A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  Around 385 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, learned to read silently. The young Augustine saw him do it, recorded this and was immensely influenced by it.

  Before his conversion Augustine was a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric. Along with his contemporaries, he followed Aristotle and saw writing as ‘signs of sounds’. He was explicit about this: ‘When a word is written it makes a sign to the eyes whereby that which pertains to the ears enters the mind.’ It is in this context that we have to see Augustine’s account of Ambrose reading.

  In 385 Augustine was thirty-one. He was very brilliant, very troubled and highly sensitive. He ran away from home in North Africa and went to Rome, where he was laughed at for his provincial accent – for his speaking voice – and was unable to make a living as an independent teacher, so he accepted a government post in Milan. Once there, he went to call on Ambrose who, as well as being the bishop, was a friend of his mother.

  I could not ask him what I would when I would, being shut out both from his ear and speech by multitudes of busy people whose weaknesses he served. When – which wasn’t often – he was not taken up with them … he was refreshing his mind by reading. But when he was reading his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest. He never read aloud.27

  Clearly this way of reading was a novelty and a bit of a puzzle to Augustine. It is the first explicit description of someone reading silently (without moving his lips). There has of course been considerable debate about whether Ambrose was the very first person ever to do this28 but I am persuaded, partly by Augustine’s Confessions themselves and partly because in 349, less than half a century before Augustine watched Ambrose reading, Cyril of Jerusalem exhorted the women in his congregation to read during gaps in the ceremonies, ‘but quietly, so although the lips speak no other ears may hear what they say’. Following Paul’s exhortation that women should not speak during worship29 there was considerable anxiety in early Christianity about keeping women silent in church. I cannot help but feel that if silent reading had been known to him, Cyril would have urged it upon them.

  We know that Augustine himself quickly learned to read this way, because his famous conversion scene in the garden in The Confessions pivots around reading. After a long day talking about faith and reading aloud with his friend Alypius, Augustine had worked himself up into something of a state. Finally he went off alone, burst into floods of tears and heard the famous child’s voice saying, ‘Tolle, Lego’ (Take, read). There was a codex of the Epistles lying near by, so he ‘seized, opened and in silence read the section that my eyes first fell on’ and immediately, ‘No further would I read, nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a serene light infused directly into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.’ What works, what dispels his doubts, is silent reading, which infuses the light of knowledge ‘directly into the heart’.

  Ten years after his conversion Augustine wrote The Confessions. Their publication marked a distinct turning point in the history of self-understanding. The role that silent reading played in this shift felt to me like yet more evidence that we cannot treat silence simply as a lack or absence – here we see it as a passionately strong positive source in the making of the modern self. One way to understand this is by looking at some aspects of modern reading and seeing how things have changed since Augustine watched Ambrose read without moving his lips.

  First, there has been an enormous social change in reading. Literacy is now seen as a necessary life skill. In the sitcom Friends, Joey always moves his lips as he reads – this is a stock joke to show that he is thick and uneducated and viewers understand this. Before Augustine’s time it was seen much more as an aristocratic accomplishment. There is a nice little story in Petronius’s Satyrica, where a character excuses himself by saying that he did not kiss a particular youth because he was beautiful but because he ‘could read a book on sight’: there is no modern version of this excuse. The level of interpretation required to read sensibly meant that fluent reading was subsequent to an extensive education, rather than prior to it. For instance we have records of an argument about whether the phrase from Virgil collectamexiliopubem (in scripta continua) should be read, ‘collectam exilio pubem – a people gathered for exile’ or ‘collectam ex Ilio pubem – a people gathered from Troy’. Obviously you need some considerable knowledge of the plot of the Aenead before you can hope to decide; reading could not be about unravelling plots and discovering secrets. This limitation was not as extensive as it would be now because one of the effects of easier reading is that it has radically reduced the depth of textual memory in even the well educated, just as calculators have reduced people’s capacity to do mental arithmetic.

  The ability to read is now also far more closely linked to the ability to write (the single term ‘literacy’ covers both). Because reading was so much more of an aural skill in the late classical world, most writing was dictated to scribes. The modern literate person has access not only to silent reading, but also to silent writing. Reading and writing were social events, whereas now they are deeply private activities.

