The Search for Silence

Many people have searched for silence; it is an ancient and a universal quest. It pervades the whole of human history: Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Pythagoricians and, of course, Christians, Catholic and perhaps even more Orthodox, have felt the need for and the benefits of silence; and this desire has been felt beyond the spheres of the sacred and the religious. I lack the skills, consequently, to describe it in its totality. Yet I cannot completely ignore something that is fundamental to a history of silence in the West. I shall confine myself to certain quests for silence made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those who have subsequently felt the desire for silence have referenced them, explicitly or not.

Silence was at this period seen as a necessary precondition for a relationship with God. Meditation, interior prayer, indeed all prayer, required it. Since antiquity, the monastic tradition had transmitted an ars meditandi which emerged from the cloisters in the sixteenth century and which then constituted an internal discipline accessible to the laity. Onto this was grafted the ancient moral philosophy, that of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, for example, with which the humanists were familiar. This led to advocacy of a struggle against distraction, a concentration of the attention, a meditative quest closely dependent on silence. This process, which led to the wide dissemination of the silent oratio interior that has been so well described by Marc Fumaroli, is crucial to a history of silence.

In 1555, the Jesuit father Balthazar Alvarez wrote a treatise with the title Tratado de la oración de silencio. He believed that the oración de la presencia de Dios, the ‘prayer of the presence of God’, made it possible to accede to the oración de silencio, ‘the prayer of silence’: ‘Then, in the heart, everything is silent, nothing disturbs it, it is the silence in which one hears only the voice of God who instructs and reveals’; this is why one must welcome him ‘in silence and in tranquillity’.1The Dominican Luis de Granada proposed a method of inner prayer which would influence people as diverse as Charles Borromeo and Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory. It consisted of imagining an ‘inner, silent picture’ of the ‘visible and tangible features of an act in the life of Christ’. ‘A veritable conversation between the sinful self and the sacred scene’ could then begin, and Christ and the other persons in the picture, by their gestures and their looks, ‘silently appeal for a reflection on the self’. Such an inner prayer, constantly repeated, would create, he believed, a habitus of ‘silent movements’ which would penetrate all actions.2However, it is the thinking of Ignatius Loyola that had the strongest and deepest influence at this period. His message was based on silence. ‘God bestows, God trains, God accomplishes his work, and this can only be done in the silence that is established between the Creator and the creature’; ‘he who approaches his Creator and Lord and who reaches him’, he is someone who lives in silence.3

Living in Manresa, in Catalonia, Ignatius Loyola spent seven hours a day in interior prayer. At mealtimes, when he ate with others, his custom was never to speak, although he listened, in order to use what was said by the guests as material for the encounter with God that would follow the meal.4He saw the spiritual exercise as a way of meditating, of praying, of examining one’s conscience and of engaging in the ‘contemplation of place’. This required silence, which happened naturally during the ‘exercise of night’. One example will help us to understand this exercise performed in silence and which allowed the imagination free play: when eating, said Loyola, ‘let him imagine he sees Christ our Lord and His disciples at table, and consider how He eats and drinks, how He looks, how He speaks’.5

In a long text on the different ways of praying, Ignatius Loyola spelled out how one should match words to breaths in order to achieve consolation and conquer the desolation provoked by evil spirits. These, he said, enter the soul ‘with noise and commotion’, whereas the good angel enters peacefully and ‘silently’.6This brings us to the mystics. John of the Cross, describing the tranquil night, formed of calm and of solitude in God, emphasizes the importance of silence in mystical rapture. ‘In the calm and silence of night and in this knowledge of divine light, the soul discovers . . . a certain correspondence with God.’ A sublime musical harmony is established, which ‘surpasses all the concerts and all the melodies in the world’, and this music is called by the soul ‘silent music’ because it is ‘a calm and peaceful knowledge, without sound of voices, and therefore one enjoys the sweetness of the music and the tranquillity of the silence’. Further, ‘even though that music is silent to the natural senses and faculties, it is sounding solitude for the spiritual faculties’.7

Later, he describes the benefits of contemplation of the ‘hidden and secret wisdom of God’: ‘[W]ithout sound of voices . . . as in the silence of quietness of night, apart from all that is sensible and natural, God teaches the soul.’8 In a word, the silence of the spirit is a necessary condition for God to enter the soul. It ‘cancels all rational and discursive activity, thereby enabling direct perception of the divine word’.9We may also, in discussing silence and mysticism, consider the experience and writings of St Teresa of Avila, in particular her description of the ‘castle of the soul’. Here, God is reached only in silence through the ‘ears of the soul’, at night.

