Peter Costello
A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
by Alain Corbin (Polity Press, £14.99)
When Silence Speaks: The Life and Spirituality of Elisabeth Leseur
by Jennifer Moorcroft (Gracewing, €20.00)
Silence, they say, is golden. But all too often we read about strenuous objections being made to the ringing of church bells in rural parts, and not only in rural parts: new residents to Clyde Road in Dublin 4 recently sought to have the bells of St Bartholomew’s silenced, because they annoyed them. Having grown up listening to the sounding of the cracked bell of the Carmelite convent in Ranelagh sound the canonical hours, I find this odd. St Bartholomew’s is a High Anglican church for whom the ringing of bells is significant. How it annoys people is beyond my understanding.
However, silence is indeed to be valued. But what is silence? The natural world is never silent, a hum of life prevails everywhere as those who stop and listen in field or wood well know.
What we really mean by silence is the absence of human noise. Since earliest times such silence as been valued by the reflective and mystically inclined for promoting insights into divine experiences and into life itself.
But since the industrial revolution, human noise has been compounded by the noises of industry. In the 18th century people even likened the din of industrial cities as like the ‘pandemonium’ in Paradise Lost, the terrifying clatter of all the demons in Hell gathered around Milton’s Satan.
Oddly though, the silence that has descended on the neighbourhoods where we live in this time of lock-down is very strange, even unnerving, one wakes at night bothered by the silence outside, which seems uncanny.
‘Old friend’
For many people though silence was as the song says “an old friend”, and not something to be fear. Hermits, recluses and monks have valued silence as well, for promoting spirituality.
This is addressed in the little biography, but Prof. Corbin’s quite short book is a little disappointing. Despite the title it really covers only the 19th Century, the authors’ ‘period’, but does not it seem to me, despite the density of the French-style academic presentation, to penetrate to the essential heart of silence. He quotes or alludes to a wide range of writers (mainly French), but in no way that seems truly productive of an answer to the real value of silence.
It does not provide what I would have looked for in history beginning, not perhaps with the Greeks, but with a survey of cultures without machines, to explore more deeply “the sounds of silence”, and what they have revealed to the inner ear over the millennia.
To explore that one might well begin with the writings of Thomas Merton, especially Elected Silence (otherwise known as The Seven Story Mountain).
Silence though, the absence of speech, comes in different forms. The story of the French mystic and Servant of God, Elizabeth Leseur and her husband, is one which appealed deeply to many in the early 20th Century, but which now seems little known, as least here in Ireland.
She was married to an anticlerical doctor, but she underwent a change of heart, and in her diary, the silent repository of her hopes, the silence of which was only broken after her death. Her husband, who became a Dominican, published the journal after her death in 1914.
This remarkable story is recounted by Jennifer Moorecroft. The journal is still in print as The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur (Sophia Institute Press, £14.95). “This inspiring book,” an admirer of it has written, “gives you a splendid example of how to live as a Christian in a secular environment that can be indifferent or hostile to your Faith.”