Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, The

The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. By Dorothee Soelle. Translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. x + 325 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Of the many books published on mysticism in recent years, this is one of the most provocative and one of the most frustrating. It begins with a familiar theme: the spiritual desiccation of the modern world. Ours, Soelle complains, is an age consumed by greed and guided by the deceitful voice of instrumental reason. The church cannot help, obsessed as it is with guarding its privileges and spinning theological abstractions. If we are to experience communion with God and with one another, we must turn to our mystics. They alone can teach us how to live, in Meister Eckhart's words, sunder warumbe, without a why or wherefore (p. 59).

Ranging across the religious world with these words as her compass, Soelle maps her argument for a people's mysticism. She cites Martin Buber and Thich Nhat Hanh as freely as she does Eckhart or John of the Cross. Convinced that women are trailblazers of the mystic path, she embraces the Sufi Rabi'a al-Adawiya along side Mechthild of Magdeburg and Teresa of Avila. From these visionaries she distills a spirituality of engaged ecstasy that plunges us into the world we are called to love and to tend. The divine awaits everyone and is present everywhere: in nature, in sexuality, and in the suffering that awakens compassion for our fellow creatures. Solidarity and selfless joy are thus marks of authentic religion. And although these seem innocent virtues, they are in fact subversive, for they undermine our idolatry of wealth and power.

Soelle is not the first writer to make mysticism the touchstone of political resistance. Nor is she alone in commending a spirituality that transcends the boundaries of dogma and gender. But few theologians are as adept at conveying the grace of radical amazement, even in this sometimes awkward translation. And Soelle brings a passion to her scholarship that is often moving and sometimes compelling. Unfortunately, it is this very singlemindedness that leads her astray. When she turns from spirituality to politics and theology, analysis gives way to parody, and argument turns to diatribe. Our civilization is not only troubled in her telling, it is the most brutal in history (p. 191). This is a staggering accusation, but like other ideologues of a certain generation, Soelle sees little difference between totalitarianism and liberal capitalism. Representative democracy she dismisses as the voice of moral mediocrity (p. 266). Even our humanitarian reforms are a delusion. Relations between men and women, Soelle insists, have not changed since the Enlightenment. And the abolition of corporal punishment in schools merely allows teachers to beat students with grades instead of canes (pp. 129, 265).

Soelle's animus toward the church is just as implacable. Given the history of ecclesiastical malfeasance, Soelle has reason to be angry. But her indictment is limitless and encompasses orthodox faith as well as faithless practice. Here she faces a dilemma, since many of the mystics she admires are orthodox, and the creeds she rejects enshrine the incarnationalism she prizes. But rather than wrestle with orthodoxy, Soelle caricatures it as obedience to an omnipotent tyrant and to the male hierarchs who interpret his laws. She is then free to condemn her un-Nicene invention for sundering flesh from spirit, divinity from humanity.

Yet although she criticizes dualism, Soelle herself inhabits a world of irreconcilable opposites: community and hierarchy, resistance and collaboration, mysticism and orthodoxy. And like all dualists, she attributes everything she opposes to a single source. For her it is patriarchy. Divine omnipotence is patriarchal. Hierarchy is patriarchal. Autonomy is patriarchal. Cartesian philosophy is patriarchal. Newtonian physics is patriarchal. Industry is patriarchal. Of course, like the Oedipus complex, the universal power of this malevolent force can never be falsified. But this only deepens its mythological appeal. And Soelle's one-dimensional heroes are equally mythological. She lumps Manichean Cathars together with Franciscans and Waldensians. She transforms Thomas Muntzer, the millenarian warrior-king, into a childlike visionary. John Brown, whom she seems to know only from Henry David Thoreau, becomes all compassion, as if Kansas never bled. And she ignores the tragic ambivalence Simone Weil felt toward her fellow Jews. Indeed, Soelle allows no middle ground for any of us. Either we are resisting "technopatriarchy" (p. 110) or we are its servants.

Simplistic though this view is, it does remind us that our fevered demand for the world's goods makes us unwitting accomplices in a host of evils. But Soelle's utopian mysticism offers neither a strategy for changing the world nor guidance on how a new world should be ordered. In a revealing passage, she notes that Francis of Assisi would not let the flames of his burning trousers be doused lest he harm "brother fire." She then complains that we modems have no such reverence because we believe Descartes's patriarchal dictum that human beings are "masters and owners of nature" (p. 237). What then should we do? Soelle is too shrewd to demand that we close our fire stations. But anyone who doubts that she is in earnest need only ponder what she says about her other mystic exemplars.