Silence as Theology

Arsenius’ silence was not mere reticence; the tradition read it as a theology — the still tongue and the quiet heart as the condition of the knowledge of God, and the silence of the creature as the fitting response to the God who exceeds all speech. This file reads the Arsenian stillness as the spiritual and theological reality the tradition took it to be: its apophatic resonance, its relation to the Word who is heard in silence, and its place in the desert’s understanding of how God is known.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of stillness)

Beyond Reticence

It would be possible to read Arsenius’ silence as a temperament — the reserve of a cultivated man, the introversion of a solitary — and to leave it there. The tradition did not. It read his silence as a theology: a deliberate spiritual discipline ordered to the knowledge of God, and a witness to truths about God and the soul that could not be spoken because they lay beyond speech. The silence was not the absence of something but the presence of something — the gathered attention of a soul wholly turned to God — and the desert prized it as the highest condition of the praying heart (Ward 1984; Hausherr 1966; Ware 2000).

The clearest sign that the silence was more than reticence is Arsenius’ own reasoning. He did not fall silent because he had nothing to say — he was among the most learned men of his age — but because he had found something that speech could only disturb. “I cannot be with God and with men,” he said (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 13; Ward 1984); the silence was the price of an undivided attention to God, not the symptom of a withdrawn character. To be silent was to keep the channel of the heart clear for God, and to refuse the dissipation that even good speech entails. The silence was, in this sense, a positive act of prayer (see Silence and Stillness).

The Apophatic Resonance

There is a deep affinity, recognized by the tradition, between the silence of the desert and the apophatic theology of the Eastern Church — the way of negation that confesses God to exceed every name and concept, so that the highest knowledge of Him passes into a “darkness” and a “silence” beyond the reach of words (Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944/1957). The apophatic tradition holds that God in His essence is unknowable and unspeakable, and that the soul approaches Him most truly not by multiplying concepts but by laying them down — by a silence that is not ignorance but reverence before the One who is beyond being.

Arsenius’ practical silence and this theological silence are not the same thing, but they resonate. [Disputed: the connection between Arsenius' ascetic silence and the apophatic "silence" of the mystical tradition (Dionysius, the later hesychasts) is a theological reading drawn by interpreters of the tradition rather than a claim made by the *Apophthegmata* themselves, which present Arsenius' silence in ascetic and practical terms (the guard of the tongue, the cost of undivided attention) rather than in the speculative categories of apophatic theology; the resonance is real and is part of how the tradition later understood him, but it is a development, not an explicit teaching of the desert sayings (Ware, *The Inner Kingdom*, 2000; Lossky, *Mystical Theology*, 1957; contrast the plain ascetic register of Ward, *Sayings*, 1984).] The desert practiced what the later mystical theology would articulate: that before the living God the creature’s truest posture is a silence full of attention, in which the heart waits and listens rather than speaks. Arsenius is the desert’s purest image of that posture.

Silence and the Word

The Christian theology of silence is not a flight from the Word but a way to hear Him. The desert held that the soul cluttered with its own speech cannot hear the Word of God, and that silence is the clearing in which the Word can be received. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 [45:11 LXX]) was read by the fathers as a charter of this stillness: the knowledge of God requires the quieting of the soul. Arsenius’ silence was ordered to this hearing — the still heart is the heart that can receive the Word — and his ceaseless prayer was the answer the silence made (Ward 1984; Burton-Christie 1993, on the desert and the Word; Ware 2000).

This guards the Christian understanding of silence from any drift toward mere emptiness or quietism. The silence of Arsenius is not a void but a fullness; it is filled with prayer, with tears, with the listening attention of a soul turned to God (see Tears and Vigil). The tongue falls silent so that the heart may speak to God and hear Him; the noise of the world and of the self is stilled so that the one Word may be received. This is why the tradition could make Arsenius a father of the prayer of the heart: his silence was the silence of one who had stopped talking in order to pray without ceasing (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still; on the prayer, The Jesus Prayer).

Silence and the Danger of Quietism

The Christian theology of silence must be distinguished carefully from any drift toward mere passivity or quietism — the error of treating stillness as an end in itself, an emptying that seeks nothing and waits for nothing. The desert’s silence, and Arsenius’ in particular, was nothing of the kind. It was an active, laborious, intensely directed thing: filled with prayer, watered with tears, sustained by night-long vigils, ordered wholly to the love and knowledge of God (see Tears and Vigil). Arsenius did not fall silent in order to think of nothing; he fell silent in order to pray without ceasing. His stillness was the most strenuous activity of his life, not its suspension (Ward 1984; Ware 2000; Hausherr 1966).

This distinction matters because the later hesychast tradition would be accused, by its critics, of exactly the quietist error — of seeking an empty stillness and a self-induced vision. The Palamite response was to insist that hesychast stillness is not emptiness but the fullness of prayer, the gathering of the whole person into the active love of God (see The Root of Stillness). In this the tradition appealed rightly to its desert roots: Arsenius’ silence was already the answer to the charge of quietism, because it was so manifestly full — full of weeping, of watching, of ceaseless prayer. The father of stillness was no quietist; he was the busiest of men, occupied day and night with the one thing necessary.

The Theology in the Practice

Arsenius wrote no theology of silence; he practiced one. And the tradition, reflecting on his practice, drew from it a doctrine: that silence is the guard of the heart, the condition of prayer, the fitting response to the unspeakable God, and the clearing in which the Word is heard. This is the proper sense in which his silence is “a theology” — not a treatise he composed but a truth his life embodied and the tradition articulated. The desert worked this way throughout: its theology is carried in lives and sayings before it is carried in arguments, and Arsenius’ silent life is one of its richest texts (Ward 1984; Burton-Christie 1993).

The later tradition’s debt to him is therefore not only the transmission of a practice but the gift of an image — the image of the great man who fell silent before God, who wept and watched and prayed without ceasing, and who taught the Church, without a word of doctrine, what it means to be still and know that God is God. That image stands at the root of the whole hesychast understanding of stillness as the way to the knowledge of God (see The Root of Stillness), and it is among the most enduring of Arsenius’ bequests to the Church, in East and West alike (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory).

See Also

References

  • Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 13, “I cannot be with God and with men”; the sayings on silence.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (On silence, stillness, and the prayer of the heart.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 (French original 1944). (On apophatic theology and the silence beyond words.)
  • Hausherr, Irénée. Hésychasme et prière. OCA 176. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1966. (On the theology of hesychia.)
  • Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (On the desert, silence, and the hearing of the Word.)