A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  This pattern – first a long period of discipline and asceticism, followed by a teaching stage and ending with a second gentler withdrawal – is a very common trajectory, not only in Christianity, but in many religious traditions. Buddhist monks may not take a permanent vow of silence because, if they are successful in finding enlightenment, they will have an obligation to teach others their way. Nonetheless, reading about the final phase of Anthony’s life on his Inner Mountain, as it came to be called, while myself sitting on a mountain in the desert, moved me deeply. It opened up a kind of longing, a first awareness that Weatherhill was not going to be enough – that I too was looking for an inner mountain and possibly even a self-emptying that would make that possible.

  As I have indicated, Athanasius was not a sweet or compliant man himself – he was an energetic, argumentative and fairly unscrupulous ecclesial politician with a remarkable lack of humility. Yet even allowing for the fact that he wanted Anthony’s prestige for his anti-Arian campaign, it is impossible to read The Life without realising that he saw in Anthony, whom he had met, great warmth, sanity, serenity as well as courage and self-mastery. Athanasius liked Anthony. I began to agree with Athanasius; I was encountering an extraordinarily attractive individual – wise, self-ironic, generous, integrated, happy; at peace with himself and with his fellow human beings. This was holiness; not simply a consequence or effect of silence, but the fruit of silence. Suddenly the unspeakable harshness of his life, the disciplines of silence, the long struggle to destroy his ego and empty himself of self, made a new emotional sense. I wanted to be more like Anthony.

  Anthony started a major movement. I am not here going to explore the whole history of Christian hermits or silent spirituality; the ground is well covered already.15 But, briefly, during the next three centuries, thousands of Christians moved into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts to become hermits. Two different traditions emerged, although there seems to have been little dispute or competition between them. The hermits were either eremitic (solitary) or cenobitic (community based). Both these approaches to silent prayer spread fairly quickly throughout the Christian world; before Benedict established the formal basis for monastic communities in Italy, there were hermits on Mount Athos from at least the fourth century and John Cassian, who trained in the Egyptian desert, had founded a community in France in the early fifth century. Although communities are likely to leave more enduring footprints, we can be certain that there were also solitary hermits in the Sinai Desert, all over the near Middle East, in Greece, Italy, Spain and, remarkably quickly, even in Ireland. The Islamic conquest of Roman Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the mid seventh century inevitably speeded up this dispersal.

  On the whole the desert hermits did not write much about their theological thinking – indeed, they did not write much about anything, even those of them who were literate. Most of what we know about their lives and their intentions we know at second hand, through extremely popular and widely disseminated collections of their ‘apothegms’, their ‘sayings’. These were often responses to questions that visitors asked them, and were frequently ascribed to the most famous of the hermits, or presented as something ‘an Old Man once said’. In the 1930s Helen Waddell, the poet and scholar, translated and edited various collections of the apothegms as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and they have since become fairly widely known in the English-speaking world.

  Waddell’s collection read very immediately and freshly in Sinai. There is a lapidary quality to many of the sayings – as though they were tiny gifts given to the reader to think about and use, rather than a sustained argument. Of course, not all of them are about silence; this desert spirituality was about various ways of emptying oneself of pride, of ego, of desire for anything except God. But silence was a basic requirement for that self-exploration and self-discipline, the more intense the silence the better:

  At one time Abba Arsenius* came to a certain place and there was a bed of reeds, and the reeds were shaken by the wind. And the old man said to the brethren, ‘What is this rustling?’ and they said, ‘It is the reeds.’ The old man said to them, ‘Verily if a man sits in quiet and hears the voice of a bird, he hath not the same quiet in his heart: how much more shall it be with you, that hear the sound of these reeds?’†

  Some of the other Sayings about silence that particularly touched me in Sinai were:

  Who sits in solitude and is quiet hath escaped from three wars – hearing, speaking, seeing: yet against one thing shall he continually battle: that is, his own heart.

  A brother told Abba Sisoes, ‘I want to control my heart but I can’t.’ The Abba replied, ‘How can we control our hearts when we keep open the door of our tongues?’

  Just as if you leave the door of the public baths open the steam escapes and their virtue is lost, so the virtue of the person who talks a lot escapes through the open door of the voice. This is why silence is a good thing; it is nothing less than the mother of wise thoughts.

  Stay in your cell; control your tongue and your belly and you can be saved.

  Not all quiet men are humble, but all humble men are quiet.

  John Cassian’s writings are slightly different from the Sayings, although some of them are included in Waddell’s anthology. He was writing about the desert hermits in order to help his new monks in France. He is often therefore much more explanatory than the hermits themselves. He gives an account of why the desert was so central to the eremitical life:

  We could have built our cells in the valley of the Nile, and had water at our door … We are not ignorant that in our country there are fair and secret places, where there be fruit trees in plenty and the graciousness of gardens, and the richness of the land would give us our daily bread with very little bodily toil … But we have despised all these; we have joy in this desolation, and to all delight do we prefer the dread vastness of this solitude, nor do we weigh the riches of your glebe against these bitter sands … He who keeps an anxious watch over the purity of the inner man will seek those places which have no rich fertility to seduce his mind to their tilling, nor beguile him from his fixed and motionless abiding in his cell to work that is to be done under the sky, whereby his thoughts are emptied out in the open, and all direction of the mind and that keen vision of its goal are scattered over diverse things. This can be avoided by no man, however anxious and vigilant, save he shuts in soul and body together. Like a mighty fisherman perceiving his food in the depths of his most quiet heart, intent and motionless he catches the swimming shoal of his thoughts; and gazing curiously into the depths as from an upstanding rock, judges what fish a man may wholesomely draw in, and which he may pass by or throw out as bad and poisonous.16

  Yet in all this rigour and silence and mortification and denial the hermits consistently demonstrate a buoyant tender love, for God and for each other. More important even than discipline and penance was care for the weak and the great hermit virtue of hospitality. As many of the apothegms speak of this as speak of the harsh fasts, long vigils and weary hours of pointless work. Waddell writes at length of the ‘heartbreaking courtesy’ of the desert hermits, their profound belief in hospitality and gentleness and generosity.

  The desert hermits, and all those since who have pursued this form of spirituality, have known that it will be hard. They say so frequently, even as they urge patience, courage, the refusal to judge and the virtues of fortitude, endurance and humility.

  Sore is the toil and struggle of the unrighteous when they turn to God, and afterwards is joy ineffable. For even as those who would kindle a fire are beset with smoke and from the pain of the smoke they weep, and so they come at what they desired. Even so it is written, ‘Our God is a consuming fire’: and needs we must kindle the divine fire within us with travail and with tears.

  The cell of the monk is the furnace in Babylon – but there the three young men found the Son of God.17

  This sort of prayer is based on the idea that self-emptying, loss of ego, handing one’s whole sel
f over to God, in prayer and in practice, is the key not just to some future post-death ‘salvation’ but to an essential happiness and well-being now; empty of self they hoped to be filled with God. To this end the desert hermits set about humbling their pride, liberating themselves from their slavery to desires, training themselves by rigorous self-discipline. Their means to this end was a level of asceticism which can seem masochistic or even deranged. But as they understood it, the disciplines and rigours of this life set them free: free from the bondage to habits, to pointless desires and to the weakness of the will that Paul summarised so neatly: ‘That which I would do I do not do and do I even that which I would not do.’ Free to lose ego, lose identity, strip naked before God and be loved.

  And at the heart of this discipline was silence; first external silence, fleeing the pressures of the social; then internal silence, peace of heart and mind, which could only come from the generous giving away of the self backed up by very hard work. And, beyond that, they hoped they might encounter the silence of God. This is what has since been called ‘apophatic prayer’ or the via negativa. Practitioners, knowing that no images or words can begin to measure up to the immense infinity of the divine, stop trying; they banish all images, thoughts and feelings, all words, and seek only to be absorbed in the void, or, in the words of the very lovely fourteenth treatise on apophatic prayer, to enter the ‘cloud of unknowing’.

  In some ways this sort of spirituality has a great deal in common with Buddhism. Nonetheless, I sense that there is a difference of intention between Buddhist and Christian silence. Buddhist silence seeks beyond the personal – seeks to end desire and, indeed, to end all things, to escape from the wheel, from the cycle of return, and to merge completely into the one world spirit – variously expressed as Nirvana, Enlightenment or Buddha-mind. Christian silence seeks an openness to the divine that is personal, in Christ who ‘emptied himself of all but love’. Self-emptying kenotic love is therefore a fulfilment of the true self, which, traditionally, is held to have the capacity to rejoice eternally without losing specific personality. Moreover, Christianity believes that the world is real and redeemable – and that therefore ‘personality’, as part of that whole, is sustainable. Buddhism believes that the world is ‘illusion’, not real – it and all its grief are shadows and delusion from which we can, through undeceiving ourselves, escape. I think these are different freedoms, although the way of arriving there is so similar.

  The influence of the hermits is hard to exaggerate. The desert experience, the disciplines of asceticism and the annihilation of the ego in silence created an aspiration and understanding that has run as a thread throughout the history of Christian spirituality. Religious orders of many different kinds have endeavoured to recreate the conditions of the desert in communities of prayer. And parallel to them, private individuals, more hidden and often effectively invisible, have pursued the same end as hermits or solitaries.

  It is a tradition still alive today. But it is becoming profoundly counter-cultural, especially in the West. It is not really part of a modern mindset at all – this ruthless self-destruction. Sometimes Charles de Foucault’s voice seems to come from a previous universe, even though he lived beyond the first decade of the twentieth century. Some of this is because of his curiously French imperialist and military ethic, which emerges particularly in relation to ‘his natives’, the Tuareg. But more than that it comes from the way he seems to have, as Peter France puts it,

  looked for opportunities for self-abasement, for abnegation. This was not a part of the life of Nazareth and it can easily be seen as a sign of psychological disorder. Many of the saints have displayed this need for abjection, for mortification, which stems from their meditations on the Passion of Christ … Those who choose to imitate him have often pursued the imitation into areas of mortification which helped them to identify with him … [Charles’s] conduct can only be understood in this light.18

  Two other modern exponents of this ruthless silencing spirituality are Thérèse of Lisieux and Simone Weil. It feels strange to me to link these two radically different women in this way. Thérèse Martin was a petit-bourgeois French provincial girl who became a Carmelite nun at the extremely early age of fifteen and died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. She also, rather unexpectedly, wrote one of the best-selling religious books of the twentieth century – L’histoire d’une âme (The Story of a Soul), which was published posthumously in 1899. She was canonised in 1925. Simone Weil was a French-Jewish intellectual, brought up in Paris. She was deeply involved in anarcho-syndicalist politics and Marxist theory. She went to Spain in 1936 to fight with the International Brigade. After 1938 and a profound mystical experience, she turned her attention to religion and especially Catholicism, although she was never baptised.19 In 1942 she came to London to work with the French Resistance until she, too, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died in 1943. The coroner’s verdict was that ‘the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed’.

  On the whole, for most progressive twenty-first-century liberals, Simone Weil is a something of a heroine while ‘The Little Flower’, as Thérèse is somewhat nauseatingly called, represents all that is least attractive in Victorian Catholic piety. But they were pursuing the same ends, and by very similar means. In the destruction of their individuality, the mortification of all desire, a brutal practice of silence and self-punishment, they were both waiting for a desert God without a name to come to them in the darkness of their own emptiness and the silence of their hearts.

  Thérèse writes:

  I had been offering myself to the Child Jesus as His little plaything, telling him not to treat me as the sort of expensive toy that children only look at without daring to touch. I wanted Him to treat me like a little ball, so valueless that it can be thrown on the ground, kicked about and left lying in a corner … I wished only to amuse the Child Jesus and let him do with me exactly as he liked.20

  Weil writes:

  The extinction of all desire – or detachment – or amor fati – these all amount to the same thing: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes. To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. To wait through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage – and with no consolation. To wait as a door slave waits, listening attentively for his master, and to go on waiting even when he knows the master will not come.

  I do not ask you to believe in God, I only ask you not to believe in every thing that is not God.21

  Despite the almost bizarre difference of imagery and language, they are offering remarkably similar insights – slaves and toys are both possessions, have no rights, no independence, no instrumentality, no true personhood. There was in both of these women an almost inhuman rigour, a willed decreation, which determinedly eliminated human love, not just sexual but even real friendship, spiritual consolation, in the sense of mystical experience, and in the end the will to life itself. They both buried themselves in a dark silence and stayed there waiting for God. They have some other interesting things in common too: they are both women and both French; they both wrote extensively and then refused to take responsibility for their own writing – giving it away at the point of death with instructions to their editors to do what they wanted with it; they both rejected normal forms of human relationship; they both gloried in suffering and they both died too young, from causes undeniably associated with their courageous assault on their own egos, using silence as their murder weapon. In a sense they were both throwbacks to a pre-modern sensibility.

  I am very much aware that this sort of spirituality is repugnant to many people. But it is not repugnant to me. It is challenging and somehow thrilling. It is also terrifying. I do not know who I would be if I gave myself away, silenced my own words and sat waiting on God in the darkness.

  Some of this repugnance is, again, the fault of hagiography; the genre loves penitence and suffering. Atonement for sin
s and renunciation of ‘the world’ sit awkwardly, in any narrative, with deep delight or joy – that ineffable jouissance, which I have suggested is part of the common experience of silence and which is likely (at the very least) to be enhanced if an individual interprets the joy as a sign of the presence of God. When Athanasius wrote about Anthony he had a point to make – everything he did was about contesting the Arians’ heretical Christology and he wanted to haul Anthony and Anthony’s immense prestige on to the side of anti-Arian orthodoxy. He needed to give Anthony gravitas and the best way to do that was to stress the painful rigour of the ascetic life. He was not very likely to say, ‘Look, this great warrior of God, the founder of the eremitical life, the hero of Christ, was having a great deal of fun in the desert.’ After Athanasius there was not much space for anyone to talk about happiness, joy, pleasure.* The genre requires hideous penitential practice and grim suffering. Even Bede, apparently in himself so gentle and sweet a personality, feels he has to present Cuthbert in gloomy sacrificial terms, giving up his bishopric and struggling deathwards in penitential solitude, despite the fact that all the evidence suggests that Cuthbert was deeply joyful to get back to his island.

  But – this is the point – despite the whole literature being set up this way, the hermits’ joy keeps breaking through. When I first read Athanasius’s description of Anthony finding his final hermitage in the Inner Mountain, I wept. I wept because Anthony’s delight was so patently revealed. I think perhaps I wept with longing for myself as well, but what it seemed to be (and I believe was) was a kind of moved sharing in the simple sweetness of his delight in his homecoming.