Art and Silence
Monastic lessons for an overstimulated age
A constant barrage of media stimuli compete for our attention and drown out critical thought. Melissa Thorson Hause explores the role of the arts and the monastic discipline of silence as a model for reestablishing more reflective patterns of life.
Fragmentation
Illustration by James Tughan
As a culture, we are nothing if not overstimulated. Printed words, artificial sounds, and fabricated images, many of them moving, saturate our environment; like the air we breathe, we barely notice them anymore. We are also busy, very busy—only slightly less (or more) so than we are overstimulated. We ingest all of these words, sounds, and images like underchewed fast food as we race from obligation to entertainment and back again. In one of life’s amusing little ironies, monthly women’s magazines—prime offenders in the glut of images and endless permutations of home decorating projects—routinely promise new and effective ways to slow down, get organized, relax (am I, too, complicit in the crime by inflicting yet another article on my jaded readers?). Apparently even the bastions of consumerism are not immune from the gnawing sense that all is not well.
Overstimulated, busy, fragmented: does the answer to this dilemma lie in improved strategies for time management, more efficient combinations of work, leisure, and entertainment? Or is something far more radical, more basic to our humanity at stake? In the following, I would like to address this question by exploring two areas that might at first seem to have little in common: the realm of art and the world of Benedictine monasticism. As we examine what our lives have become and what might be lacking in them, I think that the arts can help focus our attention on crucial aspects of human nature—not because they are inherently more important than other areas of endeavor, but because they address the dimension of our lives most easily subverted by our culture of overstimulation: sense perception as a vehicle for the communication of meaning.
With regard to the second of my two themes—well, I am a Protestant, so I admit that the reference to monasticism is somewhat for rhetorical effect. But not entirely: however one might evaluate it theologically, throughout its history monasticism has made significant contributions to the Christian world in both piety and practice. The aspect of monasticism that interests me here is arguably one of the most foreign to our cell- phone-carrying, Walkman-sporting, TV-blaring- in-every-waiting-room culture: the discipline of silence. The silence practiced by the Benedictine monks strikes me as worthy of serious consideration as we attempt to refocus our fragmented lives.
Lectio and Listening
The Rule of St. Benedict, a charter for monastic life written around the year 530, has served as the predominant pattern for Christian monastic communities for almost 1500 years. In it, St. Benedict warns against the improper use of the tongue for gossip, murmuring, and vulgar jesting, and recommends silence as the principal modus operandi for daily life. Although interpretations of the rule of silence have varied over the centuries, in modern practice speech among the monks or nuns in a Benedictine community is limited to specific contexts or times of the day, with long stretches of both day and night devoted to silence. Even meals are often eaten in silence, with one member of the community reading aloud to the others from Scripture or other spiritual literature.
Illustration by James Tughan
Benedictine monasticism in general and the practice of silence in particular may be alien to Protestant, and certainly to modern sensibilities. Yet the silence of the Benedictine monks is intended not merely as self-denial for its own sake, but as a means to a more important end. Silence is conducive to prayer; yet in the Benedictine tradition, prayer is not conceived solely as expressing one’s own needs to God, but first and foremost as a process of listening: prayerfully meditating upon the Scriptures so as to hear the Holy Spirit speaking through them. This monastic practice is known as lectio divina, or “sacred reading.” The following statements by a modern-day Benedictine prioress, Christine Vladimiroff, help us understand lectio divina more fully in its relation to the discipline of silence: “The companion of silence in the Rule of Benedict is the total immersion in God’s holy and living word—lectio. In the Rule about four hours a day, depending on the season, are devoted to lectio divina, a prayerful reading of the Scripture…. Lectio is a process of growing in a relationship with the God who speaks the word to which we listen.” Or again: “Monastic silence is meant to facilitate conversation with God…. Both silence and conversation have a common root in the spirit of attentive listening.” [1]
Listening—what a neglected art in our age. We all know how rare those individuals are who truly listen, instead of, as a somewhat unlikely source so insightfully put it, “just waiting for their turn to speak.” [2] It is a truism that one cannot both talk and listen at the same time, and in our digital, surround-sound culture, it seems that both literally and figuratively, everyone is always talking at once.
But my point is not to advocate monasticism per se as the cure for this ill; as Protestantism and especially the Reformed tradition have always recognized, we are not to be of the world, but we are certainly to be in the world, transforming it as salt and light in our families, callings, and social institutions. Nonetheless, I think that the demeanor of listening presupposed by the lectio divina, with its requisite envelope of silence, is a mental and spiritual discipline in which we, too, could be more practiced in our daily lives. If nothing else, the discontent manifested in the aforementioned women’s magazines should tell us that our fragmented lifestyles leave us profoundly unsatisfied. Time, space, and quiet to reflect not only upon the Word of God, but also upon our life and experience, is not an optional indulgence, but a need built into our very nature. To ignore it is to do violence to our humanity.
