by Lucy Violet Hodgkin
First given as the 1919 Swarthmore Lecture
Preface
The Swarthmore Lectureship was established by the Woodbrooke Extension Committee, at a meeting held December 9th, 1907: the minute of the Committee providing for “an annual lecture on some subject relating to the message and work of the Society of Friends.”
The name “Swarthmore” was chosen in memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was always open to the earnest seeker after Truth, and from which loving words of sympathy and substantial material help were sent to fellow-workers.
The Lectureship has a two-fold purpose: first, to interpret further to the members of the Society of Friends their Message and Mission; and, secondly, to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles of the Friends.
The Lectures have been delivered on the evening preceding the assembly of the Friends’ Yearly Meeting in each year.
“And as the flowing of the ocean fills
Each creek and branch thereof, and then retires,
Leaving behind a sweet and wholesome savour;
So doth the virtue and the life of God
Flow evermore into the hearts of those
Whom He hath made partakers of His nature;
And, when it but withdraws itself a little,
Leaves a sweet savour after it, that many
Can say they are made clean by every word
That He hath spoken to them in their silence.”
“Truly, we do but grope here in the dark,
Near the partition-wall of Life and Death,
At every moment dreading or desiring
To lay our hands upon the unseen door!
Let us, then, labour for an inward stillness,—
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence, where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart, that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our spirits,
That we may do His will, and do that only.”
—H.W. Longfellow, New England Tragedies
“Look with wonder at that which is before you.”
“Let not him that seeks cease until he find.
When he finds, he shall wonder;
When he wonders, he shall reign;
And when he reigns, he shall rest.”
In this mysterious double “Saying” of our Lord the germ of silent worship lies hidden.
First the Command: not to work, nor to doubt, nor to question, but to watch, to marvel, to adore.
Next, the Experience: seeking, finding, reigning, resting; a pair of attributes active and passive, on either side of this central act and attitude of wonder. Such is the demand that this Logion* makes upon its hearers who, as they surrender themselves to its claim, will discover afresh its divinity.
[*This “Saying” of our Lord occurs in the following passage from the Stromata or Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria: “The beginning of knowledge is wondering at things, as Plato says in the Theaetetus and Matthias in the Traditions exhorting: ‘Wonder at the things before you’; laying this down as the first step toward the knowledge that lies beyond.” (Clem. Al. Strom. II. ix. 45.); and again “In which connection also in the Gospel according to the Hebrews it is written: ‘He that hath wondered shall reign, and he that hath reigned shall rest. ȯ θαυμάσας βασιλεύσει και ȯ βασιλεύσας ἀναπαύσεται.'” (Clem. Al. Strom. II. ix. 45.).
In Strom. V. xiv. 96, the quotation is given more fully but without its source. “He that seeketh shall not cease until he find, and on finding he shall be amazed, and on being amazed he shall reign, and on reigning he shall rest.”
Among the λόγια Ἰησοῦ discovered at Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrh. Pap. 654. vol. iv. p. 4) this saying is found in a form closely similar to Clement’s version, and as he expressly assigns the saying θάυμασον τά παρόντα to the same source, it follows that it also is a λόγιον Ἰησοῦ.]
There may be innumerable other ways of worship for other pilgrims, but we know that this is the one appointed to us, the intimate communion of spirit in which, unitedly and as a body, we seek in stillness to “look with wonder at that which is before us,” and, thus wondering, to reign and to rest.
Silent worship,—our familiar yet mysterious Way of Wonder,—whence it came to us from the dim hills of the past; how it is leading us over dusty plains and through tangled thickets in the present; and whither, to what mist-shrouded, sun-suffused heights of the future:—this is the subject of our quest.
There is a danger that those of us who were born Friends may overlook the wonder, the mystery, of this silent way of ours, just because we know it too well. We rarely feel that we are treading anything beyond everyday streets and pavements, or country lanes, as we walk to meeting. However far back we probe into our consciousness we can never remember a time when thus to gather together in stillness with other seekers was not, for us, the familiar entrance, the inevitable approach, to the Presence Chamber of GOD.
Yet this is really an astonishing thing to do. And therefore it is well that we, whose sense of wonder at this wordless intercourse of spirits—human and Divine—has been blurred by long familiarity, should have that sense requickened by new companions to whom silent worship, instead of being a habit, is still a rich surprise. The joy these later partakers in it find in our silence has reassured us that our inheritance is no mere curious heirloom, venerable, though useless to all save the members of one small spiritual family; but is, rather, a priceless possession for world-wide present and future needs.
“How did George Fox discover your silence? Where did he find it? When did he first use it? Was this use of silence his own invention? Has it grown and developed since his time? Was it practised by him and by the early Friends in exactly the same way as it is among you to-day? And, if it has altered, in what directions?” These questions, asked by my friend Cyril Hepher in 1916, first showed me how little I knew of the history of our way of worship. Part of the answer to them was supplied by the well-known passages in George Fox’s Journal telling how, as a young man, he kept himself “sometimes retired in his chamber and
often walked solitary in Barnet Chace to wait upon the Lord,” and how, a few years later, at a “great meeting” of priests and professors, he “sat on a haystack and spoke nothing for some hours, … to famish them from words.” [See infra, p. 48.]
