Silence and Glory: Towards a Phenomenology of Paradise Lost as a Veiled Form

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of Paradise Lost as a philosophically operative symbol of a loss of transparency: not so much a disappearance of meaning as a veiling of the way in which it appears. The text’s hypothesis maintains that silence is not merely an absence of words, but rather a condition of possibility for perceiving a glory that manifests itself precisely in fragile, indirect and dramatic forms. From a phenomenology of silence – understood as an intentional structure that sustains speech without being exhausted by it – a grammar of the veiled form is articulated, with Hans Urs von Balthasar: glory appears as the splendour of form without becoming a spectacle at our disposal. The motif of paradise lost thus becomes a hermeneutical key to understanding the oscillation between memory and promise, as well as the existential translation of that veiling into anguish, abandonment and limitation. Von Balthasar’s theodrama allows us to interpret history not as a conceptual treatise, but as a scene where freedoms meet, and where silence acquires interpersonal, liturgical and cultural depth. The result is a demonstration: the return of paradise is not geographical, but a reappropriation of the present as a place of veiled manifestation of meaning.