Valuing Silence

It’s easy to suggest that the modern world detests silence. Entire industries exist to stamp it out wherever it exists. Public spaces—now that we have them again, at least for the time being—come pre-packaged with elaborate stereo systems to ensure that silence never accidentally creeps into modern life. We’ve been conditioned to flee from silence by any means necessary, to the point of seemingly crippling addictions to internet contraptions and subscription streaming services. If you’re one of the many unfortunates trapped in a dense urban environment, you couldn’t get away from the noise if you tried.

Even colloquially, silence during a conversation is considered awkward. We make up words or force small talk in order to avoid feeling it wrapped around us, afraid it might consume something of ours that we can’t even identify. Our personalities, maybe. It’s considered an absence, a void, nothingness, and so to fill it, we speak profanely or at least unnecessarily, we put something to drone on in the background, we put headphones over our ears. And we tell ourselves that these distractions let us concentrate better.

As Robert Cardinal Sarah illustrated in his 2016 book, The Power of Silence, there is an antidote to this chaos—and it’s not summarized in twelve rules for life as transcribed by a self-professed Canadian maniac. Properly diagnosing this chaos, both its exterior and its interior manifestations, is vital to understanding its antidote. As Cardinal Sarah writes,

Modern society can no longer do without the dictatorship of noise. It lulls us in an illusion of cheap democracy while snatching our freedom away with the subtle violence of the devil, that father of lies. But Jesus repeatedly tells us: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:31-32).¹

This piece is not a review of Cardinal Sarah’s book, but it would be foolish not to cite it with some occasion considering its content and thrust. First we must consider noise in order to determine how the modern world uses and understands it, and then we should consider how exterior noise disorders our interior lives. This leads to what we could call interior noise. Only after we have properly evaluated the nature of these related senses of noise will we be able to approach what silence is and why it’s necessary.

Exterior Noise

When we consider silence, we typically conceive of an absence of noise. While incomplete, this is a useful starting point for what silence actually is; with this in mind, we can consider noise in the two obvious forms that it comes in: exterior noise and interior noise.

Exterior noise is what first comes to mind with silence’s immediate oppressor. It’s the loud music we choose (or in public, don’t choose) to listen to. It’s the podcasts we shove into our ears. It’s the television in the background of every airport lounge. Some exterior noises are indications of neutral acts, or themselves are neutral—the sound of a lawn being mowed outside, for instance, or of construction occurring in a big city. These aren’t sounds we can usually control. They’re part of the sonic landscape and, for anyone whose hearing is overly sensitive, especially loud pockmarks on this ‘soundscape’ are things to be avoided like a keen driver tries to avoid potholes. It’s not always possible.

It goes without saying that all noise is not simply background noise. As mentioned, we choose to engage with what goes into our ears with somewhat of the same capacity that we choose what sort of light enters our eyes. How we change what we’re listening to isn’t difficult to compare how we choose what to look at. If we’re constantly seeking indecent imagery, or if we’re intentionally exposing our vision to ugliness, our participation in the beautiful becomes degraded—and this affects both our ability to reason as well as our moral character. The same is true for our hearing, though not with quite as obvious results.

There are a couple reasons that this is not as obvious. One is simply because human beings naturally rely on their sight more than their hearing, unless otherwise deprived of their vision. This can’t be helped. But the second reason can: modern life, especially modern urban life, trains us to dismiss our hearing more readily than we would otherwise. The incessant buildup of background noise in urban environments has been aided by the last century of architectural aggression against the human form. Streets filled with cars and lined with glass, steel, and concrete towers produces an acoustic hellscape that forces anyone stuck in it into a depersonalized state. You have to ‘turn your ears off’ or otherwise you’re completely disoriented.

On the other side of things, we’re readily supplied a steady diet of sonic distractions in the form of music commodities, advertisements, radio, and video. The proliferation of the home radio in the first half of the last century opened a door that can’t easily be shut, but it was the development of the music industry, proliferation of the LP, and FM radio that all occurred later on which destroyed the airwaves. After generations of distorted noise pollution amusingly referred to as ‘music’, which was propped up by a top-down ‘pop culture’ engineered by LA-elite executives, and we have what we see today: music turned into a tool of mental isolation.

Which leads us to an interesting point. Isolation indicates a deprivation, a removal of a subject from things it relates to. A typical image of isolation is a man stranded in the desert, or someone thrown into a desolate prison cell. And yet, this isolation is characterized not by deprivation but by plenty. A lover of modern music finds himself with no shortage of entertainment. The curious-inclined, so long as they have internet access, can tune into countless podcasts, interviews, or media concerning virtually any subject imaginable. And yet, by engaging with this consumption, it isolates this man not just from the world immediately around him, but from himself as well.

Maybe there’s a reasonable balance to be struck when dealing with media consumption. Surely that balance would be different from everyone, if it exists. Popular audio media features content all across the scale of acceptability—all pop music obviously isn’t evil by its nature, just as all television shows aren’t pornography. However, just because something isn’t by its very nature sinful and vile doesn’t therefore mean that it’s good to merely consume it. There could very well be bands who don’t sing about sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, or Satanism, but the mere fact they feature benign lyrics isn’t enough to conclude that we should be listening to them for a majority of our waking hours.

