Silence: A Christian History

In this daring and unclassifiable book, Diarmaid MacCulloch draws us into a polyphony of silences from the whole span of Christian history and beyond - some holy, some skirting the borders of evil. MacCulloch begins by unravelling the surprisingly mixed attitudes of Judaism to silence, the Jewish and Christian borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine, and the silences which were part of Jesus's brief ministry and witness. He describes how the Early Church negotiated the competing claims of silence and noise, and how monasticism, a movement not original to Christianity but imported into it, came to dominate Christian worship and practice. He highlights the importance of long-forgotten or hidden Christian personalities in setting patterns of silence and contemplation still central to Christianity's approaches to God. The story moves to the sudden eruption of relentless noise in the Protestant Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation's efforts to defend centuries of insights about listening rather than speaking.

MacCulloch also singles out different and often darker themes. Christian Churches have often persecuted both other Christians and people beyond Christianity, particularly Jews, so producing silences of hidden religious belief and practice - protection and refuge against norms propounded by the powerful and the dogmatic. Many less benign silences are revealed: the forgetting of histories which were not useful to later Church authorities (such as the leadership roles of women among the first Christians), and the constant problems which Christianity has faced in dealing honestly with sexuality. In a deeply personal final chapter, MacCulloch reflects on how it may be possible to be a modern, post-enlightenment Christian, suggesting that if the noise, the obfuscation and the dogmatism are stripped out, we may yet be able to listen to the silence of God. At a time when Christianity as traditionally presented seems less and less believable, the book brings a message of optimism for those who still seek God beyond the clamorous noise of over-confident certainties.