A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  Once upon a time there was a man from the hill country of Ephraim, called Elkanah. He had two wives – Peninah and Hannah, who had no children. Each year the whole family went up to Shiloh, where Eli was priest, to worship the Lord of Hosts and make the ritual sacrifices. Year after year, Peninah used the occasion to taunt, provoke and irritate Hannah about her infertility. Hannah was so upset that she wept and refused to eat, even though Elkanah would treat her tenderly and ask, ‘Hannah why are you weeping? Why is your heart so sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?’ But Hannah was not comforted and left the family group, deeply distressed, and went off on her own into the temple to pray. As she prayed Eli watched her. Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved and her voice was not heard; therefore Eli took her to be a drunkard. Not surprisingly Eli reprimanded her, but she replied, ‘I am a woman sore troubled. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.’ Eli, clearly moved, told her, ‘Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your petition.’ Then Hannah left the Temple and was sad no longer. The following year she gave birth to a son, whom she called Samuel.7

  This is a very ancient story – probably originally eleventh century BCE, but it is worth noting that it continued to be curious enough for the later editor, who put the Books of Samuel into their present form after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, to keep it in – obviously silent prayer did not take off with quite the speed one might now expect.

  It is a story set in a culture that values the word and the community so highly that silence has very little positive role in classical Judaism. When I talked to Christopher Rowland, Professor of Biblical Studies at Oxford University, about silence in the Hebrew Scriptures, he felt that for that community silence was a negative thing, a lack or absence, indeed, and so of little or no cultural interest.8 In this culture to be alive is to be speaking – the dead in Sheol are silent. The faithful speak to God and God speaks to them directly, or through messengers (‘angels’) and through the prophets. It is not that Judaism lacks mystical or visionary insight, or denigrates intense personal union with God; it is more that the accepted form and expression of this inner authority was prophecy and poetry, rather than silent contemplation.

  One might expect a society that formed its spirituality in the silent desert, and which forbids itself visual representations, to need and value language especially highly. In such a context words take on an additional weight and significance, and silence poses a particular danger. Perhaps it is not surprising that in the Hebrew Scriptures ‘silence’ signifies more than simply our modern quietness and comes to mean total ruin or destruction, subjection, death and the grave. The direct Word of God, and the authorised record of it in the law and in history, is essential to the life of the community. In such a culture the great terror is that God will fall silent:

  ‘Behold the days are coming,’ says the Lord God, ‘when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.’9

  Yet at the heart of Judaism is the Great Silence. The name of God is not spoken. Even God does not break this silence: when asked for a name, God only said, ‘I am who I am.’ Once a year, in awe and solemnity, the High Priest in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem spoke the name of God. Even that has been silenced: the name was written down in consonants alone, but obviously a word cannot be pronounced unless its vowels are also known. After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE there was no place in which the name could be spoken and – somehow – the way to speak it got lost, silenced in a new way.

  This is one silence that was not broken. It is a taboo so deep that it was not even inscribed in the law. But there is an ancient tale about speaking the name of God. When God first created the world, he created human beings ‘in his own image; male and female he created them’ (Genesis 1:27). Later, after many things and for many reasons, the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ so He took one of Adam’s ribs and made Eve from it, to be ‘bone of Adam’s bone and flesh of his flesh’ (Genesis 2:18–23). There is a myth, however, to fill the obvious gap. The first woman, the one made directly in the image of God and equal of Adam in every way, was called Lilith. She refused to be subservient to him – some versions tell that she refused to lie underneath him when they had sex, while he felt his status required the missionary position – and the couple fought. Outraged, she named the unnameable name and it gave her power. She flew out of Eden and down to the Red Sea coast where (untouched by the Fall and therefore immortal) she lives for ever, sustained on the flesh of her own children, which she conceives alone, giving birth every morning and consuming them before nightfall. She is the screech owl and newborn babies must be protected from her rapacity and enmity with amulets and charms lest, not satisfied with her own offspring, she tries to consume and destroy yours. Power and peril, male and female seem well balanced in this story. But the central silence is protected by threats as well as by promises.

  This unnamed God is known not through silence but in the ongoing story of the community and through his own direct spoken word. When asked for his name, God first said, ‘I am who I am,’ but then added, ‘The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob … this is my name for ever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations’ (Exodus 3:14, 15).

  Very early Christianity did not break with this tradition. Although the Gospels record Jesus’s forty-day fast, presumably in silence, and his temptations in the desert, and although they describe him on occasion going off to the hills to pray alone, when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he did not instruct them in meditation techniques nor urge interiority and silence; instead, he immediately gave them a formalised set of words, clearly designed to be said out loud and communally. (The Lord’s Prayer is in the first person plural: ‘our’, ‘us’ and ‘we’.) Nor in his epistles, which instruct the new Churches around the Mediterranean in great detail about the life in Christ, does Paul seem give any attention at all to what we would now call ‘spirituality’, the silent and interior practice of personal prayer. The attitude that insists that the practice of Christianity is centrally the disciplined worship of the community and works of charity and justice has continued ever since. ‘And whose feet will you wash?’ asked Basil the Great testily as yet another member of his community headed off into the desert to become a hermit. It was a major plank of the Reformation, but also of the Counter-Reformation, and is still embedded in a great deal of contemporary theology.