From these we went on to Robert Barclay’s sentences in the Apology: “A man may learn more in half an hour and be more certain of it by waiting upon God and His Spirit in the heart than by reading 1,000 volumes… for when I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people, I felt a secret power among them that touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it I found the evil weakening in me and the good reached to, and raised … in that inward quietness, stillness and humility of mind where the Lord appears and His heavenly wisdom is revealed.” [Apology, xi. 21, 23, and xi. 7.]
Nevertheless the more insistent questions as to the growth and development, the origin and history of silent worship remained unanswered and a fruitful subject for enquiry.
In a short hour’s lecture it is impossible to do more than hint at the various stages, but let us glance first at:
The Earlier Use of Silence
- In Other Religions
- In the Christian Church
- In the Mass
- Monastic Communities (Compulsory Silence)
- Individual Mystics (Free Silence)
- Among Philosophers and Heretics
Next let us concentrate on
The History of Quaker Silence
- Its Roots
- On the Continent, in France, Germany, and the Low Countries
- In England, among Familists, Seekers, etc.
- Its Main Stem
- Experiences of Fox and the early Friends
- Theories concerning these—Barclay, Penington, Penn
- Its Degeneration in later times, Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century
- And Revival. Later Nineteenth Century
Lastly, in conclusion, let us look at present developments and future possibilities of silent worship.
- Its Dangers
- Fragility
- Wordiness
- Failure to “Arrive”
- Its Future Hopes
- Central Appeal to the Will
- Hope of Re-union
- The Upper Room
The first division of our subject is too vast and complicated for me to attempt to treat it in detail. I can only offer a few scattered examples in proof of the widespread use of silence in other religions. Some of these I have come across in my own reading. Others have been generously sent to me by more scholarly friends, who are able to go much further afield—and who are also interested in the history of silent worship.
More than three thousand years ago, in the religious life of ancient Egypt, “the attitude of silent communion, waiting upon the gracious goodness of God, was not confined to the select few nor to the educated, priestly communities.”
On the humblest monuments of the common people Amon is called the “god who cometh to the silent, or the lord of the silent, who cometh at the cry of the poor,” [Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt by J. H. Breasted, Ph.D.] and again, “Thou sweet Well for him that thirsteth in the desert, it is closed to him that speaks, but is open to him that is silent. When he who is silent comes, Lo he finds the Well!”
[In Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, by Professor J. H. Breasted, the following paragraphs occur:
“Thou O Amon art the lord of the silent,
Who cometh at the cry of the poor.” (p. 351)
“The surviving influence of the Aton faith and the doctrines of social justice of the Feudal Age now culminated in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries before Christ in the profoundest expression and revelation of the devotional religious spirit ever attained by the men of Egypt…. Prayer becomes a revelation of inner personal experience, an expression of individual communion with God. It is a communion in which the worshipper discerns in his God one nourishing the soul as a shepherd feeds his flock.” (p. 355)
“Amon is a herdman herding him that leans upon him.” “The lord of Truth he lives in Truth.” (Inscriptions in the Hieratic character XXVI.B.Mus. Ostrakon No. 5656 11 6-7. 14. 15.)
“Thou sweet Well for him that thirsteth in the desert; it is closed to him who speaks, but it is open to him who is silent. When he who is silent comes, lo, he finds the Well.” (Papyrus Sallier, 1. 8. 2-3.)
For kind help in tracing the above references I am indebted to Mrs. H. Sefton Jones, F.R.H.S.]
In the changeless East it is said that “The Hindu still looks with pity on our extravagant activities and reckless thought [that] take us ever further from the Absolute, the True, the Unspeakable, the Repose, the Great Silence, upon whose unmoving bosom the tiniest scratchings which make up our earthly silence, transpire, are born, and pass.” [P. N. Waggett—Introduction to The House of Wisdom and Love]
The Buddhist religion, on the other hand, attempts to unite all these distant regions within the breast of a silent worshipper, in the practice of “the art of pervasion, whereby the silent votary contemplates in turn every quarter of the globe with active love.
Silence could never be alien from worship to the devout Hebrew whose Scriptures showed “in the beginning” an earliest æonian silence of the Spirit brooding upon the waters, broken only by the “first tremendous Fiat of GOD.”
Even in the later, ornate days of the Jewish religion more than one trace of silent worship remains. The Talmud states that “companies of angels praise by night but are silent by day because of the glories of the Eternal.” It also mentions that: “The former Chasidim” (i.e. the predecessors of the Pharisees about the Maccabæan period) “used to sit still one hour and then pray one hour and then sit still for one hour.”
The idea formerly held that the word “Selah” in the Psalms preserves the memory of a similar hush or pause for silent prayer, is denied by modern scholarship. The importance of silence in the Jewish conception of worship is shown, however, in several places, notably in the Prophet’s exclamation: “The Lord is in His Holy Temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him.” (Hab. ii. 20).
Memorable also is the record of the utter silence in which the Temple buildings themselves had been scrupulously fashioned.
