Despite the privations, the discipline and the sheer hard work, hermits like their lifestyle. They find joy there.
Charles de Foucault wrote in a private letter:
I find this desert life profoundly, deeply sweet. It is so pleasant and so healthy to set oneself down in solitude, face to face with the eternal things … I find it hard to leave this silence and this solitude and to travel.22
(Being Charles de Foucault, he does his ‘hagiographic work’ on himself by immediately turning to a self-denying piety and continuing, ‘But the will of the Beloved, whatever it may be, must not only be preferred but adored, cherished and blessed.’)
Thomas Merton’s pure pleasure, after waiting so long, at being in his little hut in the woods, alone in silence, has something of the same quality about it:
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech … the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges … As long as it talks I am going to listen. But I am also going to sleep, because here in this wilderness I have learned to sleep again.23
Everything the Fathers of the Church say about the solitary life is absolutely right. The temptations and the joys, above all the tears and the ineffable peace and happiness. The happiness that is so pure because it is simply not of one’s own making but sheer mercy and gift.24
Dalrymple gives a lovely example of this in From the Holy Mountain. He was staying with an Egyptian hermit:
I asked him about his motives for becoming a monk and why he had left the comforts of Alexandria for the harsh climate of the desert.
‘Many people think we come to the desert to punish ourselves, because it is hot and dry and difficult to live in,’ said Father Dioscuros. ‘But it’s not true. We come because we love it here.’
‘What is there to love about the desert?’
‘We love the peace, the silence… . You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.’ He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside: ‘But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself.’25
It is about joy – and love and happiness and beauty. The Chinese poet Jia Dao wrote, ‘On Looking in Vain for the Hermit’ in which the poet goes to massive efforts to track down a hermit but never finds him.
I questioned the boy under the pine trees.
My master went to gather herbs.
He is still somewhere on the mountain side,
So deep in the clouds I do not know where.26
The last night I was in Sinai I kept an all-night vigil, just sitting and watching and listening to the silence. I watched the moon cross the sky casting sharp shadows, so clear that I could see the shadow of wisps of my own hair that had escaped from my plait, and changing the shapes of everything. It seemed to tow an indigo sky with very bright stars in its wake. Later the moon turned yellow like an egg, and slipped over the horizon; as the glow of it faded I watched half an hour of dancing stars, with Venus hanging huge in the east, and then the grey light moving towards sunrise and a spectacular performance of colour as the rising sun moved in a visible sharp line down the rock faces and they changed colour from grey to pink, to red and then to gold.
Through the whole night I listened – listened to nothing.
The silence was very pure. Down in the camp, all the sounds were precise breaks in the silence, very distinct, separate from each other. There was no ambient sound, no background. Just noises laid on to the silence – like pebbles on a still pond. Or rather not like that, because there were no outspreading ripples, just a single sound ‘chomp’ (camel); ‘rustle’ (sleeping bag) or my cigarette being inhaled. Round like a stone – and then the silence returned unbroken, each individual noise carrying very clearly, but without any ‘residue’. The sounds seemed to alight quite gently on the silence – and the silence gobbled them up, or swallowed them down.
It was absolutely still, absolutely silent. The desert night was not very dark and the sky was deep – the stars did actually ‘twinkle’, and I had a sense of their distance – some are nearer, seem nearer, as well as larger or brighter. The sky was not a black ceiling, but an infinite recession. In the night the starlit silence, the time, the distance – the infinite. Yet underneath my hand when I reached out from the sleeping bag, the sand was made of tiny grains, very cool and clean, fine-textured, soft against my fingers. It was probably the most profound silence I had ever engaged with. It was this intensity of silence that I had come to listen to; this was the silence that the desert hermits sought here in this desert, while they engaged in their enormous courageous battle against ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ and their own noisy selves.
Through that desert night I conceived a vast, lovely and awestruck sense of God. God, in this desert context, does not say be safe, be cosy, here’s a woolly blanket, a tidy cocoon, a place of refuge. God says, ‘If your eye offends you pluck it out; if your hand offends you cut it off.’ Bend and break the will, discipline and scourge the flesh, face blindly the unknown, the enormous, the terrifying. Love your life and you’ll lose it. Risk it and maybe, just, you’ll totter into heaven – the place of both annihilation and total knowledge; the place of beauty and joy. The risk is absolute, you’ll get nothing else out of it, not pleasure, not health, not affection, not comfort and certainly not safety. Just the beauty of God.
Later in the night I began to hear John Cage’s ‘sound of silence’ in a new way. It was not my nervous system or my circulation; it was not the last murmurs of almost silenced chatter, nor the shifty movements of the tectonic plates. I thought I heard the singing of the spheres. The classical and early Christian world believed that the heavenly bodies sang as they spun through their orbits; each had its own unique and perfect note that reverberated in perfect harmony with the others. With a geocentric universe there were eight such spheres – the sun, the moon and the six visible planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto cannot be seen with the naked eye, so they were not known until there were telescopes); this created the perfect eight-note scale. The singing was silent and could only be sensed or imagined at moments of heightened and joyful awareness. The sound of silence, in that desert night, was the song of jouissance, of bliss.
In the desert I realised that there is something hideous, especially to a contemporary Western sensibility, about a systematic and determined attempt to break down, or thin out the boundaries of the self and become open to, participate in, the undefined, illimitable freedom of the divine. It is also very hard work. One of the Zen monks at Throstlehole remarked to me once, ‘It is strange, everyone says they want to meet a saint, but no one actually wants to be one. It’s too tiring even to think of it.’ The experience of both East and West is that silence is the ground for this work.
Whether or not silence is also the goal of the task is a slightly different question.
In the desert I learned that silence is more for me than a context for prayer, or a way of creating more time (though those are important). It is, in itself, a form of freedom; it generates freedom, free choices, inner clarity, strength. A freedom from one’s self and a freedom to be oneself.
I started to think that perhaps silence is God. Perhaps God is silence – the shining, spinning ring ‘of pure and endless light’. Perhaps God speaking is a ‘verb’, an act, but God in perfect self-communication, in love within the Trinity, is silent and therefore is silence. God is silence, a silence that is positive, alive, actual and of its ‘nature’ unbreakable. Perhaps the verb ‘God’ – speaking, creating – is one more reflex of the infinite generosity, the self-giving abandonment, the kenotic love of God. Perhaps the incarnation of the Word is but a secondary expression of that ‘for our hardness of heart’. Far from ‘all silence is waiting to be broken’ perhaps all speech is crying out ‘like a woman in travail’ to be reabsorbed into silence, into death, into the liminal space that opens out into the presence of the everlasting s
ilence.
Did I dare to find out; did I dare to give the absolute a whirl?
Notes – 6 Desert Hermits
1 Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bower, 14–15 February 1913, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern (Schocken Books, 1973).
2 Charles de Foucault, letter to Father Jerome, OCSO, 1901, quoted in Ann Fremantle, Desert Calling (1950), pp. 162–3.
3 Gertrude Bell, quoted in Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), pp. 54 and 108.
4 Wind, Sand and Stars publicity brochure. (The company’s name is derived from a book of the same title by Antoine Saint-Exupéry, an extraordinarily lyrical memoir of the desert.)
5 Cage, Silence: Lectures, p. 8.
6 Martin Buckley, Grains of Sand (Vintage, 2001), p. 49.
7 My own free reworking of 1 Samuel 1:1–20.
8 Personal communication.
9 Amos 8:11–12.
10 Indeed, someone has done so. Rudolf Bell’s Holy Anorexia (1985) is a tediously reductionist attempt to present a wide range of medieval women saints as case studies in anorexia. To achieve his purpose he has to strip them of all cultural context and all self-awareness. If he is right, the only reasonable conclusion is that the medieval Church was better at treating anorexia than modern medical science is.
11 Even in the early nineteenth century Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey (1818), has Eleanor Tilby (a model of rational good sense and refined taste) support the view that it is perfectly proper for historians to invent speeches for historical characters.
12 Waddell, Desert Fathers, pp. 289ff.
13 Nicolson, Sea Room, p. 156.
14 Athanasius, Life of Antony, in Early Christian Lives, trans. Carolinne White (Penguin, 1998), p. 39.
15 See, for example: Derwas James Chitty, The Desert a City (Blackwell, 1966); Peter France, Hermits (St Martin’s Press, 1996); Andrew Louth, The Wilderness of God (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1991).
16 John Cassian, ‘On Mortification’, in Waddell, Desert Fathers, pp. 232–4.
17 Waddell, Desert Fathers.
18 France, Hermits, p. 139.
19 There is some disagreement about this. Some argue that she sought and received baptism in the hospital shortly before her death; some that she was baptised without her explicit consent after she lost consciousness. Here I am following Simone de Petrement, her friend and biographer, who writes persuasively against any regular form of baptism; La vie de Simone Weil in (Fayard, 1973).
20 Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, trans. M. Deig (Source Books, 1973).
21 Simon Weil, Waiting for God (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 116.
22 De Foucault, letter to Marie de Bondy, 15.7.1906, quoted in Philip Hillyer, Charles de Foucault (Minnesota, 1990), p. 129.