  Adam Phillips explores some of this new privacy in Promises, Promises where he links it specifically to dreams and silence:

  Whenever I read a book someone is communicating with me in their absence. Modern technology masks how truly incredible it is that people can communicate with us in their absence and after their deaths. So what difference does a person in the room make? We might think of children as experimenting with what is possible in the absence of the object, of finding out what they can do, what experiences they can have without the palpable presence of another person … a time comes, ideally, when the child discovers the pleasures of her own solitude. One of the things that a child might do with this solitude is read … Like the dreaming experience, the reading experience is conducted in silence, unless of course one reads out loud in which case, oddly enough, one hears only one’s own voice. What kind of exchange goes on between a book and its reader? What can a book give us that a person can’t? One possible answer might be ‘the experience of a relationship in silence’ – the unusual experience of a relationship in which no one speaks. Our present interest in biography, in knowing about writers is, I think, a wish to break this silence.30

  Along with this social change in reading since Augustine’s time there have been enormous physical changes in the written text. For example, silent reading strips away certain aspects of language like pace, volume and inflection, which we primarily use in speech to insert emotional rather than intellectual content. To replace this loss, punctuation was invented. Punctuation marks both assist sense (especially because the natural rhythm of breath has also disappeared; you cannot speak on an in breath but you can carry on reading perfectly well) and emphasise mood or emotion.

  Silent reading also changed our relationship to both books and readers. A person reading is ‘private’ even in public places. It would be considered rude to lean over the shoulder of a person reading a book on a train and share the text; but we will shamelessly listen to and engage with other people’s conversations. Within that privacy readers ‘own’ the text in a new way; they can read subversively, secretly. Augustine himself was aware of this. He became very anxious about independent ‘interpretations’: private (silent) reading could – and he was right it did, as Luther was happy to confess – lead to heresy. The practice of silent reading led to individual, or independent thinking. This sense of independent ownership of a text established itself quite quickly. From this new relationship between reader and text stems the long struggle about Authority in the interpretation and translation of sacred writings – still a rather crucial issue for all text-based faiths like Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

  If reading is a separate language by which authors communicate with readers, in what sense can we properly describe it as ‘silent’ at all, particularly if we think of silence as predominantly an absence of language? Should a
person seeking true silence be reading?

  Here there have been a variety of traditions. In mainstream Western Christianity reading – scholarship – has been seen as central to the contemplative, or silent, life. Protestantism maintained this part of Catholic practice even when they abandoned the monasticism, which had originally promoted it. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, laying down his rule in the sixth century, was very clear that reading was a part of the harmonious rhythm of monastic life. He argued that ‘a cloister without books is a fort without armoury’.

  In classical Buddhism, on the other hand, reading has generally been seen as antipathetic to meditation and enlightenment. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have, broadly, taken up an intermediate position; while scholarship and books were preserved through intensely difficult periods within the monasteries of Greece and the Middle East, there is also a strong ascetic revulsion from too much reading. In From the Holy Mountain William Dalrymple relates a contemporary encounter with this approach. He is visiting the monastery of Mar Saba in the West Bank – a notoriously austere community – where Fr Theophanes, the guest master, is shocked to discover that Dalrymple is a writer. He announces that,

  ‘I’ve stopped reading books myself … The Divine Liturgy contains all the writing I need. Once you’ve read the Word of God everything else becomes very dull.’

  ‘They say books are like food,’ pointed out Fr Evodimos. ‘They feed your brain.’

  ‘But Father,’ said Theophanes quietly, ‘monks should try to eat as little as possible.’31

  I read; of course I read. I cannot really imagine not reading. But I gradually became aware that, through silence, I was beginning to read in a new way. I still, too often, use reading as a way to escape from silence, either into a noisy mental dogfight with authors I disagree with, or simply by being sucked into fictional worlds. This often happens in certain sorts of genre novels, particularly (for me) romance. Such writing can leave me entranced rather literally – feeling empty at the end and even slightly nauseated, as lost to myself as those characters who were stolen by the fairies and could not calculate how long they had been away but were left semi-enchanted, deranged and febrile when they returned. Lost to the real. These are not ‘silent’ reading experiences – they are overwhelming, even oppressive. Such novels are too easy, too successful; they don’t ‘nourish’, they drain; they are escapist in the technical sense of the word, and even addictive.

  But during my time in Weardale I discovered a new way of reading. I read more slowly and therefore in a sense I read less, but I read more carefully and attentively. I felt less excited by plot, tension and pace, and more engaged with language and mood and place. I started reading more poetry and enjoying it more. I want to say that I learned to read more silently, but also I read with a sense of the mystery of what reading is and how deeply and silently it has shaped our sense of self.

  Notes – 4 Silence and the Gods

  1 Janet Batsleer, personal communication.

  2 Genesis 1:1–3.

  3 John 1:1.

  4 Genesis 1:1–5.

  5 John 1:1–3.

  6 P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820).

  7 In Greek there are two words that are translated by a single English word – time. Kronos means time in its literal and measured-out sense – as in chronology or chronometer. Kairos means time in the sense of ‘the right or opportune moment’, an undetermined period of time in which something takes place. Naming their ur-god Kronos (rather than Kairos) therefore has a metaphorical depth that is quite hard to express in English.

