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.