The semiotic ideologies of religious silence

Abstract

This article develops a semiotic analysis of prayer by shifting attention from verbal articulation to the structured management of non-expression. Rather than opposing silence to language, it argues that religious practices organize silence as a strategic suspension of expression, integral to the production of meaning, agency, and presence. Drawing on a semiotic philosophy of prayer, the article first reconstructs a long intellectual trajectory – from Augustine and Aquinas to Kant, Kierkegaard, and modern psychology of religion – in which prayer is progressively interiorized, agency is displaced toward the immanent subject, and language is spiritualized to the point that silence itself becomes prayer. This trajectory finds its most radical liturgical realization in Quaker worship, where collective silence is not a mere absence of speech but a finely articulated temporal and corporeal practice, structured by discernment, expectation, and occasional vocal ministry. Against this model, the article examines the Catholic rosary as a contrasting semiotic dispositif. Far from eliminating silence, the rosary incorporates it into ritual form: through repetition, quantification, and tactile mediation, it organizes a continuum ranging from articulated recitation to murmured prayer and momentary muteness. The rosary thus appears not merely as a mnemonic or devotional tool, but as a technology for regulating pauses, thresholds of audibility, and shared silence within communal prayer. Historically situated and semiotically analyzed, the rosary exemplifies a Catholic response to the problem of silence: not its interiorization, but its ritualization. By juxtaposing Quaker silence and the rosary’s managed muteness, the article proposes a broader framework for a cultural semiotics of prayer, one attentive to how religious traditions distribute agency, incarnate language, and choreograph the intervals between expression and its suspension. More generally, it suggests that the semiotics of silence elaborated in religious contexts provides analytical tools for understanding non-expression in other cultural domains, where meaning often emerges not despite silence, but through it.