23 Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York, 1964), quoted in M. Furlong, Merton, a Biography (London, 1980), p. 283.
24 Merton, Journal, 16.12.1965.
25 Dalrymple, Holy Mountain, p. 410.
26 Jia Dao (779–843), James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight Errant (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
* As a rather delightful footnote, in 2002 British songwriter Mike Batt released an album containing a track called ‘A one minute silence’, credited to himself and John Cage. The estate of Cage launched a lawsuit against Batt, claiming it infringed the copyright of the earlier Cage work. Sadly the case was settled out of court for a large undisclosed sum, but it raises the interesting question of what a copyright in silence might conceivably be.
* It is necessary, of course, that her silence be broken in this respect – since if she has never received any of the sacraments she can’t technically be a saint. This is a good example of the sort of pressures that hagiography is working under. As well as extreme penance you also want scriptural knowledge, a sacramental life and some miracles – note the lion.
* Abba is an Aramaic word for ‘Father’ and was what Jesus called God. It became an honorific title for hermits, especially those who acted as teachers to neophytes. From here it evolved into its modern English form, ‘Abbot’ (the head of a monastery) and the French Abbé, and is the etymological reason why collectively the hermits are known as the ‘Desert Fathers’. I tend to avoid this expression and use ‘desert hermits’ when possible because ‘Father’ can obliterate the fact that there were women desert hermits too.
†It is curious that when Henry Thoreau described his ambition to live in silence, he wrote in his Journal in 1841, ‘I want to go soon and live away by the pond where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.’ His silence was very different from Arsenius’s.
* There is a nice little example of the pressure towards suffering in hagiographical literature in The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, edited by Donald Attwater. Although this is not really a ‘pious work’ it falls into a number of genre-coded traps. Describing Bernadette of Lourdes, Attwater comments that she was a ‘pious BUT cheerful’ child. Even in his scholarly mind there is a contradiction between happiness and holiness.
The Bliss of Solitude
Then, very soon, and wilfully, I turned my attention to what felt like the opposite sort of silence; Kafka’s idea that ‘there can never be enough silence around one when one writes’. My whole idea of what it is to be a writer was profoundly formed within a post-romantic model of the creative artist. I wanted to undertake an adventure in romantic silence that I could balance against my desert experience and try to learn more precisely how they were both the same and different and what I might do about that.
What I should probably have done was go to the Swiss Alps. The Alps were, for the leading romantics, the apotheosis of the sublime – beautiful not in the orderly, balanced and serene style of classicism, but in a new aesthetic – which meant that a kind of wildness, horror or terror should pervade a view and intensify the emotions. In the previous classical period the Alps had appeared so chaotic and uncivilised that the man of sensibility on his way to Italy for the Grand Tour was supposed to pull down the blinds of his carriage lest he be driven mad by such grotesque excess; some people apparently even had landscapes with tidy Greek temples and other classical scenes painted on the inside of the carriage blinds to protect them against the vast disorder outside. This doubtless made them all the more attractive to the would-be rebel poets of the early Romantic Movement. In Britain, at least, there was nothing comparable, so the high mountains of the Alps had an additional exotic ambience, which was attractive. Shelley in ‘Mont Blanc’ – his great poem of 1817 – captured and refined a cultural moment:
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears – still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it ice and rock …
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights …
Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
This elevated understanding of mountains, and particularly the Alps, led moreover to the original solitary adventurers. Walking and climbing alone, in marked contrast to team sports and their rules and regulations, became activities appropriate to a man of genius. Coleridge led the way by semi-addicting himself to vertigo, running preposterous risks in high places in order to enjoy the sensation of terror.
There were, however, some practical reasons why I did not go to the Alps. The most important one was about solitude. It was not physically p
ossible (for me) to go to the desert alone, but I had found going in company difficult. I wanted to explore the romantic ‘bliss of solitude’. I did not have the knowledge or the physical skills to climb high alone and I did not want to do it with anyone else. Moreover, I had learned that rock climbing scared me, and not in any ‘sublime’ way.
I also needed to distinguish this investigation from the long silence in Skye. This was to be a very different sort of journey. Then I had wanted to sit in silence and see what happened. Now I wanted to replicate the particular sort of silence that romanticism has made central to our culture and see how that related to my own ideas about my writing and my growing sense that this was a profoundly different silence from the silence of the desert. I decided that what I should do was go for a very long walk, the sort of walk that Dorothy Wordsworth describes so often in her Journal. Day-long hikes in wild, high hill country, followed by quiet evenings at home seems to have been the Wordsworths’ circle’s recipe for productive poetic work.
A Book of Silence Page 26