  So it is not entirely clear why, from the middle of the third century, Christians began to go into the desert, initially around Egypt and east of Jerusalem, and develop an intense spirituality based on rigorous asceticism and particularly on silence. Nonetheless, for the next several centuries they did so in surprising numbers. The extremity of the desert and eremitical life is as far as one can possibly go – so they went.

  The simplest explanation is that the end of active persecution by the Roman state provided a challenge to a Church that had seen martyrdom as the noblest expression of faith, not just because dying for a cause is always effective, but also because being martyred was imitating the life of Jesus. The extremes of the ascetic life were a response: create something as difficult and disagreeable as dying and you too can be as heroic as the martyrs were. While this is generally viable, it does not explain why silence became such a central form of asceticism. There are lots of other more spectacular disciplines, as the early Church set out to demonstrate. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has suggested that early Christian spirituality was highly experimental: sit on a pillar, nest in a tree, live in a desert, dance, study, fast, don’t speak and so on – and see what that does for your interior life and your relationship with God. In the light of the actual physical and psychological effects of silence i
t seems reasonable to suppose that silence emerged as an effective instrument for inducing profound experiences, and for lowering the barriers between the self and the Other – the resurrected Christ.

  Peter Brown, in The Body and Society, has suggested that some of the impetus towards Christian chastity and virginity (now interpreted mainly as body hatred and dualism) in fact arose partly from a radical refusal to participate in or support the Roman Empire. For women virginity meant childlessness and refusing to have babies was a clear way of expressing contempt for the system, especially as the Empire had a worrying population shortfall. If this is correct, it might be worth remembering that public speaking (rhetoric) was another key citizens’ duty and the central focus of a Roman education: silence, like virginity, was a critical stance.

  In any event, in a surprisingly short time this new faith threw off the aura of faint suspicion in which silence had been wrapped and adopted it with enthusiasm. It is hard now to understand what a profound and radical shift this idea of silent and interior prayer was.

  Each day, I took up into the rocks with me Helen Waddell’s translation of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, a collection of the things that hermits said about the eremitical life, which were collected by various contemporaries and became immensely influential in the Church for many centuries; and The Life of Antony, by Athanasius, a pugnacious bishop and politician who nonetheless wrote an immensely moving account of Anthony’s life. I tried to sit still and listen to these accounts in the silence of the desert itself, and think about their experiences and how they might relate to my own.

  It is tricky to do this honestly, because these writers had such a very different mindset from mine. Two particular differences get in the way of a straightforward comparison between a modern silence seeker and Anthony. The first is that his culture on the whole had very few problems with asceticism and physical penance. The kind of ascetic practices we might see as self-hatred or even masochism, were seen – following Paul in his epistles – not so much as penitential but as training, as for an athlete or soldier; and training for a prize well worth winning. We now believe that fasting and sleep deprivation, for example, produce some very particular physiological results that have little or nothing to do with holiness as we understand it. We would probably diagnose a substantial number of the famous and highly regarded saints of this tradition as suffering from ‘eating disorders’.10

  The second difference is the very straightforward belief in devils – or demons or Satan himself. This went way beyond a belief in the ‘forces of evil’ as an abstraction and pre-dates the Augustinian idea that people have a predisposition to sin and a split, divided will. This belief meant that effects like auditory hallucinations, boundary confusions and a consciousness of risk have a totally different meaning and value. Of course they were all at risk – there is nothing that stirs up devils so much as watching a hermit trying to control his or her passions. The demons were continually there, malignant, assiduous and cunning.

  Even when I was able to recognise these differences, there remained a sense in which the sources we have for the hermits of the desert are, in modern terms, ideologically contaminated. Athanasius’s beautiful and moving ‘biography’ of Anthony, for example, was written in part for political reasons. Athanasius was well aware of Anthony’s immense popular prestige. It was crucial to him to demonstrate that Anthony was a rigorous anti-Arian in order to mobilise popular enthusiasm for his own lifelong struggle against this widely received Christological heresy. However, it is well-nigh impossible to work out anyone’s academic theology if he lives in complete silence and never says anything. Athanasius manages, rather cleverly, to present Anthony as silent all the time except when he was sounding off about orthodoxy. For this cause he was apparently always willing to break his silence, even to leave the desert and come to Alexandria and speak out. Of course this may be exactly and precisely true, but knowing Athanasius (contra mundum they nicknamed him: ‘against the world’, ‘against everyone’), one can’t help having some doubts.