“And the house when it was in building was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither; so that there was neither hammer nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building.” (1 Kings 5:7)
Not only from Judæa, however, also from ancient Greece, come some of the most significant traces of the use of silence in the life and worship of pre-Christian times.
The Pythagoreans are known to have practised silence. “Stop chatter and take to learning” was one of the injunctions of Pythagoras himself, and he “was wont to set every student a task of lengthened silence,” in order that “by the fermentation of his thoughts he might be the better prepared for his master’s teaching.”
In the *Symposium* Socrates is said, on one occasion, to have remained wrapped in thought from early dawn throughout a whole day and night, with a wondering crowd around him. “There he stood till the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way.” [Symposium, 220]
But the most significant example of silence in worship is found in the heart of ancient Greece, in the Mysteries of Eleusis, those shrouded rites of cleansing, of initiation, of death in life, of life out of death, that seem almost like a strange foreshadowing of Christianity.
At sunrise, on a certain day in every year, a throng of chosen worshippers issued forth from the City of the Violet Crown. Leaving Athens, they passed out from under the luminous shadow of its pillared temples and wandered on all through the daylight hours along the Sacred Way, that ancient Way of Wonder, across the plain of Attica and over the dim blue hills to Eleusis. The sun was already setting as the long procession wound round the still waters of the land-locked bay of Salamis; not until nightfall did the pilgrims reach their goal, the Temple of the Two Goddesses at Eleusis.
We know that here in summer’s ardent heats, the chosen came for initiation; but of what the Mysteries themselves consisted, what secrets of essential being they both symbolised and unveiled, can only be guessed now from the scattered hints that have come down to us from illuminated votaries, pledged to secrecy in regard to the essential points of their experience. The Greeks, in their wisdom, knew full well that
“If the chosen soul could never be alone,
In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God,
No greatness ever had been dreamed or done.”
[Columbus, J. R. Lowell]
Therefore they took every precaution that life’s deepest lessons should be learned, and kept, in secret, in darkness, in hiddenness, and in silence.[Even the name mystes given to the Greek initiate, “probably arose from the fact that he was one who was gaining a knowledge of divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut. (myeo means close lips or eyes). It is from this word that our ‘mystic’ and ‘mysticism’ are derived: thus the connection between mysticism and silence is far from being superficial or arbitrary.”—C. F. E. Spurgeon, Mysticism in English Literature.]
Only after three days of purification, of prayer, and of solitary ordeals, did the central and most representative event of the Mysteries take place. This was enacted not in the inmost chambers of hidden secret things but with a sudden blaze of light in full sight of the assembled multitude. [At Eleusis “there was probably no dogmatic teaching, there were possibly no words spoken, it was all an acted parable. But it was all kept in silence. There was an awful individuality about it. They [the initiates] saw the sight in common, but they saw it [alone]. It was his personal communion with the Divine life. The effect of it was conceived to be a change both of character and of relation to the Gods. The initiated were, by virtue of their initiation, made partakers of a world to come. ‘Thrice happy they who go to the world below having seen these mysteries; to them alone is life there, to others all is misery.'” (Sophocles, Fragm. 348) E. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888. The initiates “were bound to make their life on earth correspond to their initiation. In later times it was supposed even to make them better.” (Ibid.)] Every soul present was drawn into rapt communion and participation, every eye was focussed to witness and to partake in the symbol of one divine act, every heart bowed to adore “the great, the wonderful, the most perfect object of mystical contemplation,—an ear of wheat reaped in silence.”[“The Greeks of old knew that silence is not a negative but a positive thing. There is never a complete vacuum of stillness but only a hushing of the more dominant sounds. The silence of a northern night and of a southern noon; the silence of a forest, a moor, a sea: what resemblance is there between them, and how are they related to this silence of a worshipping multitude who came to Eleusis to learn—so an inscription tells us—’the fair and joyful truth that death is not an evil but a blessing to mortals.'”—E. S. Bosanquet, Days in Attica]
In spite of the difference of outward ceremonial there is a true inward connection [There are several interesting points of contact between the Mysteries (at Eleusis and elsewhere), and the ritual of Christian worship. It was the later Mystery Religions with their indoor rites of communion, that prepared the way for the Christian ritual observances rather than the open air sacrifices that went on outside the normal classical temple, accompanied as the latter were with hymn and dance and a hubbub of conversation among the worshippers. In contrast with these open air noisy rites of the state religion of Greece and Rome, silence as an attribute of highest worship is characteristic of the Mysteries, which were as has been said generally nocturnal, indoor or even subterranean. Later on, during the persecutions, Christianity was also forced into hiding, and often driven underground as a condition of survival, or even of continued existence, (as for instance in the Catacombs of Rome), and this reinforced its natural sympathy with the Mystery Religions. Another interesting point of similarity is that both in the Mysteries and in the Christian Church the altar is placed at the inner end of the meeting house, whereas the Greek or Roman temple invariably had its altar in front, outside the building. In the later history of Græco-Egyptian mysticism an extremely interesting example of Ritual Silence occurs in the so-called Mithras-Liturgie, although this is not strictly a liturgy, and can hardly represent the official Mithraic teaching. It is, rather, a Revelation, put by the writer in the mouth of Mithras, of the rites by which a worshipper may attain to the presence of the supreme God. In one “instruction” the novice is told what to do when as the result of his first prayer the Gods become visible to him and he to them. When they fix their eyes upon him and bear down upon him, he is to lay his forefinger on his mouth and say, “Silence! Silence! Silence! Password of the living imperishable God! Guard me, O Silence!”