Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Christianity has a deeply ambivalent relationship with silence.
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Allen Lane
4 stars
Stuart Kelly
Christianity has a deeply ambivalent relationship with silence. While one hymn exhorts the believer "Tell out my soul", another warns "Let all mortal flesh keep silence". In Luke's Gospel, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees during the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem saying that were he to silence his disciples, the very stones would cry out - yet earlier he strictly admonishes the disciples to keep silent about his ministry.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, charts this problematic and often contradictory relationship with aplomb in Silence: A Christian History. First, the broadcaster, writer and historian discusses the depiction of silence in the Bible - in the Tanakh, with its insistence on the dumbness of idols, and in the New Testament, culminating in the very odd reference in Revelation when, at the opening of the seventh seal, there is silence in heaven "for about half an hour".
The second chapter covers the rise of monasticism, making a bold claim for the continuing influence of the mystical writings.
There are two points worth raising here. First, that the idea of "negative theology" (describing God in terms of what may not be said about him) provides one of the book's unifying threads. And second, that the schism in the church after the Council of Chalcedon in AD451 was a major turning point in ecclesiastical history.
One of the disciplinary canons accepted by the Western church thereafter concerned limitations on the ability to accuse a bishop of wrongdoing, the spirit of which haunts the modern church.