stands as an irrevocable sign, a mystery that is so full of content84 that it
cannot be appropriated by reasons language, nor by the wisdom of the powers, but
stands as a sign of contradiction calling into question all such discourses of desire.
The Word of God nailed to a Cross has the power to reduce all of our speculation
and conjecture to a question, the grandeur of human reason to a mere nervous guffaw; but
it also has the power to enchant us, like a distant melody, yet so close, calling for fidelity,
and thus dispossessing love. Breton says that God is passage not possession, and that
Grace is not power but dispossession because it is given under the interrogative sign of
the Cross.85 Janklvitch concurs: God, according to scripture, does not come with the
noise of wrathfulness but as imperceptibly as a breezeGod arrives on tiptoe, furtively,
pianissimo.86 And as both Janklvitch and Breton note, God does not, therefore, appear
before Elijah in the theophany: in the rushing wind, in the earthquake, or in the fire, but
instead in the sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19:11-12)in the voice of a gentle breeze
as it passes through the mountain cave.87 The coming forth of the Word of God, reduced
84

I am grateful for conversations with Josh Davis on this point.

Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 139, p. 143.
86
Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 149, p. 150
87
Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 139; Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. REF. Note also the
comment by J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale Ann-Brault and Michael Naas,
Meridian Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 114: This silence comes to
us from the abyss. It perhaps resembles, it perhaps echoesjust perhapsthe silence from the depths of
which Elijah heard himself called, him alone (How is it, Elijah, that youre here; what are you doing
here?), from the depths of a voice that was scarcely a voice, an almost inaudible voice, a voice barely to be
distinguished from a light breeze, a voice as subtle as silence, a sound of sheer silence, but a voice that
Elijah thought he could make out after having sought in vain the presence of God on the mountain, in the
wind, then in the earthquake, and then in the fire, a voice that asks (What are you doing here?) and that
orders, Go.; note also St. John of the Cross mention of that whistling of the gentle breeze heard on the
85

Belcher, 24

to a question mark on the Cross, is the passage of a divine song, a tender gust that passes
before us. By its grace we are enraptured and by a graced fidelity we are caught up with
it. To those who hear the soft, sad melody, already anticipating a joy unspoken, to these
fools who lend their bodies as instruments to its tune, and by their profound and foolish
enactment participate in the very event of Christs Cross and Resurrection, these little
ones become a divine singing, sung forth into the world a song of love by a common
work, a liturgy, a doxology, a prayer of hope:
Divine music, deliver us also, we who are not dead like the dead, but
dead like the living, that is to say, ugly, nauseating, and cadaverous, deliver us from the depths; do not refuse your mystic washing to our departed souls; and may your melodious angels forever chase away from us
the anxious Walkyries of wrath.
Vladimir Janklvitch, Pellas and Pnlope88

mount at the mouth of the cavethe whistling of love-stirring breezesThis divine whistling which
enters through the souls hearing, The Spiritual Canticle, stas. 14 and 15, p. 468.
88
Janklvitch, Pellas and Pnlope, p. 590, my emphasis.

Belcher, 25

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