Several of Kierkegaard’s journal entries denigrate ‘merely human’ speech in favour of ‘divine’ silence. One should not ‘drivel to other men’ about one’s relationship to the divinity: ‘Talking about one’s God-relationship is an emptying that weakens’. (In another journal entry, Kierkegaard notes with interest the early Church’s view that one can confess Christ by remaining silent.) Part of his objection, here and elsewhere, is a worry about the tendency of speech to degenerate into what he calls ‘chatter’ [snakke]. In Two Ages, he insists that ‘[o]nly the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness … The inward orientation of silence is the condition for cultured conversation’. In some of his extraordinarily imaginative riffs on the theme of what we may learn from the lilies in the field and the birds of the air – mentioned in Matthew 6: 24-34, a biblical text to which he returns in no fewer than fourteen separate discourses – their silence is centre-stage, and is treated as a pathway to an experience of a hopeful joy that can calm our worries about the future.

If silence can nurture hope, in what way might this hope be ‘radical’? In his book Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear discusses the case of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the native American Crow Nation, and his need to face up to the potential collapse of life as he and his people knew it, in which the norms and values that constituted an excellent life risked being rendered meaningless by the territorial advance of the white settlers. A central focus is how Plenty Coups manages to hold on to hope in these potentially desperate circumstances. His hope is radical in the sense that it involves commitment to a goodness that transcends his existing, limited understanding of the good. He holds out hope for a desirable possibility beyond his current imaginative capacities, one to which his existing conception of the good is unable to do justice. Extrapolating from his main example, Lear suggests that such hope is crucial in ‘an ethical enquiry into life at the horizon of one’s understanding’. Precisely because our present understanding of the good life is unable to capture the content of the hoped for good, such hope demands a kind of silence. Much Kierkegaardian hope is like this, and I have argued elsewhere[1] that such hope is an important but often neglected aspect of Kierkegaardian faith.