Art, Reflection, and Revelation
The arts are one area in which we can begin to recognize, desire, and even crave this condition of attentive silence. The reason for this is almost paradoxical, and has to do with their very nature as a means of communication. The arts use sensory stimuli to convey emotional or spiritual meaning; because God created us a body-soul unity, the material world—the realm of paint, stone, sound, movement, and words, whether voiced or inscribed—is able, indeed is designed to communicate to senses and souls that are designed to receive and understand it. [3]
Illustration by James Tughan
One might even say that the juncture of the physical and the spiritual is the site of revelation, both humanly and divinely speaking. Among human beings, our communication with each other—our revelation of ourselves to one another, if you will—is always mediated through physical, sensory experience. We cannot read each other’s minds; we have to speak, write, gesture, draw, dance, embrace, and the like in order to share our souls. Yet this is not just a fallen, human condition: the entirety of God’s own revelation of Himself to us—the created world, the spoken Word, the written Word, the Word made flesh—is likewise mediated through this physical- spiritual continuum. Our knowledge of God is obtained not in a sudden flash of enlightenment or a disembodied beatific vision, but from the ongoing experience of and reflection upon His dealings with us in the world.
The choice of words, however, is significant: while communication does indeed require sensory experience, true understanding is a function of reflection upon it. Revelation, whether divine or human, is incomplete without this element of deep, sustained, critical thought about what has been experienced. We cannot merely sense; we must think about what we are sensing, and it is this habit of mind that is so profoundly neglected in our day. Sheer multiplication of activity and stimuli does little to compensate for it, and in fact achieves the opposite effect: the senses are overwhelmed to the point where they become numb and unable to reflect upon what they do take in. When this happens, our capacity to communicate and receive truth is seriously compromised.
The plethora of words, sounds, and images with which we are constantly confronted commandeers, indeed usurps, the place in our humanity that genuine artistic expression is meant to fill. Yet properly understood and practiced, the arts can also be a means of reclaiming the senses, of retraining them to collaborate more closely with reflection and critical thought. When we engage in them with conscience and authenticity, both the making of art and the experience of art made by others can produce in us an almost monastic slowing-down and learning to think, a listening, as it were, in silence.
Whenever we expose ourselves to works of visual art, music, theatre, dance, literature, or a combination thereof, we permit an intentionally fashioned message from another human being to enter through the doors of our senses. Where it goes from there makes all the difference between mere stimulation and authentic communication. If we are willing to be silent and “listen” to the work—to contemplate and reflect upon its qualities, interrelationships, and references, with attentiveness and without haste—we will discover, first and most importantly, whether it has anything of consequence or value to say. If it does, we will then begin to experience firsthand the profound enigma of our existence as spiritual beings in a material world. The moment of thought and reflection upon an object of intelligent making is the locus of the union between the physical and the spiritual; it is the place where matter is mysteriously transformed into meaning. This is precisely the phenomenon observed by artist Lynn Aldrich when she describes the experience of viewing sculpture:
[Sculpture] seems especially capable of giving viewers a profoundly visceral awareness of their own physical presence while making meaning inside their heads, feeling one’s invisible spirit moved by the experience of the concrete art form…. To view a sculpture, one walks back and forth and around and sometimes through or upon a three-dimensional object in three- dimensional space…. All the while, one is involved in a complex, hidden activity of thinking and feeling, of describing and interpreting what is being seen. Knowledge happens. And the activity that produced this knowledge gives the viewer a more acute awareness of his reality – simultaneously being a spirit (or soul) and a body. [4]
Illustration by James Tughan
In the same essay, Aldrich walks the reader through encounters with individual sculptures, concretely demonstrating the slow, attentive pace required to interpret the best works of visual art. This same process is required, mutatis mutandis, in the other arts as well.
As any serious practitioner of the arts knows, moreover, this fundamental commitment to unhurried, critical reflection is necessary not only for the viewing and experiencing of works by others, but also and especially for the activity of making, writing, composing, and performing. The slow, demanding process of mastering techniques and materials, of refining ideas and images, forces us to counter our natural tendency towards laziness and haste, in a manner not unlike the measured, structured discipline of the monastic life. Furthermore, true competence in an art form—as opposed to short-cuts and formulae—presupposes an equally monastic disposition toward silence and listening: “listening” to our materials, to the sounds of our music as we practice, to the words or movements we compose and enact.
