This classic book has long been out of print in English, though the French and German editions are available and continue to sell. Professor Theophil Spoerri was professor of Italian and French literature at the University of Zürich for more than thirty years. He served as Rector of the University from 1948 until 1950. His work on Dante won him the Gold Medal of the city of Florence and the award of ‘Commendatore’ of the Italian Order of Merit. He was also one of the pioneers in Switzerland of what in the years before the Second World War was called the Oxford Group, and then Moral Re-Armament. He died in December 1974 during a winter conference in the Caux conference centre.
It is over forty years since the first edition in the German original, in l971. It was the fruit of many years’ work, and much thought by an original teacher and thinker, who stimulated generations of young people.
Dynamic out of Silence was for a many years the first introduction by an international scholar to Frank Buchman, the remarkable American initiator of Moral Re-Armament (now known by the name Initiatives of Change). Garth Lean in his major and deeply-researched biography Frank Buchman - A Life (Constable, London, 1985), describes Buchman as ‘a prophet set in an apocalyptic age, an era when God is being pushed into a private ghetto and where moral standards are slipping, a time when civilisations show signs of disintegration and the world itself feels in danger of extinction,’ (p.532).
Spoerri’s book is not so much a biography of Buchman. Rather it is a meditation, weaving together, as the title implies, two strands: a personal introspection, a search for a deepening understanding of self and of God’s purposes, and an active effort to make this faith relevant and effective in the world. As, Spoerri says in his introduction, the effect Buchman produced ‘was due more to quietness than to anything he said. His gift was to make the ordinary the basis of the extraordinary, the ordinary person the doer of extraordinary things.’ So Buchman was a charismatic of a rather unusual kind, leaving little by the way of writings other than his speeches, and the challenge facing Spoerri was all the more daunting. Lean, who wrote the foreword for the English edition of Dynamic out of Silence reports that Spoerri discarded five books on Buchman one after another, so difficult did he find the subject.
Buchman, and Spoerri, were both committed Christians. The world has become notably more secular in these last forty years - and the work that Buchman set in motion has become more universal and inter-religious. At the start of a new century, many are concerned about the clash of civilisations. Do religions necessarily work towards division and conflict? Or does the spiritual factor still have something positive to offer for the future of humanity? Perhaps the individual’s search in silence, for inspiration, for correction and for direction, remains a vital factor, an instrument for survival.
Grigory Pomerants, who has written an essay as a foreword, is a major Russian thinker and philosopher. He was deeply marked by his reading of Dynamic out of Silence when he first visited the Caux conference centre, and quoted at length from it in his first major article in Russian on what he called ‘the spiritual movement from the West’. We are grateful for his evaluation both of Spoerri’s writing, and of Buchman’s work that inspired and provoked it.
Andrew Stallybrass, director of Caux Books until the end of 2017
English
