Silence: A Christian History

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Overview

A provocative meditation on the role of silence in Christian tradition by the New York Times bestselling author of Christianity

We live in a world dominated by noise. Religion is, for many, a haven from the clamor of everyday life, allowing us to pause for silent contemplation. But as Diarmaid MacCulloch shows, there are many forms of religious silence, from contemplation and prayer to repression and evasion. In his latest work, MacCulloch considers Jesus’s strategic use of silence in his confrontation with Pontius Pilate and traces the impact of the first mystics in Syria on monastic tradition. He discusses the complicated fate of silence in Protestant and evangelical tradition and confronts the more sinister institutional forms of silence. A groundbreaking book by one of our greatest historians, Silence challenges our fundamental views of spirituality and illuminates the deepest mysteries of faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143125815
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/26/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.42(w) x 8.39(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, and professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Suffolk and the Tudors, winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize, and Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize. A former Anglican deacon, he has presented many highly celebrated documentaries for television and radio, and was knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship. He lives in Oxford, England.

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: The Witness of Holmes's Dog 1

Part 1 The Bible

1 Silence in Christian Prehistory: The Tanakh 11

Israel and the Celebration of Noise 11

A God who Speaks 16

'Be still before the Lord' 19

The Suffering Servant 22

Silence, Plato and the Creator-God 24

2 The Earliest Christian Silences: The New Testament 30

Jesus: Ending Silence 30

Jesus: Embracing Silence 33

The Gospels Interpret Jesus 37

Paul's Noisy Christians 41

'About half an hour' 47

Part 2 The Triumph of Monastic Silence

3 Forming and Breaking a Church: 100-451 CE 53

Ignatius, Bishops and the Great Disappointment 53

Gnostics and Silence 56

Catholic Christianity, Silence and the Philosophers 61

Martyrs and Confessors 64

The First Ascetics and Monks 69

Desert Fathers? 74

'That yonder' 78

Evagrius: Meditation and Contemplation 80

4 The Monastic Age in East and West: 451-1100 84

Silence beyond Chalcedon 84

Dionysius versus Augustine 86

Monks in the Latin West: The Rule of St Benedict 92

Dionysius and Cluny 95

New Orders for the Western Church 98

Part 3 Silence through Three Reformations

5 From Iconoclasm to Erasmus: 700-1500 105

Icons: Contemplation for All 105

The Latin West: A Different Path 108

Orthodoxy and Hesychasm 110

Gregorian Reform in the West 114

Monks and Mystics 119

The Devotio Moderna and Erasmus 124

6 The Protestant Reformation: 1500-1700 127

Justifying Protestant Noise 127

Music and Church Buildings 131

Protestants, Inner Silence and Tolerance 136

Radical Protestants: Word and Spirit 140

Stuart England and the Quakers 144

Tridentine Catholicism: Defending Traditions 150

Tridentine Mystics and their Trials 155

Part 4 Reaching behind Noise in Christian History

7 Silences for Survival 163

Nicodemism: Name and Thing 163

Iberian Jews: converses 166

Nicodemites in Reformation and Counter-Reformation 167

England: A Variety of Nicodemites 174

Reformation Radicals: Word and Silence 178

Gay Anglo-Catholics: Let He who Has Ears to Hear 184

8 Things Not Remembered 191

Building Identity through Forgetfulness 191

Silence, Sex and Gender 196

Shame: A Dark Theme 202

Concealing Clerical Child Abuse 203

Western Christianity and the Holocaust 207

Christians, the Bible and Slavery 212

9 Silence in Present and Future Christianities 217

Retrospect: Wild-tracks 217

Varieties of Modern Christian Silence 222

Whistle-blowing 225

Ecumenism in Silence 228

Music and Silence 231

Patterns in Scripture, Silence and Sin 234

Further Reading 240

Notes 248

Index 305

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Praise for Silence

“Silence has all the spark of Christianity. . . . In MacCulloch’s hands, reading about Christianity often feels as soulful, as silently consuming, as prayer itself.”
—Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine

“Silence is excellent: a beautifully written, factually dense, intellectually sophisticated look at the theological uses and abuses of silence, from the spirituality of quiet to the Catholic Church’s horrifying reticence about child abuse and the Holocaust.”
—Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine

“A stimulating and sweeping overview.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Enjoyable and intelligent . . . MacCulloch is a gifted scholar and his ideas are always worth hearing.”
—The Economist

“In the first part of his compelling new book, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores the use of silence in spiritual practice, but it is in the second part that he constructs his main challenge. Here he speaks not of the lovely silence of that which cannot be spoken, but of the ugly silence that cloaks evil. . . . MacCulloch’s account is peppered with the kind of delicious asides that make him such a compulsively readable historian.”
—The Times, Book of the Week

“Silence is intellectually robust, and without the prevarications and self-qualifications that sometimes stymie academic prose. . . . MacCulloch is by turns precise, poetic and righteously indignant.”
—The Guardian

“MacCulloch is a superb raconteur, full of imagination, wit, irony and fun, who entertains, challenges, enlightens and occasionally enrages his readers. But beyond mere storytelling and the skilful display of his strength of learning, he also takes a strong ethical stance in telling the truth and revealing some of the darker sides of Christian history.”
—The Times Higher Education

“Unfailingly interesting and readable. . . . MacCulloch the sleuth historian enjoys nothing more than digging beneath this silence to reveal the smothered stories of variously disreputable Christian heroes.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“This is a specialist book for non-specialist readers—by which I mean that it is made highly accessible to anyone seriously interested by excellent and lively writing . . . It is great fun . . . a rich engaging book. Read it.”
—The Spectator

 

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Silence

“Silence has all the spark of Christianity. . . . In MacCulloch’s hands, reading about Christianity often feels as soulful, as silently consuming, as prayer itself.”
—Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine

“Silence is excellent: a beautifully written, factually dense, intellectually sophisticated look at the theological uses and abuses of silence, from the spirituality of quiet to the Catholic Church’s horrifying reticence about child abuse and the Holocaust.”
—Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine

“A stimulating and sweeping overview.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Enjoyable and intelligent . . . MacCulloch is a gifted scholar and his ideas are always worth hearing.”
—The Economist

“In the first part of his compelling new book, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores the use of silence in spiritual practice, but it is in the second part that he constructs his main challenge. Here he speaks not of the lovely silence of that which cannot be spoken, but of the ugly silence that cloaks evil. . . . MacCulloch’s account is peppered with the kind of delicious asides that make him such a compulsively readable historian.”
—The Times, Book of the Week

“Silence is intellectually robust, and without the prevarications and self-qualifications that sometimes stymie academic prose. . . . MacCulloch is by turns precise, poetic and righteously indignant.”
—The Guardian

“MacCulloch is a superb raconteur, full of imagination, wit, irony and fun, who entertains, challenges, enlightens and occasionally enrages his readers. But beyond mere storytelling and the skilful display of his strength of learning, he also takes a strong ethical stance in telling the truth and revealing some of the darker sides of Christian history.”
—The Times Higher Education

“Unfailingly interesting and readable. . . . MacCulloch the sleuth historian enjoys nothing more than digging beneath this silence to reveal the smothered stories of variously disreputable Christian heroes.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“This is a specialist book for non-specialist readers—by which I mean that it is made highly accessible to anyone seriously interested by excellent and lively writing . . . It is great fun . . . a rich engaging book. Read it.”
—The Spectator

 

From the Publisher