Silencio performativo y mediación de gracia: El silencio como acción lingüístico-teológica en la predicación cristiana

Abstract

Far from being mere absence, silence in Christian preaching can be understood as a form of language that is expressive, performative, and mediating of grace. This article addresses the problem of how silence can function as a communicative act within homiletic discourse. It develops this thesis through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together spiritual theology and formal linguistic analysis. Based on Cardinal Robert Sarah’s The Power of Silence and several homilies from Saint Josemaría Escrivá’s Friends of God, treated here as a discursive corpus, the article explores how ellipses, pauses, and implicit structures intensify the communicative density of homiletic discourse. Using tools such as speech act theory, relevance theory, and formal semantics, it argues that, under specific pragmatic conditions, silence can operate as a performative act with interpretive and spiritual effects on the hearer. This study continues a previous line of research on the unity of life and preaching as integral communication, proposing an explicit account of silence as an interpretive operator with a theological-linguistic dimension.