Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Pasquale Morabito

The rose of silence

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ABSTRACT

Religion is tied up to violence as well as to its secret. A secret that is hiding and mystification, but also mystery and initiation. Secret, silence and mystery are all characters that cannot be parted from the sacred.

The symbol of the rose is taken back from the Christian tradition for a reflection on the archaic themes and on the consequent operation of demystification that Christianity operates with respect to the violence hidden by the pagan cults.  

Dante’s rose, the symbol of purity and discretion is a shared Christian topos. “Sub Rosa” meant, in the Middle Age, “under the secret of the confession”. Confessionals used to bear a rose with five petals as an ornament to point out the sacramental secret. One of the traditional invocations to the name of Mary, the mother of the Saviour, is that of Rosa mystica. In the “Legenda Aurea” of Jacopo from Varagine the rose represents the martyrdom[1]. The initiating character of the rose (the esoteric symbol deriving from the cults of Isis and Aphrodites), is assumed in the Christianity after the Pentecost. The advent of the Holy Spirit in the community of the Apostles is also called Pasqua Rosata. 

However, since the Dionysian rites roses were symbol of silence: with them the participants were crowned to mitigate the effect of wine and to keep them from saying too much[2].

In Baroque epoch, the Spanish Jesuit Balthasar Gracián, seemed to know this process: in his allegoric book, the Criticón, it tells that the donkey of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses “se curò de comer la rosa del silencio”[3].  

The silence is meant by Gracián as sign of wisdom, reason and prudence, interpretating in an allegoric way the roses’ crown eaten by Lucio during an initiated rite in honour of Isis, thanks to which the protagonist, from the condition of donkey, becomes a human being. 

Baroque art, in its process of recovery of mythical elements, proposes the silence in a mournful key, through the representations of the Friday Saint, in the Trauerspiels as in the Autos Sacramentales of the Easter Celebrations.  

Evidently, the figure of the donkey postpones the image of the victim in the sacrifical rite and its double value: first, this figure is represented as a monster, as animal with bestial appetites; then, it regains a human shape, almost deified.

In the Christian tradition, silence recalls besides those three days when the Christ was closed in his sepulchre: in fact, the liturgy of the Easter triduum foresees the end of any noise, music, songs, bells. In the liturgy of the Eastern Church, during those three days of silence, Christ hoes down to hell to set the dead free, before going to die himself. Fake human wisdom is transfigured by the silence of Jesus sepulchre and by his sacrifice on the cross.

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