  8 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

  9 Almost the only personification of silence I have seen is a picture of her in a nineteenth-century mural in the old British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

  10 George Steiner, Real Presence (Faber & Faber, 1989).

  11 OED. Both these possibilities are mentioned, although they are rejected.

  12 Figures comparing the 1991 with the 2001 census. The present population of the Scottish islands is now just under 100,000.

  13 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Geoffrey Bles, 1942) reissued Fontana, 1973, p.114.

  14 Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (Paladin, 1985), p. 154.

  15 Anthony Storr, The School for Genius (André Deutsch, 1988), p. xiii. This excellent book has been reissued in a revised edition with the simpler title Solitude (HarperCollins, 1994).

  16 Revelation 8:1.

  17 Philip Howard in The Times.

  18 John 19:9

  19 Attributed to Bodhidharma (fifth century CE) and first recorded in Ts’u-t’ing shih-yuan (1108).

  20 Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, (Harvester Press, 1979) p. 248.

  21 Ibid., p. 251.

  22 Ibid., p. 255.

  23 Pierre Lacout, 1969 www.quaker.org. uk.

  24 John Russell, personal letter.

  25 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911).

  26 Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver (Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 99.

  27 Saint Augustine, Confessions, vi:3, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961).

  28 The principal scholarly positions are laid out by Balogh in 1927 and Knox in 1968. In A History of Reading (Viking, 1996), Alberto Manguel lays out the case for the lay reader. In 2007 in the Guardian James Fenton challenged this, but I remain persuaded by Manguel.

  29 1Timothy 2:11–14.

  30 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises (Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. 373–5.

  31 William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (HarperCollins, 1997), p. 290.

  * I think the change of preposition is fairer to the modern story: it is not a rerun, whatever some Christian apologists would like to think – it is a brand-new story. It just has some remarkably similar features …

  * Chthonic is a word that deserves wider use. It is derived from the Greek khthōn (earth; pertaining to the Earth; earthy). It is one of several Greek words for ‘earth’; it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land (Gaia) or the land as territory (khora). It is usually restricted to discussions of Greek religion, although Jung uses it in the sense that I am here. Essentially it carries a very similar meaning to ‘primitive’ but without any pejorative associations.

  * ‘Logical’ derives from the Greek logos, which means ‘word’. Logical thinking means thinking amenable to the conscious processes of language.

  * There is an amusing irony here. When I first started meditating seriously I used to sit not on a zafu but on one volume of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Same colour, same height, but full of words!

  Silent Places

  So for the three years that followed my Skye adventure I was busy and engaged pursuing these ideas and experiences of silence. But simultaneously and woven into these various forays into the silence and lack of it out there in the world, something else began to happen to me; a more domestic and intimate kind of silence welled up in my consciousness and started to counterbalance this more intellectual research.

  One of the things I discovered at this point was that there were bits and pieces of silence woven into the fabric of each day and I began to try to keep an eye out for them and move into them as swiftly and quietly as possible. Some of these moments I had to create for myself – unplug the phone, maintain a pattern of meditation, walk where or when there are least likely to be other people, say ‘no’ even to delightful invitations to work or social events – but some were just there, waiting for me as it were.

  Dawn became one of those occasions. I found myself waking earlier and earlier in the mornings. At sunrise, as at sunset, particularly in the summer months, the wind often drops, so that even in very exposed places there can be a period of great calm, especially if the weather is clear. I became attentive to those early mornings, which came so gradually. The stars would fade and the black sky turn indigo. The distance emerged, c
olourless out of the darkness. The sky would change colour: indigo, grey, cream. The view opened out and away mysteriously. The horizon line like a shadow separated the sky from the moor. The sky would go on changing: grey, cream, peach. Although the sun rose to my left in the east, because of the conformation of the hills, the first sight of it was to my right; the western hills would catch fire first, the sunshine suddenly falling on them in a splash of brightness. The sky would still be changing: cream, peach, white, palest blue. On the moor there were very few songbirds, so this extraordinary silence was not broken by that joyful but insistent clamour, but occasionally there would be buzzards, hunting high, floating against the enormous blue. Sometimes the rising sun would catch them from below and the moth-markings of their under-wings would light up suddenly, tawny gold as they rode the bright air. On some lucky mornings there was an extra bonus: overnight the valley would have filled with a thick mist, which did not rise as high as the cottage, or as the moor the far side of the dale, so I could contemplate the glory of this making of the day, as though above and outside the world, looking out over a shimmering lake of mist, barely stirring in the dawn calm.