A Spirituality of Silence in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Today
A spirituality of silence before an undefinable God developed in earliest Christianity and reemerged in the Middle Ages; its reestablishment is most timely today
By the time of the influential theologian Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (354–430), there had arisen a movement toward Christianity not as a set of correct teachings and beliefs (orthodoxy), or of feelings and their expressions (orthopathy), but as a proper and disciplined practice, a challenging way of life (orthopraxis), rooted in a spirituality of silence. This movement would have its most significant initial effect in the churches of the Eastern Empire, but its influence would later be manifest in the Western church, as well.
As early as the third century, there were Christians who sought to put the teachings of Jesus into practice by relinquishing what they owned, going to live alone in caves in the desert, seeking inner stillness and silence (ἡσυχία or hesychía) through meditative prayer techniques, developing lovingkindness and hospitality, chanting and meditating on scripture, and practicing some form of mendicancy, production, or craft to support themselves. They were known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
Scriptural underpinning for their way of life can be found in the lives of Elijah and John the Baptist, in Jesus’ praying alone in seclusion, in Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, in the early apostles’ dedication of themselves to a life of prayer, and in teachings from the epistles concerning prayer. Some of these desert dwellers had pioneered an apophatic, wordless spirituality that brought them into a state of hesychía. Apophatic theology holds that since God cannot be described, the descriptive terms we use fall short, and we are left with everything God is not.
For more on the Desert Fathers and Mothers, see my post,
Christianity Was a Religion of Silent Meditation from the Start
Though Augustine certainly understood apophatic theology (see my post, Christianity: The Spiritual Realm Is Inside Your Consciousness), a spirituality of silence did not fully develop in the West until the ninth century. Its origins in antiquity came through the anonymous Greek writings of someone using the pseudonym Dionýsios ho Areopagítes (Dionysius the Areopagite, one of Paul’s converts in Athens—see Acts 17). Upon being translated into Latin in the ninth century, these writings had an outsized influence in the West, until their sixth-century origin and false attribution were made clear in the fifteenth century, since which the author has been known as Pseudo-Dionysius. For brevity, the English form of the pseudonym, Denys will be used below. His writing more or less faithfully describes the apophatic theology of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
For Denys, creation was not a one-time occurrence of the past, but a continuous, timeless process. Consistent with his contemporaries, this is not a rational description of the cosmos (though it fits better with the observable universe than any static model), but a mythos deliberately intended to bring laypeople, monastics, and clergy alike to the point of silence, making them conscious of the limits of language. His treatise On the Divine Names (Peri theíōn onomátōn) makes clear that the names, forms, and attributes we assign to God are all ultimately misleading.
In Denys’ threefold dialectic, when we hear or read scripture in corporate worship, we first affirm (e.g. God is good). If we are paying attention, we realize the inanity of such an affirmation, so the second phase is to deny (e.g. God is not good in any of the limited ways we understand ‘good’). But, because we can no more declare what God is not than we can know what God is, the third phase is to deny the denial (e.g. God is certainly not lacking in goodness). Through this process, we become increasingly aware of the inadequacy of language—even the liturgy or the divinely inspired words of scripture through which we enter such a process.
In this way, once we have emptied ourselves of the idols of our own projected ideas about God, we can remain silent in the presence of the undefinable God. The mythos of scripture or liturgy based on it leads us to experience oneness with that which transcends all names and forms. This is not an emotional or ecstatic experience, but one of profound stillness. It makes little sense to anyone unaccustomed to some kind of contemplative practice.
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Augustine lived and wrote at the twilight of Antiquity, but the influence of his work was deeply imprinted on Christianity in the ages to come. Denys’ writings in translation articulating a viewpoint from Antiquity had a lasting influence on medieval Christian thought and practice, even if their cachet was based on a false attribution of authorship. Denys’ ideas and those of the people he influenced, who had their own experiences to account for, are undergoing a reexamination in our own postmodern context.
Some de-churched people today who seek a replacement for religious participation are finding it in the practice of meditation. Even though historically more recent approaches to Christian faith and understanding of scripture have obscured it, and though the long history of meditative practices has been lost to the awareness of ordinary laypeople today, scriptural writings and other documentation of early Christianity indicate an orientation toward disciplined spiritual practice. The patient cultivation of self-awareness, equanimity, and compassion inherent in a dedicated spiritual practice provides a means of developing the very attributes and behaviors that fulfill the teachings of Jesus. That is why it is important to start seeing that contemplative practices for Jesus, apostles, and early Christians have been there all along, and should be regarded as an effective way to live a Christian life.