…Then shalt thou see the Gods looking kindly upon thee, and no longer rushing upon thee, but going about their business. So at later stages of the journey a prayer admits to each, and the same password, “Silence,” keeps the intruder safe. [A. Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 6] I am indebted to my brother-in-law, Prof. R. C. Bosanquet, for this information.] between this mystical spell of silence cast over the worshipping multitude in the dark Hall of Initiation, and the hush of utter stillness that unites the congregation in a dim, candle-lit Christian Church, at the culminating moment of the Sacrament of the Mass, when the tinkle of a silver bell calls the worshippers to adore in silence [It is true that in the Roman Liturgy there is no outward pause in the swift succession of words and of dramatic actions accompanying them, beyond the direction to the priest genuflexus adorat and this “adoration” is now usually interpreted as a rapid genuflection rather than a pause. But so far as the people are concerned the Roman Mass is generally said in silence, that is inaudibly, almost in toto. Therefore, as it is commonly said, it is in effect largely a service of silent fellowship directed by symbolic acts, which in silence convey a well understood succession of thought and devotion. In the liturgy of St. James there is a call to silence: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence…for the King of Kings cometh…” In the Roman and Sarum Missals a relic of ancient silence is preserved. There follows “Let us kneel,—Let us arise,” and a collect which gathers up the prayer of the silent interval. I owe this interesting information to Cyril Hepher.], not one gathered ear of wheat, as in Eleusis of old, but the broken Bread itself: “My body, given for you.”
In the Didaché or Teaching of the Apostles, a fragment dating from very early, if not from sub-apostolic times, the following words of meditation form part of the actual Giving-of-thanks:
“But with regard to the broken bread: We give thanks to Thee, Our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou hast made known to us through Thy Child Jesus, to Thee be glory for ever.
“As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, and being gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom.”
But after being filled, give thanks thus:
Remember O Lord, Thy Church to deliver her from all evil, and to perfect her in Thy love, and gather her together from the four winds, her the sanctified, into Thy Kingdom which Thou preparedst for her; for Thine is the power and the glory for ever.
Thus, from the earliest days of Christian worship, silent adoration, thanksgiving, and the prayer for unity have been woven into one. At first, however, the Way of Wonder was discovered less often by pilgrim spirits travelling in company than by separate souls journeying alone. If silence be the true road to unity it must first unite each separate soul with its unseen leader and with the cloud of witnesses within the Veil, before the consciousness of this timeless union can bind together the variegated minds and hearts of those who at any one period happen to be visibly journeying together on earth. This track through the thick wood of material things is not easy to find. The footsteps of many lonely pioneers wandering in solitude were necessary before the path became broad enough for associated pilgrims to tread together through the centuries. Thus the earliest records of the use of silence are often in connection with solitary prayer.
Clement of Alexandria [In the Stromata, see Life of Clement of Alexandria, vol. ii. p. 93, by H. B. Tollinton.] commends this form of worship above that of the congregation, when he says that the righteous man “will pray aloud sharing the common petitions of the faithful which are the true incense composed of many tongues and voices; or preferably he will pray silently without utterance, speaking in his heart to GOD.”
A prayer attributed to Saint Ambrose says: “Let thy good Spirit enter into my heart, and there be heard without utterance, and without the sound of words speak all truth.” [Quoted in Mysticism, by E. Underhill, p. 328.]
It is recorded also that the disciples of Saint Dionysius asked him why one of their number, named Timotheus, surpassed them all in perfection. Then said Dionysius, “Timotheus is receptive of GOD.” [Eckhart, Pred. 11.]
The unknown writer of the fifth century who preserves this story is indeed one of our true spiritual forerunners on this pathway, for silence, wonder (or adoration) and receptivity are only different names for the same attitude of the soul.
Very early in the Christian centuries, however, the way of silent worship bifurcated. Blessed and acknowledged by the Catholic Church it became on the one hand a broad highway shut in by high walls, roofed over, paved underfoot, in the compulsory silence enjoined by the great monastic communities.
Benedictines, Cistercians, Carthusians, Trappists; the soul of silence echoes through the names, or rather seems to reverberate through interminable corridors haunted by noiseless footsteps. Yet that there was both a true listening silence and a true speaking of the Inward Voice in some of these isolated cells is shown abundantly by many of the messages that have issued thence.
Listen to this fragment from an old English Carthusian, writing in the reign of King Henry:
“The secret voice of Jesus,” he says, “is full true, and it maketh a soul true, there is no feigning in it, nor fancy, pride or hypocrisy; but gentleness, humility, peace, love and charity: it is full of life, love and grace. And therefore when it soundeth in a soul, it is of so great power sometimes, that the soul suddenly layeth aside all that was in hand, as praying, speaking, reading or thinking, and all manner of outward work, and wholly listeneth thereto, hearing and perceiving in rest and in love the sweet sound of this spiritual voice, being as it were ravished from all earthly things.”
