Silence: a Christian History

This book by Diarmaid MacCulloch is precisely what it says on the tin - a history of Christianity focused on silence, about which there is far more to say than you would likely expect. I certainly found myself astounded at the breadth of things he was able to talk about and still felt that there were many places in which he was being deliberately brief as there was yet more to say left on the cutting-room floor.

   The text is split into four parts. Firstly, we get an overview of the pre-Christian influences on its attitude to silence, chiefly from Israel's Tanakh but also considering the impact of Platonic philosophy; followed by what we can glean from the New Testament (interestingly Jesus variably embraces and ends silence) about silence in the emergent Church's earliest years. Next, we span the first millennium of Christian history and how silence played different roles from the desert hermit to the marginalised gnostics to the nascent centralised episcopacy - these chapters go into considerable detail about silence as a practice among monks, and illuminated me as to the nuances between meditation and contemplation. Thirdly we look at three great upheavals across the second millennium of Church history - iconoclasm in Orthodoxy, the Gregorian reforms of Catholicism, and the Protestant Reformation* - and how these affected attitudes towards and practice of silence. The final section of the book attempts to reach behind the noise of Christian history - conceptualising silence as lacunae, things ignored, not talked about, rather than as a literal [in]audible phenomenon - here we take a close look at: Nicodemism (i.e. what happens when someone conceals their true character or beliefs to avoid social consequences; alongside historical examples there is a much more contemporary discussion of gay Anglo-Catholics); issues that the Church seems to be trying to forget out of historical shame (slavery, clerical child abuse, and the centuries of anti-Semitism which enabled the Holocaust are the main focuses); and the status of silence in present and future Christianities (music and ecumenism get special attention in this section, as does the complicated question of whistle-blowing - can we justifiably stay silent when truth demands we speak?).

   I'm really glad I read this book - it has given me a much richer understanding of the global historical precedents that surround the practices of worship to which, as a Quaker, I subscribe. MacCulloch is evidently a scholar of great thoroughness in diverse learning and erudite insight - though I will admit that this is the first non-fiction book with endnotes for a while for which I didn't read the endnotes. Nothing personal, Diarmaid, I just thought I was getting enough mental nourishment from your primary pages. Niche it may be as a topic, but if somehow you also find yourself curious about Christianity's historical relationship with silence, this is almost certainly THE book to go to.

* It is in this chapter that we get the chief discussion of Quakers, which was the whole reason I bought this book to begin with - I do think MacCulloch could and should have gone into greater depth when considering a denomination for whom silence is part and parcel of their worship style, but then look at how much other ground he's had to cover. And besides, it's hardly as if there's a dearth of Quaker literature to engage with for that kind of insight.

the Courage to Be

This book by Paul Tillich is what I wanted Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety to be - a philosophically coherent and spiritually compelling discussion of anxiety, fear, and existential dread, as these are psychologically dissolved in the ontological freedom of faith which gives us "the courage to be".

   Tillich is always an interesting theologian to read in large part because he starts off seeming to not be doing theology at all. The first five chapters of this book are all grounded in philosophy and psychology, and only in the final chapter does he tie everything together into points immediately apparently relevant to the religious life of a believer. The first chapter is a rough introduction to the concept of courage in relation to being, walking briskly through Plato to Aquinas, the Stoics, Spinoza and Nietzsche; the second constructs a conceptual framework for anxiety through the interrelation of being and non-being (alongside this ontology he also sketches the three main types of anxiety natural to humankind - that is death, meaninglessness, and condemnation); and the third briefly deals with pathological anxiety and the circumstances that cause it to arise - also making a rough delineation between what needs treating pastorally and what medically. Chapters four and five then take the plunge into applying these foundations to two different manifestations of the courage to be: firstly the courage to be as a part of a larger whole, having a confident identity as a member of a collective (with a deeper inspection of conformist tendencies in Western democratic societies); then the courage to be oneself as the unique individual one is - unsurprisingly reflected to a great degree in the cultural and intellectual developments of existentialism. The final chapter then offers a third model of the courage to be, one which absorbs and transcends the previous two - this is a model only attainable by faith in the grace of God: when humankind encounters the divine and knows it is accepted by it, we are presented with a heavenly acceptance of who we are, and by accepting this acceptance we can start to grow in a confidence of our individual and collective identities, which as they develop give us an ever deeper penetration into the relationship with God that makes such courage to be possible.

   This was a very insightful read. Tillich's breadth of applicable understanding in both philosophy and psychology make for some very unexpected avenues of thought that nevertheless find their fruition in the conclusions. I'd highly recommend this book to readers of any faith who want to dive deeper into the means of avoiding despair at the human condition.

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes

This book, composed by Rob Wilkins based on autobiographical notes made by the subject, Terry Pratchett, is a brilliant biography. I won't say too much about his life or character as portrayed herein as in an early (post-wise) recommendation I think everyone should read this book - it's a heartfelt and complicated and beautiful image of the man who probably has done the most anyone has done for fantasy fiction since Tolkien, and I do not say that lightly.

    Wilkins's prose is passable enough but it's the pictures carried therein that really move this book to something brilliant - one really gets to know Pratchett in an intimate sense, from his childhood as an under-achiever to his unwanted death to dementia.* Some of the earlier chapters are genuinely idyllic - his lifestyle throughout the 1970's read to me like some kind of fantasy it was so much so. One also gets a thorough picture of the blue-collar attitude he took to the business of writing novels - perhaps most perfectly displayed in the discussion of when Pratchett took six months of sabbatical to rest his mind, and then following this when Wilkins (as was at the time his personal assistant) asked him what he did with his time off, Terry grumpily replied "I wrote two books." Further from this though is an image of a man with an insatiable aptitude for practical learning - even though he'd never done particularly well at school, Terry would take an interest in something and learn the skills to master it. From his room full of old hardware that he never dared throw away in case it might still prove useful to the brilliant story of how when he recieved a knighthood he bought a small knob of metal from a meteor, found a local blacksmith and learned himself how to smith metal, personally mined a bunch of iron, forged a sword using this iron and the meteor-metal he'd obtained, and got knighted using exactly that sword.** Basically the man was a living legend, full of so much humour and wisdom that I sincerely believe the Discworld series will survive for centuries to come.

    As already said, I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a lovely read. But if you are already a fan of Pratchett's work, or at all interested in the kind of character who could produce such diverse and prolific literature - this is a must-do.

* I will say that this book, especially in the latter chapters dealing with Pratchett's struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's, is a hardcore manifesto for the right to self-dying. The tragedy of everything that you are, that you know yourself to be, degrading as your body decays, is an abhorrence, and though before reading this I had qualms about it, since, I am fully on Terry's side and think that one should be able to of sound mind & heart choose the time & method of their exit from this world should they, their family, and their medical authorities foresee nothing left for them but loss and pain. After all, if there's one thing Terry taught us overall, it's that Death is a friendly dude just doing his job.

** Tangential I know, but as a D&D dungeon master I've always had it in my head that were I to plan a campaign set in a magical post-apocalyptic England, then 'Terry Pratchett's Meteor Sword' would have to be a legendary item. I haven't worked out its stats yet.