The Irreducibility of Silence in Peter Wust’s Concept of Existential Certainty
Among the quiet corridors of twentieth-century philosophical thought, the name of Peter Wust remains an aesthetic whisper rather than a clarion. A Catholic existentialist, born in Rissenthal in 1884, Wust’s thought developed in proximity to contemporaries such as Max Scheler and Romano Guardini, yet his work retained a unique and unmistakable fragrance: a Catholic existentialism that fiercely wrestled with questions of inner union between epistemic rigor and spiritual experience. His magnum opus, “Ungewissheit und Wagnis” (Uncertainty and Risk), framed uncertainty not as skeptic paralysis but as the sole theater upon which faith and intellect may genuinely act. Yet, buried within his otherwise systematized reflections on uncertainty and spiritual risk lies a curious silence—both literal and conceptual—surrounding the phenomenology of silence itself, a silence that proves, upon closer exegesis, irreducible and foundational to his entire metaphysical framework.
This article endeavors to excavate the notion of silence—not merely as absence of speech or sound—but as an ontologically fecund concept embedded within Wust’s theory of existential certainty. It will be shown that Wust, while never formally construing silence as a metaphysical category, inadvertently treats it as the precondition for the encounter between the finite subject and the Absolute—that is, God. This gives his Catholic existentialism a depth that surpasses phenomenology and enters into the more forbidding but vital realm of apophatic metaphysics.
Wust’s central thesis—that man’s existential being is poised on an abyss of uncertainty that is only bridged by an act of inner risk—presumes a subject structurally open to mystery. But in his articulation of this openness, the space in which the decisive leap into faith occurs, Wust makes a significant avoidance: he never names silence as the medium of that encounter. Instead, he speaks of “inner readiness,” “attentiveness of the soul,” and “listening,” yet conspicuously refuses to name the semantic condition for such listening. This omission, however, is instructive.
Silence, in Wust, is not a category of negation, where speech has ceased or failed, but an active presence, a clearing or Zwischenraum in which existential decisions gestate. It is in the interstice between doubt and decision, between suspended knowledge and committed belief, that Wust’s anthropology finds its ethical and metaphysical heartbeat. That space—a silence in both intellect and speech—is exemplified in his aphoristic claim: “Erkenntnistheoretisch gibt es keine Sicherheit; aber existentiell gibt es eine Gewißheit, die dem Menschen gestattet, zu leben.” (“Epistemologically, there is no certainty; but existentially, there is a certainty which allows man to live.”) Silence is the unnamed precondition here, the ground upon which this existential certainty may emerge, because only silence can hold a space truly open to such a non-epistemic form of knowing.
This silence is not merely passive awaiting, but the crucible of risk. Wust’s emphasis on risk (“Wagnis”) as the central category of his ontology presupposes a suspension of the economy of speech and discursive reason. One does not “risk” in speech; one risks within the wordless decision between two forms of unknowing. Even prayer, in Wust’s formulation, must be conducted “in der Tiefe des Seins” (“in the depth of being”), not primarily as a spoken petition but as an inward cry—a cry too deep for words. Thus, paradoxically, for Wust speech obscures that which silence reveals.
In a passage oft overlooked in secondary literature, Wust describes the moment of religious risk as occurring “zwischen dem letzten Wort und dem anfänglichen Glauben”—”between the last word and the awakenment of faith.” This in-between is not discursive; it is apophatic. Hence, Wust here brushes—though unconsciously—against the Orthodoxy of Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom the divine is precisely that which is neither spoken nor conceived, and must be approached through “divine darkness.” The difference is telling: whereas Dionysius thematized this darkness as a theophanic veil, Wust leaves it unnamed, yet central.
It would be a mistake, however, to categorize Wust merely within the tradition of negative theology. He is no pseudo-mystic. His silence is not doctrinal or liturgical; it is ontological, grounded in the creatureliness of man’s condition and the fallibility of human reason. Yet, he resists nihilism not by asserting knowledge, but by activating trust—a trust that can only be enacted in the medium of silence, when the voice of reason ceases.
Another subtle manner in which silence operates in Wust’s ontology is its relation to death. Wust was acutely aware of mortality—not only in the abstract, but personally, as he composed his final reflections while succumbing to bone cancer. In this period, his writings take on a tone tinted with silence, not only stylistically, but metaphysically as death—the “final silence”—becomes the ultimate test of existential certainty. It is here that silence assumes its most rigorous metaphysical function: as the veil beyond which risk becomes consummation. Faith must leap into a silence that is no longer temporary, but final, and yet still not without promise. Thus, silence in death is not annihilation, but culmination.
The phenomenology of silence, therefore, should not be seen as incidental or aesthetic in Wust’s corpus, but foundational. It is the background against which words acquire meaning, decisions acquire weight, and being acquires contour. Silence, irreducible and omnipresent, is the existential canvas of Wustian philosophy. Perhaps Wust never named it precisely because its efficacy lay in its anonymity. It is not the silence that ends language, but the silence that precedes it; not the nihil that devours meaning, but the abyss that makes meaning possible.
To praise Wust for this unspoken insight is to appreciate the structural humility of a thinker who, unlike many of his louder contemporaries, understood that not everything of significance is expressed—some things are only gestured at, and others may only be suffered. In this regard, Peter Wust offers a model of philosophical thought that risks fidelity to truth not through argumentation, but through lived surrender to the holy silence in which truth might be encountered. And thus, through subtle neglect or mystical tact, he offers a philosophy that is not merely read but awaited.
It remains for future scholars to interrogate more deeply this metaphysics of silence in Wust—not by expanding it, but by preserving its boundaries, its gentle refusals, its aesthetic aporias. Perhaps silence must remain partially untouched, if it is to remain fertile. Just as a field must lie fallow before it may be sown anew.
—
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
silence, Catholic existentialism, Peter Wust, metaphysics of risk, apophaticism, uncertainty, death