[Quoted in a curious old book A Tour through Holland and Flanders, written by Cornelius Cayley in 1777, p.81]
The exquisite “Listening Angel” of Southwell Cathedral seems the expression of these words carved in stone, showing the same rapt stillness of soul in those who, amid all the splendours of the earlier worship, yet understood the secret of silence and stole apart to hearken to the Inner Voice. Is it not this same attitude of alert listening for the Voice of God that our own age needs, not indeed to carve in lifeless stone but to impress upon the living spirits of its men and women?
In the words of the great Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, “The Eternal Father has spoken one word which is the Son, and He speaks it still in an Eternal Silence; the soul must listen to it in a like silence.”
This listening instinct is at the centre of all silent worship whether fettered or free. This compelling instinct drove the hermits of the Thebaid—those first silent communities—apart into the burning solitudes of the desert [The Arabic name for the desert is ” The place where He is all”]; and this instinct again prompted innumerable anchorites and hermits of after times to immure themselves within the narrow self-chosen limits of their cells. [“Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another’s want of conversation.” —A Quaker’s Meeting, by Charles Lamb]
The “so-called Hierotheus,” a Syrian monk of the fourth century, says: “To me it seems right to speak without words, and understand without knowledge, that which is above words and knowledge. This I apprehend to be nothing but the mysterious silence and mystical quiet which…dissolves forms. Seek, therefore, silently and mystically, that perfect and primitive union with the Arch-Good.” [Christian Mysticism, by W. R. Inge, p. 103]
Yet this ascetic monastic silence has dangers of its own. It is not without humours too, dangers and humours that are both shown in the, probably apocryphal, legend of the three anchoresses who agreed to live together under a vow of perpetual silence. At the end of the first year the first anchoress broke silence by saying: “This is a beautiful year after all.” At the end of the second year the second anchoress replied to the remark made the previous year by saying: “It is indeed.”
Not until the end of the third year did the third anchoress break silence with the words: “If you women go on chattering like this I shall go out into the world again!”
Nevertheless, whatever its dangers, this compulsory silence, whether in solitude or in communities, has endured throughout the centuries. Apart in narrow grottos and cells or else standardised into a pattern behind high conventual walls, this silent pathway still exists, rigid and dumb it may be, yet a way, although not our way, to the Celestial City, apart from the hubbub of the modern Vanity Fair.
In Fogazzaro’s powerful modern novel Il Santo there is a memorable scene when two passionate human souls, after long tragedy and separation, find themselves once again face to face in the corridor of a monastery, where upon the white walls “there was inscribed in large black letters the word:
SILENTIUM
For centuries, ever since that word was first written, no human voice had been heard there, within those walls. The great, black, imperial word, heavy with shadows and with death, triumphed over the two human souls, while outside the fury of the cataract and the storm bellowed against it in vain.”
“The great, black, imperial word, heavy with shadows and death”—such may be the compulsory silence of the cloister. Our Way of Wonder does not lie here. To find it we must go back in thought to an earlier, freer time, when the silence of even the holiest saints was not shut up within stone walls but was fresh and out-of-doors and filled with sunlight.
Think of that fragrant silence described by Saint Augustine in the Confessions, when he and his mother Monica were “at Ostia by Tiber” recruiting themselves for the sea voyage. [Conf., ix. 10]
“As the day drew near,” he says, “on which she was to depart from this life; Thou knewest it, though we did not; it fell out, as I believe, through the secret workings of Thy providence, that she and I were leaning by our-selves on the ledge of a certain window from which we looked down on the garden of our house…. Sweet was the converse we held together. We were discussing…of what kind would be the eternal life of the saints, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man…. And as our talk was leading us thither where we would be…we soared with a more glowing emotion to that Self-same, we wandered step by step through all material things, and even the very heaven whence sun and moon and stars shed their light upon the earth. And still higher did we climb by the staircase of the Spirit, thinking and speaking of Thee, and marvelling at Thy works. And so we came to our own minds and passed beyond them into the region of unfailing plenty where the Life Itself IS, as it was and shall be evermore because in it is neither past nor future but present only, for it is eternal…. And as we talked and yearned after it, we touched it for an instant with the whole force of our hearts….
“We said then, ‘If the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed these shadows of earth, sea and sky; hushed too the heavens, and if the very soul should be hushed to itself, so that it should pass beyond itself and not think of itself; if all dreams were hushed and every tongue and every symbol; if all transitory things were hushed utterly—suppose we heard His word without any intermediary at all—just now we reached out and with one flash of thought touched the Eternal Wisdom that abides above all.’—Suppose this endured, might not eternal life be like this moment of comprehension for which we sighed?”
This “moment of comprehension” reached by two human souls in perfect harmony with each other is like the perfect attunement of two musical instruments soaring together and resting in a pause of completed harmony as the highest note dies away into silence.
Yet, perfect as it is, this double silence is only the prelude to the full orchestral silence of a whole fellowship waiting to be revealed in later days. But the hour for that was not yet come.