And there is a difference between periodically imbibing and the behavior of an addict. Media today should be treated not too differently from alcohol, albeit with a moral dimension that alcohol surely lacks. Drinking bad alcohol, after all, is at most an offense against taste; the mere existence of pornography, much less even the briefest indulgence in it, is a moral offense that far exceeds its aesthetical deficiencies. Nonetheless, taking the analogy further, if we sideline that mortally sinful entertainment altogether and treat only with what’s not innately evil, the subjection of the will to the endless noise of popular entertainment still corrodes the soul. It acts as an interfering jamming signal placed between man’s ability to observe himself and God’s incessant, loving calls to him.

Interior Noise

And so we can acknowledge that exterior noise functions in two ways: first, as a distraction from more pressing concerns, and second, if indulged in habitually, as a reinforced barrier to spiritual contemplation. It is this second aspect that we should deal more thoroughly with here.

Although we rely on our vision more than our hearing, usually, in everyday life, our hearing plays a much more active role in our interior lives. Interior monologues, the ability to dialogue, language itself, and turning images into expressed forms—each of these takes a sense of hearing that is ultimately unique to interior perception, but is informed by our experiences of the exterior sense. So it is without difficulty that we can address interior noise in much the same way we can address its exterior form: disorder, interference, and unpleasantness.

While it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the NPC memes have more truth to them than we might want to admit, those of us with our self reflection skills intact can still recognize what it’s like when our minds are too cluttered to think straight. You try to hold onto a thought, and in a minute’s time, you’re contemplating something utterly unrelated—a memory from your childhood, what to do next on a project back at work, what that sound is in your basement, you name it. Sometimes chemicals play a roll in the frequency of these distractions; caffeine in particular, if consumed past the point of what is appropriate, leads to interior jitters before you get exterior shakes. But media consumption also plays a roll in this.

It’s easy to dismiss this as simply having stumbled upon the long-recognized link between media consumption and short attention spans. We’ve known for at least a decade that social media hamstrings people’s ability to pay attention to things, and for three decades that television ruins the attention spans of children. But there’s more to this than the generic anti-tech talking point frequently parroted or promoted by the extremely online. Think critically here: how is it that media does this to us? It’s not enough to recognize that it does, we should want to know how, and babbling about endocrine receptors or dopamine isn’t enough to give us a relevant answer.

With this in mind, we turn again to Robert Cardinal Sarah:

Without noise, man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent. With its festive appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself. Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a morphine pump, a sort of reverie, an incoherent dream-world. But this noise is a dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness. The awakening will necessarily be brutal.²

Cardinal Sarah refers here to exterior noise mentioned above, but he draws out a deeper issue. With regard to postmodern man, he emphasizes an interior emptiness that such men use noise—unsuccessfully—to fill up. This emptiness does not indicate silence, necessarily, as we shall soon see. Rather, media consumption is used as an inefficient if not outright harmful attempt to nurture man’s innate faculties; consider the image of a man consuming candy, or worse, poison, in place of food, because he’s so hungry and so blind that he cannot recognize real meat and vegetables. Such spiritual amnesia would be easy to make excuses for were it not at every minute imposed interiorly, tacitly agreed to, and explained away.

In light of this analogy, consuming exterior distractions does take its toll on the interior life. Maybe it’s possible to undo this damage, at least to some extent—going overboard with candy consumption ruins the body’s metabolism and wrecks your bathroom scale, but most of its harmful effects can usually be undone by changing one’s eating habits and diet. Consuming poison regularly, on the other hand, does irreversible damage; if you recover from it, the body still carries the poison’s wounds, albeit papered over with scar tissue. The same holds true for our media consumption. Some of it is like candy; some of it is poison.

Silence

In recognizing noise’s twofold existence, its exterior and its interior forms, and how it attacks the soul, we should remember too what the soul is: the image of God. Exterior noise seeks to worm its way into our interior lives, either by habit or by force. In doing so, it imposes itself between the soul and God. In order to undo this, we should work backwards, so to speak, and by working backwards, we will understand how best to define silence.

As such, consider silence as defined in three layers. Each layer refers to a specific and indispensable aspect, with the foremost being its most obvious and the deepest being its most hidden. The foremost, for our purposes, is silence’s deprivative quality. It’s impossible to speak of silence without understanding that it is, obviously, an absence of noise. Ignoring this would be a fool’s errand, but so would merely stopping here and considering our task done—as modern sensibility suggests.

It is total deprivation of noise that first frightens such sensibility, and why silence is so frequently maligned, even if only implicitly, but the modern world. It removes the exterior distractions that torment the interior life, making inward vision clearer; it forces a man to recognize that he is alone in the world, or at least that he seems to be. The terror that accompanies this apparent isolation occurs to the modern mind because it has not trained to see within itself the spiritual life. Because although each man may live in isolation in the world, no man is ever truly alone, but it is only in the silence of interior contemplation that he can come to recognize this.

