Silence: A Christian History Photo: Image courtesy of Allen Lane Press.
The history of silence
G Gordon Steel reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch’s scholarly work 'Silence: A Christian history'
Sometimes, as Quakers, we may be inclined to think that we have a corner in silence, that this marks our special place within the broad range of Christian practice. But that is hardly so and this remarkable book puts us in our place. It is the latest work by Diarmaid MacCulloch, a well-known authority on the history of Christianity, and is almost worth its price just for the wonderful dust-cover.
This is a scholarly book. It takes us through the Old and New Testaments, through the first stressful centuries of the early church and the monastic movements in East and West, through the period that MacCulloch calls ‘the three reformations’ and the Enlightenment leading, finally, to more recent developments. The book is carefully indexed (there are fifty-six pages of notes and references). It is an erudite, but very readable work.
The writer uses the term silence in a broad sense. There are the silences of individual monks and the gnostic movements, of the so-called Desert Fathers and mystics. More recently, there are the silences of groups of Christians who found themselves sidelined from orthodoxy and, therefore, having to keep quiet (some of these he calls the ‘whistle-blowers’).
MacCulloch reminds us of the quiet role of women in male-dominated churches and devotes a substantial chapter to sex and gender issues, including the pain of unadmittable homosexuality. The church was silent about the Holocaust and slavery and in our day we are very much aware of a history of silence about child abuse. A recurring theme is the struggle between noisy elements in the church (powerful bishops and church politicians) and the quiet perception of spiritual truth, or between evangelicals and the mystics. He recalls the oft-quoted comment that the church is ‘like a swimming pool in which all the noise comes from the shallow end’.
I was surprised to find no mention of Karen Armstrong and her remarkable distillation, through many books, of the traditions of the Abrahamic world faiths: she has reminded us of ‘apophasis, the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God, and the necessity of silence. MacCulloch does, however, refer to the eminent New Testament scholar John Fenton as telling his Oxford ordinands that ‘The most obvious characteristic of God is his silence’.
What interested me most in this book are MacCulloch’s frequent references to Quakers. Within his broad, erudite, sweep he has been generous to us, in particular to the early Friends. He writes of George Fox’s contribution of applying the principle of inner light to congregational worship. And he asks: ‘Why has the Society of Friends managed more than any other Reformation radicalism to maintain its balance between contemplation and social activism?’ His answer is that mystical aspects of our Society have appealed particularly to women and also that we have been conspicuously successful in enabling their activism.
He notes our leading role in the anti-slavery movement and in pioneering biblical criticism: ‘The Quakers’ disrespect for the established conventions of biblical authority was the reason they could take a fresh perspective on biblical authority and reject it.’
Quakers also feature prominently in the last two pages of the book and this perhaps indicates the place we have in his final thoughts: ‘Can a negative theology or a theology of silence carry a comparable burden in fighting evil in human society? The example of Quakers, activists and contemplatives alike, might suggest that it can… The task of combating the sin of the world is for humanity, not humanity’s creator.’
Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen Lane Press 2013. ISBN: 9781846144264 £20.