Nine centuries after that sunset evening at Ostia another double silence of comprehension has left an ineffaceable mark on the page of history. Here again the silence is of two souls only—united in this case neither by any fleshly tie, nor by the memories of a life-time of shared sorrows and joys, but known to each other by spiritual sympathy alone and united in one silent embrace. In the Little Flowers of St. Francis the story is told how, after the death of Francis, St. Louis, King of France, came disguised as a Pilgrim to visit Brother Giles in his convent at Perugia. But it had been revealed to Brother Giles that the seeming pilgrim was the King of France, wherefore he “left his cell in haste and ran to the gate without asking any questions. They knelt down and embraced each other with great reverence and many outward signs of love, as if a long friendship had existed between them, though they had never met before in their lives. Neither of them spoke a word, and after remaining clasped in each other’s arms for some time they separated in silence.”
Later, when the other brothers learned who the seemingly humble Pilgrim had been, they reproached Brother Giles bitterly for his silence; to whom Brother Giles answered, “Beloved Brothers, be not surprised at this, as neither I could say a word to him nor he to me, for no sooner had we embraced each other than…we saw into each other’s hearts and knew far better what we had to say than if we had explained in words what we had experienced in our souls. The tongue of man reveals so imperfectly the secret mysteries of God, that words would have been to us rather a hindrance than a consolation.”
“Let not him that seeks cease until he find,” true at Ostia, true at Perugia, still true to-day. “When he finds he shall wonder, when he wonders he shall reign, when he reigns he shall rest.”
The “Prayer of Quiet” of Teresa of Avila, the Spanish warrior saint, is different both from the hush of Ostia, and from the embrace at Perugia, but it is another link in the chain, another stage on the long journey.
Teresa, though herself a professed nun, knew intimately both the free and the compulsory forms of silence. In her own experience and out of her own early spiritual struggles she had discovered the need for what she calls “passive prayer” or “mental retirement.”
In this prayer she distinguishes four stages [Rev. Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. II. p. 673, et seq.]:
(1) Holy Meditation, (2) Prayer of Quiet, (3) Repose of the Soul, and (4) Prayer of Union. For, as she truly observes, “the servants of divine love arrive not on a sudden at the highest degree of prayer.” In later life, when, as prioress of a convent, Teresa was herself in a position to direct the devotions of others, she declared “assiduous prayer, silence, close retirement and penance to be the four pillars of the spiritual edifice she had raised.” [Ibid, 688] “Settle yourselves in solitude,” she says to those “dear daughters” of hers whom she entreats to be “valiant men”—…and you will come upon God in yourselves…Those who can in this manner shut themselves up in the little heaven of their own hearts, where He dwells who made heaven and earth, let them be sure that they walk in the most excellent way; they lay their pipe right up to the fountain.” “God never withholds Himself from him who pays this price and who perseveres in seeking Him.” “God is the soul of my soul,” she declares in another passage, “He engulfs Himself into my soul.”
All seeking souls are one upon this way. Not only have the great saints and mystics of the Church carried the Silent Way of Wonder on towards its goal, those
shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun;
we owe our Way of Worship also to the philosophers and to the heretics. Among the former, Sir Thomas More notes unity, gentleness and silence as characteristic of the worship of the Utopians.
“For King Utopus,” he says…”hearing that the inhabitants of the land were before his coming thither at continual dissension and strife among themselves for their religion…made a decree that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring the other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others…This law did King Utopus make not only for the maintenance of peace,…but also because he thought this decree should make for the furtherance of religion. Whereof he durst define and determine nothing unadvisedly as doubting whether GOD desiring manifold and divers sorts of honour, would inspire sundry men with sundry kinds of religion.”
In Utopia “they have priests of exceeding holiness and therefore very few,” not only men but women, “for that kind is not excluded from the priesthood, howbeit few be chosen and none but widows or old women.”
“Religion and devotion,” we read, “are not there of one sort among all men, and yet all the kinds and fashions of it, though they be sundry and manifold, agree together in the honour of the divine nature, as going divers ways to one end.”…In the Churches “no prayers be used but such as every man may boldly pronounce without the offending of any sect…When they come thither, the men go into the right side of the church and the women into the left side. the priest first cometh out of the vestry…they fall down every one reverently to the ground with so still silence on every part that the very fashion of the thing striketh unto them a certain fear of God, as though He were there personally present.” [Utopia, Bk. II]
In the atmosphere of courts and philosophers worship in silence and in unity such as is here described was, even in the sixteenth century, an exotic. It could only grow and flourish in Utopia.
Yet, more than three centuries before, far humbler folk than the Tudor Chancellor had transplanted the same rare plant with success into the spiritual soil of their own homes and had actually cultivated it successfully in practice. In Paris, in 1209, the first Society was formed of people who believed in “the actual reign of the Holy Spirit now within the hearts of men” and who cultivated silence in order to discover the Inward Presence, “the joy of finding themselves free in GOD, and of feeling His life palpitate within their own being.” [R.M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 180]
But this little company of practical Utopians were given a harsher name by the ecclesiastical authorities of their day: they were broken up and exterminated as heretics, those who proved “obstinate” being put to the stake “without showing any sign of repentance” for their supposed sin of heresy.
