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The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. By Dorothee Soelle. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. vii+325 pp. $20.00.
Dorothee Soelle (b. 1929), formerly at the union Theologicial Seminary (19751987), poet and long-time activist in the German peace and ecology movements, has written extensively on spirituality and political theology. Although themes and ideas in her earlier books also appear in The Silent Cry, in this work she seeks with renewed vigor "to erase the [unnecessary] distinction between a mystical internal and a political external" (3). In this highly provocative book, Soelle sets about awakening the souls, exciting the minds and inciting ethical response on behalf of justice, peace and the health of all of creation in her readers. The title, drawn from an anonymous letter from a fifteenth century German mystic (83), conveys multiple meanings. "The silent cry" is at once an address to God, a mystical name for God (6), an expression of union with God that no longer needs language (71), an experience of learning to listen that plunges one into the dark night of the soul (75), the source of resistance to the status quo (76 and passim) and a way of life.
The book is divided into three parts and includes a not particularly helpful "Afterword" in the form of a conversation with her husband about a few of the book's elements. In Part 1, "What Is Mysticism," Soelle proposes that we are all mystics, because for her mysticism is not primarily about extraordinary phenomena like ecstasies and visions, although ecstasy in the sense of the enthusiasm born of mystical union with God is not neglected (44). Mysticism, for Soelle, is cogito Dei experimentalis, the perception of God through experience, (cf The Strength of the Weak, 86). Perceiving God through experience places us in touch with the heart of reality and, if authentic, is never merely an individual and private affair. True mysticism is never politics-free and never withdrawn from the world and blind to its suffering. Among her concerns in the initial chapters are hermeneutics and language. Acknowledging the importance of a hermeneutics of suspicion in the struggle for liberation, she calls for a movement beyond it to a hermeneutics of hunger. One may wonder why she does not speak of a...