  Modern biography – trying to discern and then explain the true inner life or nature of a famous person – did not develop as a literary form until the Enlightenment.11 Augustine’s attempts to write autobiography in the modern sense in The Confessions were extremely ill-received by his contemporaries. Athanasius, like other commentators on the early saints, was not attempting biography in the sense we would understand, but hagiography (writings about the lives of holy individuals), a separate genre with its own codes. One of the ‘rules’ of hagiography, at least until the nineteenth century, was that the saints should be exceptional and extreme in whatever way of life they are engaged with. Their sins prior to repentance are always the worst the writer can think of; their penances eccentrically abject; their virtues miraculous in their intensity. Christian hagiography dotes on penitents (ideally young beautiful females whose sins have been sexual); Buddhist ‘hagiography’ seems to prefer rich, nobly born young men. Practically no one in this literature goes off to be a hermit because they think they might like it. They are driven – at best by a desire to atone for hideous sins, but failing that by a fierce and painful renunciation of a sinful world.

  The life of St Mary of Egypt (seventh century, from an oral tradition) provides an early model for this sort of narrative. Zozimos (fifth century CE), himself a famous ascetic, used to spend Lent in the desert; there by chance he met a woman, naked but wrapped in her own hair. She told him that at twelve she became a prostitute, not for money but for ‘unbridled lust’. (I find this detail intriguing. A modern morality would tend to treat taking money for sex as more sinful than indulging genuine sexual desire. I am not sure when this shift in consciousness took place.) At twenty-nine she took a pleasure cruise to Jerusalem, which she paid for by selling sex to the sailors. However, once there she was miraculously unable to enter the church. An icon of Our Lady taught her that this was because of her sins – so she instantly repented and rushed out into the desert, where she had lived for the last forty-seven years on ‘what this wild and uncultivated solitude afforded’, before Zozimos stumbled upon her. She had lived in complete silence for all this period and had undergone agonising temptations and equally agonising mortifications, and now her ‘mind was restored to perfect calm’. She had been taught the Scriptures directly by God, as she could not read. She asked Zozimos to bring her the sacrament,* which he did once, but when he came back again the following year he found her dead and a handy lion helped him bury her. This is an exemplary hagiographic account and it reveals some of the problems in discussing the tradition of silence.12

  Nonetheless, with all these caveats in place, I wanted to brood on the contemporary accounts of the hermits in the hope of understanding this desert spirituality better. I chose The Life of Antony because Anthony is seen as the founder of the monastic tradition and the first of the Desert Fathers. He was not the first individual to experiment with silence as an aid to spiritual growth – we know that he himself sought instruction from some already practising hermits – but partly, indeed, because of Athanasius’s hagiography, his influence and importance, both in his own day and in the development of Christian monastic life ever since, cannot be underestimated.

  Anthony was born in Egypt and, while still quite young, sold all his possessions and started to live as a hermit. Subsequently he barricaded himself into a ruined fort in the desert west of the Nile for twenty years in total solitude. (His friends posted him food through a small aperture.)

  Adam Nicolson, drawing on his own experiences in the Shiants, comments on the early stages of Anthony’s spiritual development:

  All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisers, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding … A hermit will force himself to confront that crowd of critics. The followers of the great St Anthony, the third-century founder of Christ
ian monasticism, who immured himself for twenty years in the ruins of a Roman fort in the Egyptian desert, could hear him groaning and weeping as the demons tested him one by one.13

  After twenty years, however, his friends and admirers broke their way into Anthony’s fortress and forcibly ended that phase of his silence. They were surprised to find that he was neither emaciated nor mad, but fit, well and serene; ‘his mind was calm and he maintained a well-balanced attitude in all situations’, although he manifested ‘an aura of holiness’.

  He then moved to the eastern desert and spent the next period of his life training and supporting other would-be hermits, teaching, healing and developing his ideas on silence and self-discipline. He was illiterate so he has left us no first-person accounts or theology, but he was widely quoted and his thoughts were recorded by a number of his disciples and visitors. However, ‘the arrival of so many people was a nuisance to him for they deprived him of the silence he desired’, so he persuaded some travelling merchants to take him with them deeper into the desert.

  After a journey lasting three days and nights they came to a very high mountain at the foot of which flowed a spring of sweet water; on a small strip of flat land encircling the mountain there grew a few untended palm trees. Anthony fell in love with this spot. He accepted some bread from his fellow travellers and he remained alone on the mountain. He lived there as though he recognised that place as his own home.14

  Although he made an occasional trip back to his settlements, and received visits and supplies from his brother monks, ‘he was pleased to be able to live in the desert by the work of his own hands, without troubling anyone else’. And he died there aged 105.