“Heresy? At the word I see a long, keen line of Light, the Very Truth, borne down the highway of the ages by their hands, those whom the Church has called Heretics and made into Schismatics.” [E. Waterhouse, Thoughts of a Tertiary]
In the fourteenth century the pathway of these heretical pilgrims begins to broaden. The “long, keen line of light” they carry illuminates first Germany and the Low Countries and then—like a revolving searchlight—is borne across the stormy waters of the North Sea until at last it rests on England.
In Germany the beginnings of united silent worship are found, about 1350, among the “Friends of God,” and other like-minded communities in their “quiet nests.”
“They hear,” says one of them, “in their own souls what they are to speak.” [R.M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 259] Simplicity of language is one of the distinguishing marks of this higher state of immediate revelation, which was known as “the upper school of the Holy Ghost,” in which “the scholars speak only in words of one syllable.” Here, as in many later instances, the use of silence in worship accompanies the very small stress that is laid on sacraments, or, rather, the very great stress that is laid on their spiritual significance.
“If the Holy Church wishes to deprive us of the external sacrament, we must submit,” [Ibid, p. 275] writes Tauler, one of the best known of these early “Friends of God,” “but nobody can take from us the privilege of taking the sacrament spiritually.”
Throughout the ages those spirits who could surrender themselves to it, seem to have found in the unity of a silent gathering that which other, differently constituted, souls have found in the Sacrament of the Altar—the true Holy Communion;—the meeting-place of the human spirit with the divine; the perception, through the temporal, of the eternal.
Tauler’s Master in this silent way was Eckhart, “the profoundest of all German mystics,” as he has been called. [Ibid, p. 224] Of him an old scribe wrote: “This is that Meister Eckhart from whom God kept nothing hid.” Eckhart describes the crown of all true worship—silent or sacramental—in the simplest words:
“Thou needst not call Him to thee from a distance; thy opening and His entering are but one moment: it is harder for Him to wait, than for Thee.”
Thus in their communities on either side of the Rhine the French spirituals of the early thirteenth century, as well as these German “Friends of God” in their “quiet nests” in the middle of the fourteenth, are among the earliest heralds of the dawn of a new day.
Two centuries later another group of spiritual reformers pressed on further along the same path in later morning light. These were Denck, Schwenckfeld, Weigel and many others whose names even had been forgotten, until our Friend, Rufus Jones, rescued the separate threads from the relentless roller of Oblivion (to use the imagery of the old Norse legend), and unfolded their lives and thoughts afresh in vivid colours. In his volume, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, he clearly shows that though their names may have been forgotten, their spirits are in harmony both with one another and with many greater mystics, whose love of united silence they also share.
“I cannot belong to any separate sect,” writes one of the earliest of them, “but I believe in a holy, Christ-like church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ among all sects, faiths and peoples, scattered throughout the whole world.” [Spiritual Reformers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, R.M. Jones, p. 52] Yet it was the writer’s “ideal purpose to promote the formation of little groups of spiritual Christians which should live in the land in quietness and spread by an inward power and inspiration received from above.” [Ibid, p. 82] They believed that “all spiritual service arises through the definite call and commission of God, and the persons so called and commissioned are rightly prepared for their service, not by election and ordination but by inward compulsion and illumination through the Word of God.”
These stillen Frommen or “quiet spirituals” “formed a little meeting,—in every respect like a seventeenth century Quaker meeting—in their own homes, meeting about in turn, discarding all use of sacraments, and waiting on God for edification rather than on public preaching. [Ibid, p. 83]…They sought and found a transfigured life, ‘a radiant life,’ ‘a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines on the face,—a joy which can turn even hard exile into a Ruheschloss, a castle of peace.'” [Ibid, p. 72]
But these stillen Frommen were before their time. “They were eventually discovered, their leaders banished, their books burned, and their little meeting of ‘quiet spirituals’ ruthlessly stamped out. Societies something like this were formed in scores of places, and continued to cultivate their inward piety in the Fatherland until, harried by persecution, they migrated in 1734 to Pennsylvania, where they have continued to maintain their community life until the present day,” [Ibid, p. 83] doubtless to the Fatherland’s irreparable spiritual loss.
A little later than the stillen Frommen very similar views and teaching spread to Holland where another small society was formed under the name of the Collegium. [Spiritual Reformers, Chap. vii. ; and Beginnings of Quakerism, by W.C. Braithwaite, p. 410] Its members refused to fight even in self-defense, would not take oaths, or even acquiesce in punishments inflicted by civil law. They chose the Sermon on the Mount as their one guide and tried to follow its precepts literally. They sought to keep the Sabbath, not in a ceremonial or legal sense but in “an inward quiet, a prevailing peace of soul, a rest in the life of God from strain and stress and passion.” “They rejected the Supper as an ecclesiastical ceremony but they highly prized it as an occasion for fellowship and group worship.” “They encouraged the custom of silent waiting in their gatherings as a preparation for ‘openings.’ At the same time they did not undervalue the spoken word. One of the original members declared that ‘he should fear the loss of his salvation if he failed in a meeting to give utterance to the Word of God revealed to him in his inner being.'”