We could be reminded of friends or family in order to rebut the notion of our solitary journeys through modern life. True, reliable bonds of friendship, blood, and camaraderie are important to establish and maintain, and they do tend to ease whatever loneliness might creep into the heart. But a simple momento mori suffices to establish what we’re really talking about here.

It is not that every man is truly alone, in the sense that social bonds mean nothing beyond some reductionist sense of happy feelings. It is that every man intuitively grasps that his death will be his own, and only his own, whether he dies in the company of his loved ones or in the solitude of an empty room. So understanding death, this casts life as a long sojourn toward that moment, in which all of his experiences are carried with him under the mark of his ownership. His memories, his pain, his struggles, and his interior disposition: these are what he can take with him into the grave, and indeed what he will take with him, while whatever friends or loved ones survive him remain on the surface to lower him down.

The deprivative aspect of silence provides for us such a momento mori. It deprives us of outward conversation or distraction. It confines our attention to ourselves or to the task at hand. It strips away excuses for looking anywhere other than at what we presume to be ourselves.

Recognizing this sort of isolation is what leads to the second understanding of silence: insulation. Becoming accustomed to exterior silence naturally leads to this conclusion. Exterior silence provides an insulation for the interior life, especially when the interior life is still immature, sick, or otherwise weak. It is difficult enough for someone experienced in prayer to find an interior silence when stuffed into the chaos of modern noisiness, but for those unfamiliar even with contemplation, whose interior disposition has been familiarized only with superfluous daydreaming or, worse, self-cannibalizing neuroses, even attempting interior reflection is practically impossible.

As a man is familiarized with the insulating aspect of silence, he finds that it will guard his interior disposition more firmly when he is thrust into the world of exterior calamity. Awareness of his interior life becomes easier to remember and tap into. Stability and clarity of thought, while not guaranteed, are easier options to choose in the heat of the moment. The insulating feature of silence means that the will becomes more known and of greater utility. Clearing out interior noise grants the will a freedom of movement that he was otherwise blind to.

This insulation will seem like isolation at first, as mentioned above. But it is the soul’s attention on its discrepancies that causes discord with God’s calling. We can hear God only interiorly; although we can read as much Scripture as we want, and gird our studies with the writings of the saints, mystics, doctors, and theologians of the Church, it is our interior disposition that allows us to discern God’s presence in mental prayer. Exercises in theology exist specifically to aid in our understanding of recognizing God so as to properly order our prayer life—and by extension, our exterior lives—around Him.

These discrepancies that come to our attention in this silence are ones that it seems God draws specific attention to. Consider that His love for us is greater than our love for Him can possibly be. He wants our ills attended to, our sins absolved, our evil habits destroyed even more than we could, if only we would will to align ourselves with Him. But this gets us to a deeper level of what silence is.

The third element is what Cardinal Sarah’s book is largely about, though he uses different terminology: inundation. It is in this sense that our communication with God is possible in the form of meditative prayer. Optimally, this is done in full communion with the Church, as it is only by being in full communion that the sacramental graces according to one’s station in life are available. Attempting to cultivate a healthy, lively interior life without access to the sacraments of penance and communion seems out of the question, and the very idea that such a thing is possible without baptismal graces is absurd on its face.

It should be noted, however, that for those outside of the Church, focusing on the interior life is still important. In fact, such focus may indeed be the precipitator of conversion, in which God’s callings are finally heeded and heard amid the ruckus of our interior noise. Receiving the Sacraments while living, as best we can, a virtuous life ordered toward He Who rests on the altar—this is the foundation of all Christian life. Our private penances, grievings, grievances, beseechings, and thanksgivings, done in the darkness of our long journeys through life, serve to magnify this basic experience of Christian living. In order to die to ourselves so that we may live in Christ, we must recognize first what is dying so that who may live.

Where can we possibly find this guidance from? How do we know God when we see Him? How can we recognize Him, if he comes seemingly cloaked in an unpierceable silence? He tells us Himself, in language we’re sure to understand, but only when we have cast aside those things polluting our interior lives. The ‘inundation’ we refer to indicates a deluge of something from somewhere toward someplace else; it is God’s deluge of graces, provided purely out of his infinite love, and flooded directly into the soul. God does most of the work here.

In recognizing the inundative aspect of silence, we can consider silence not as deprivation per se, but as great filling of God’s love. This love fills soul, provides insulation from evil, and deprives us of those exterior distractions that we come to dislike anyway. It provides a baseline for understanding a true, lived experience. It shapes for us an interior space in which God can come to dwell.

So far from an isolating, distancing, or depriving notion, silence becomes a means by which we come to know God interiorly. Silence enables us to recognize what is true, good, and beautiful. It enriches our lives, which makes us more genuine. Our penances become more sorrowful, our communions more grateful. Our friendships deepen and our enemies more deeply forgiven. Embracing silence begins the formation of the interior life so necessary for salvation, and indeed, proper living. It engages us, enlivens us, feeds us. Because that silence, ultimately, is a medium specifically for God to be found within us.

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