We are created to fashion and perform things for use and for pleasure; many of these things also have the capacity, upon sustained contemplation, to communicate truths about our condition and aspirations. As the Rule of St. Benedict teaches us, however, to use this ability in the way that God intended requires humility and silence—the willingness to engage in critical reflection in response to stimuli received through the senses. In the realm of the arts as in the rest of life, this element of reflection and contemplation on the part of both “sender” and “receiver” is the sine qua non of true communication or revelation.
Making Space for Silence
In order to establish an environment favorable to silence, Benedictine monks literally left the hubbub of the outside world and submitted themselves to a strict, contemplative pattern of life. Although most of us neither can nor should withdraw wholesale from our daily responsibilities, we can, in smaller ways, create external environments of silence for ourselves. We have far more choice than we realize as to what—and how much—we allow onto our sensory radar screen. This same point is made by John Eldredge in The Journey of Desire, where he, too, alludes to the Rule of St. Benedict and suggests “a bit of monastic wisdom for contemporary pilgrims”:
First, you must reduce the constant noise of your life. Turn off the television; it is an enemy of your heart. Having one is like inviting Vanity Fair to set up shop in your home. The whole operation runs on mimetic passion, a continual assault on your desire. Even the news is a problem because of its artificial importance…. I believe Thoreau said, “Don’t read the Times; read the eternities.” Given the pace of our lives, I doubt we have time for both. Simply unplug from all the clamor, and make room for eternity in your life. [5]
Illustration by James Tughan
Christine Vladimiroff describes it this way: “Benedict’s rule establishes a way of life that slows things down on the outside so that the inside can come alive. Contemplative life is rooted in a rhythm.” Shouldn’t we, too, pursue rhythms of life that “slow things down on the outside,” permitting us to engage in the kind of silent reflection that will make our insides, our souls, come alive?
But external changes are useless without internal ones. I think another lesson we can learn from the monastic discipline of silence has to do with what it means to “seek first the Kingdom of God” (Mt. 6:33). Jesus’ words in that well-known passage address the sin of anxiety over worldly possessions and status. How much of the noise and busyness of our culture has to do with an almost frantic striving to keep up with the latest, the best, the newest and most revolutionary, whether in technology, art, fashion, entertainment, marketing, or current events? Are we not desperately afraid to slow down, to intentionally limit our intake of even legitimate goods and entertainments, lest we miss out on something that might be essential to our happiness? But could it not be that the kingdom Jesus tells us to seek has less to do with activities than with habits of mind, with minds and hearts that are willing to prioritize listening and reflecting upon God’s revelation in all its forms? To embrace silence—a way of life that “slows things down on the outside”— is to consciously resist the pressure to run after every fleeting stimulus and to affirm that there are things more important to our humanity than prevailing trends and media-driven images of the good life.
Benedictine monasticism gave rise to some of the greatest practical and cultural achievements of the Middle Ages: architecture, agriculture, care for the poor, the preservation and development of literature and philosophy, to name just a few. Were they able to accomplish this because they had carved out a space—a whole pattern of life—that permitted these things to develop? If we, too, could somehow, in a 21st-century, post-Reformation way, turn our backs on the overstimulation of the world and cultivate a space for silence, reflection, profound observation, listening, and true conversation, might it not also prepare the way for a renaissance of Christian civilization rivaling that inaugurated by the Benedictine order in medieval Europe?
Dr. Melissa Thorson Hause is assistant professor of art history and dean of the Honors College at Belhaven College.
[This article was originally published in The Creative Spirit: A Journal of Faith and the Arts, Belhaven, Fall 2004]
Notes:
[1] Christine Vladimiroff, OSB, Prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, “Reflections on the Monastic Life: Silence in the Rule of Benedict” <www.eriebe nedictines.org/pages/inspiration/backprioress/ silence.html>
[2] In the 1999 movie Fight Club, the antihero Jack, in the throes of an existential crisis, frequents hospital support groups pretending to be terminally ill. His reason: “When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just …” Another character finishes his thought for him: “—instead of just waiting for their turn to speak?”
[3] For a fuller discussion of this premise, see Melissa T. Hause, “Between Matter and Spirit: Inhabiting the Boundary,” Creative Spirit III, 1 (Aug. 2003), pp. 37-38.
[4] Lynn Aldrich, “What’s the Matter with Matter?” in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (Grand Rapids 2001), p. 103. See also the interview with Lynn Aldrich in this issue of the Creative Spirit (pp. 26-31).
[5] John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire (Nashville 2000), pp. 205-206.