Here at last is our true Way emerging broad and clear. Not an anchorite’s cell in the desert under the burning Libyan sun; not compulsory silence behind monastic walls; not the constant repetition of “hammered words,” or forms of prayer, however ancient, however hallowed by association and use; not the preaching of “conned and gathered stuff,” but the ever-new miracle, the birth of living words from the depths of living silence: this, these obscure Collegiants had surely found.
And not they alone. This form of worship, or something similar to it, was at that time—as we should say now—”in the air.”
In this same sixteenth century there arose, also in Holland, the sect of the “Family of Love” whose founder, Henry Nicholas, laid stress on the necessity for “quiet waiting in silence.” “Grow up in stillness and singleness of heart,” he says, “praying for a right sight in the truth, for that shall make you free.” He urges his family “to break spiritual bread together in stillness, abiding steadfast in prayer, till all covering wherewith their hearts, after the flesh, are covered is done away, that is to say until the spiritual, heavenly, and uncovered being of Christ appears and comes to their spirit.” [Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 439]
These Familists, as the followers of Nicholas were called, seem to have been for the most part humble folk, since the chief elders among them were described as “weavers, basket-makers, musicians, bottle-makers and such like.” They were already to be found in England in the middle of the sixteenth century. “They swarm and dayly increase in the Isle of Ely,” writes a Cambridge M.A. in 1579. [Ibid, p. 443]
Although another of their opponents declares that “the errors of the sect be so foull and so filthy, as would force the very penne in passing to stay and stop her nose,” nothing seems to have been proved against them beyond their tenets which were said, a century later, to be a sort of “refined Quakerism.”
They insisted first of all upon a “deep inward experience” or discovery of God in the soul.
“The true Light,” said Nicholas, “is the everlasting life itself and shows itself through illuminated, i.e., godded men, for through such persons the Most High is manned [incarnated].”
“In addition…the Familist rejected oaths and war, and capital punishment, and his position towards the Bible and towards outward rites and ceremonies was substantially the same as that taken by Friends. Moreover, like Fox, Nicholas made much of quiet waiting in silence.” [Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 23]
“The congregation does not speak until admitted to do so…They may not say ‘God speed, God morrow, or God even’…When a question is demanded of any they stay a great while ere they answer, and commonly their word shall be ‘Surely’ or ‘So’…They bragge verie much of their own sincere lives, saying ‘marke how purelie we live.'” [Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 441]
“These people were called Seekers by some, and the Family of Love by others,” writes William Penn, but this identification of the two sects seems hardly correct, since the Familists’ headquarters remained in the Isle of Ely, whereas the ‘Seekers’ were to be found in small groups and companies in various parts of England. Yet that they were nearly allied to one another is shown by Penn’s further description of both.
“As they [the Seekers] came to the knowledge of one another, they sometimes met together, not formally to pray or preach, at appointed times and places, in their own wills, as in times past they were accustomed to do, but waited together in silence, and as anything rose in any one of their minds that they thought favoured a divine spring, so they sometimes spoke.”
Compare the following extract from Charles Marshall’s journal:
“And in those times, viz., about the year 1654, there were many in those parts who were seeking after the Lord, and there were a few of us who kept one day in the week for fasting and prayer; so that when this day came, few met together early in the morning and did not taste anything. We sat down sometimes in silence; and as any found a concern on their spirits and inclination in their hearts they kneeled down and sought the Lord; so that sometimes, before the day ended, there might be twenty of us pray, men and women; on some of those occasions children spake a few words in prayer; and we were sometimes greatly bowed and broken before the Lord, in humility and tenderness.”
The silence of these Seekers, “thirsty souls that hunger,” was not an addition to their worship: it was an essential part of it. “Their Silence came out of their Seeking, and their Seeking out of their Search for Reality.” [W. C. Braithwaite]
To these plastic communities of Seekers, George Fox was sent in the first divine fury of his prophetic mission. His strong soul acted as the signet to their gentle wax and stamped them with the indelible impression of Quakerism.
George Fox also had discovered in silence and in loneliness the path of receptivity that gradually widened out before him and became a broad highway along which thousands of liberated souls were to follow him as their leader.
Even in childhood he was noted as being “religious, inward, still, solid and observing beyond his years.” [W. Penn. Preface to G. Fox’s Journal] “When at the age of twenty he left his home and friends he sought for light in solitude and silence, and often walked in the Chace to wait upon the Lord.” From the silent musings of his own soul he went on to the silent Seekers: “the most retired and religious people… who waited for the consolation of Israel night and day.”
“At this time he taught and was an example of silence, endeavouring to bring people from self-performances, to the light of Christ within them, and encouraging them to wait in patience to feel the power of it to stir in their hearts…. Accordingly several meetings were gathered in those parts”—gathered, apparently, rather through the convincing reality of his silence than through any eloquence of preaching, since, as William Penn notes in a pregnant sentence, “his more ample ministry was not yet come upon him.” Yet, doubtless, then as later, he knew how to “speak a word in due season especially to them that were weary and wanted soul’s rest, being deep in the Divine mysteries of the Kingdom of God…whereby many were convinced of their great duty of inward retiring to wait upon God, and as they became diligent in the performance of that service were also raised to be preachers.” Note how emphatically the spoken word is here made to depend upon the diligent use of silence.