The Carthusian rule was based on silence and solitude, completed by a specific book-based education. This, writes Gérald Chaix, made it possible to adhere (inhaere) to God ‘with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul and with all one’s might’.10 The exterior silence which features in the Carthusian rule and practices is simply a means of reaching an interior silence, that of the mind (mens) and of the heart (cor). Purged of all worldly imagination, the mind then thinks solely of God. Though only a procedure for attaining this relationship, the exterior silence imposed by the rule, like solitude, must be scrupulously observed. So also must the renunciation of the study of eloquence in favour of reading works that taught silence and devotion. Gérald Chaix concludes that this ideal of solitude and silence, though perfectly adapted to the age of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, was subsequently found increasingly baffling, and the Carthusians appeared ‘fools for God’.11In the seventeenth century, as the external world turned away from silence, two notable personalities gave it a major role in the practice of contemplation: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and, more radically, the abbot of Rancé, the reformer of la Trappe. The former repeatedly emphasized in his works the grandeur and the necessity of silence. Bossuet based his exhortations on a passage from the Apocalypse: when the angel broke the Seventh Seal, there was a profound silence in heaven and, during it, ‘the angels paid tribute to and venerated the supreme majesty of God. What does this mysterious silence which the angels created in heaven mean?’ he asked. That ‘every creature, whether in heaven or on earth, must hold their peace, and refrain from speech so as to adore and venerate the grandeur of God.’ Hence he urged: ‘Every so often, be silent, in imitation of the angels’;12 ‘you will never regret having remained silent’.13In this exhortation intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet maintains: ‘It is only in silence and in the avoidance of useless and distracting speech that [God] will visit you through his inspirations and his grace, and that He will make his presence felt within you.’14 Exhortations of this type were a leitmotif of his preaching. He recalled the words of St James, who asked that everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak.15‘There has to be perfect silence and recollection to hear internally the voice of God’;16 and again addressing the Ursulines of Meaux: ‘one loses much through the absence of silence’,17 the desire to speak deflects from God. In religious houses, ‘the absence of silence leads to all the faults against charity’.18 Except when responding to Pilate, Jesus, during his Passion, ‘maintained a perpetual silence’ – imitate him, urged Bossuet. Where does it come from, this intense eagerness to speak, he asked? It prevents introspection.19Vivid examples reinforced these messages. In the ‘Second Panegyric upon St Benedict’, Bossuet wrote that, in the solitude of the ‘horrible and frightful [desert] to which he withdrew, an awful and terrible silence [prevailed], which was interrupted only by the cries of wild beasts’.20 It was to encourage him to shun the licentiousness of his youth that God gave him ‘an uncultivated and uninhabited land, a desert, a silence, a solitude . . . a dark and awful cavern’.21 Later, St Bernard, having renounced the world at the age of 22, become ‘extraordinarily enamoured of secrecy and solitude’, reflecting that the Cross had closed the mouth of Jesus, said to himself: ‘I will condemn mine to silence.’22 At Clairvaux, when some monks found the ‘long and horrible’ silence of the monastery too harsh, Bernard told them that, ‘were they to think seriously about the rigorous examination the great Judge would make of their words, they would not have much difficulty in remaining silent’.23In his ‘Meditation on Silence’, intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet is more specific. There were, he believed, three types of silence: ‘the silence of rule, the silence of prudence in conversation, and the silence of patience in affliction’.24 In thirty years, Jesus spoke only once in the Temple. ‘If he said not a word, it was to teach us to remain silent.’25 In the monastic orders, the rule fixed the times and hours of silence. Some even ‘maintained a perpetual and profound silence, and never spoke’. The founders of orders had believed ‘that silence cut out many sins and faults’. They had also ‘foreseen that devotion and the prayerful spirit could not exist without silence’.26 Silence was necessary, lastly, to maintain charity, peace and union among the brothers and sisters alike. Whoever wished to reform a monastery, he added, must begin with silence and banish the ‘desire to communicate’.

To practise the silence of prudence was to avoid the faults against charity, and to demonstrate a ‘wise discretion’. To practise the silence of patience was to ‘suffer in silence under the eye of God’; because ‘it is silence that sanctifies our crosses and our afflictions’.27 One should to this end reflect on the attitude of Jesus during the flagellation and the crowning of thorns. It had been said that Christ was the ‘victim of silence’. He had demonstrated and consecrated this during his Passion.28 Silence protected against anger, it was the best way to conquer the passion of vengeance and it was a way of overcoming the ‘desires of curiosity’; and, Bossuet concluded, ‘by faithfully keeping silent, you will be victorious over all your passions’.29At Soligny, the abbot of Rancé introduced and insisted on silence, to which he devoted his 29th constitution. Many messages of Bossuet echoed the views of Rancé, his friend. The abbot believed that silence went with solitude, which would, without it, be vain. Silence was part of the spirit of penitence and it sanctioned separation from men. It was a sign of rupture and detachment. It was a precondition for forgetting the self, proof that bodily concerns had been put aside. Above all, silence was a precondition for prayer, it was a preparation for listening to the divinity. It facilitated spiritual exercises and access to other languages than speech: that of the interior, that of the hereafter, that of the angels.

Rancé also argued that silence favoured meditation on the vanities. It made it easier to measure on a daily basis the passage of time. It anticipated the silence of the tomb. It prepared, consequently, for eternity, which wiped out time. It was this that made Chateaubriand regard the silence of Rancé as terrible, in its length and its depth. On the point of death, the abbot cried: ‘I have only a few moments to live; the best use of them I can make is to pass them in silence.’30 He was true to his word.

from: A History of Silence From the Renaissance to the Present Day

by Alain Corbin