“The duty of the disciple is to be silent and listen” (Rule of Saint Benedict, VI). So reads one of the most well-known passages of the Holy Rule, which over the centuries has shaped the life of entire monastic generations. But what does it really mean to be silent? Why is silence so central to the spiritual life, and particularly to the monastic vocation?
Today, silence is perhaps the most misunderstood and most feared virtue. It is mistaken for emptiness, for absence, for sterility. But true silence is the opposite of nothingness: it is fullness, pregnant with Presence. It is the womb in which the Word of God can truly be conceived, guarded, and heard. In the Rule, Benedict does not prescribe a rigid or anxious silence, but a watchful silence, full of attentiveness, open to mystery. It is a way of being, not a technique. It is the posture of the heart, made receptive, available, ready to obey.
As Benedict XVI writes in Verbum Domini, silence is a constitutive part of revelation: “The Word falls silent, becomes mortal silence, for it has ‘spoken’ itself to the point of silence, withholding nothing of what it had to communicate to us. Evocatively, the Church Fathers, contemplating this mystery, place upon the lips of the Mother of God this expression: ‘Speechless is the Word of the Father, who made every creature that speaks; lifeless are the eyes of Him whose word and nod bring all to life’” (n. 12). On the Cross, God is silent. But it is not the silence of absence. It is the fulfilment of Love, which speaks to the very end and gives itself completely.
The monk is silent, as Mary is silent beneath the Cross, as Christ is silent in Gethsemane, as God is silent before Job. That silence is a lofty word, the mystery that educates us to the ultimate truth: nothing can be truly heard without silence. Nothing can be truly loved without silence. Nothing can be truly generated without silence. We live immersed in noise. But perhaps it is precisely the noise – of voices, notifications, urgencies – that becomes our way of fleeing the radical question: where are you? Where are we, truly? At what point in the journey, in what corner of the heart?
It is the same question that Alessandro D’Avenia recognizes in the pregnant silence of the film The Tree of Life, where a grieving mother questions God about the death of her child. The answer is not an explanation, but a vision: creation in its beauty, from the vastness of galaxies to the fragility of cells. D’Avenia writes: “Pain generated the question, which forces God to answer with His credentials by showing that He has not ceased to care for creation […] beauty is the bulwark placed against nothingness and evil.”
This is also the meaning of monastic silence: not a refusal of words, but an exercise in presence. To be silent in order to inhabit, to guard, to listen. It is the same silence Jesus sought when He withdrew to pray in solitary places. It is the silence of intimacy with the Father, deeper than any word. But there is also another silence, more difficult: the silence of God. When prayer seems useless, when the cry brings no answer. Like Jesus on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That silence is not absence, but a threshold. It is there that faith is stripped bare, and man stops using God as a shield and begins to let himself be converted by Him.
Job experienced it: he spoke, he protested, he cried out. And in the end, after God’s silence, he was able to say: “Now my eyes see You.” Alessandro D’Avenia understood this and writes in Ultimo Banco: “[God’s] answer gives direction to meaning, inviting us not to use pain as accusation or retreat, and only thus can it become fruitful.” Thus, even in our lives, there are silences to pass through. Silences that do not crush, but purify. That do not take away, but reveal. That offer no easy answers, but return us to ourselves. That is why Saint Benedict insists so much on silence. Not out of love for order, but out of love for Truth. Only in silence does the word not scatter. Only in silence does prayer become fruitful. Only in silence can beauty be recognized.
And perhaps today, more than ever, we need silence. A small space in the heart in which to sit – as D’Avenia suggests – “on an imaginary stool, at the center of a crater on Mars”, and press a key, without having to prove anything. A piano on Mars, a silent beauty that cries out meaning. We don’t need to say more. We need to say less, but with Truth. To be silent not to hide, but to open up. To be silent to let the heart of the heart sing. To be silent to pray. To be silent to live.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum