Academics who become TV personalities necessarily also become divided personalities. Thus Diarmaid MacCulloch can be seen for general consumption on YouTube as an expounder of the convolutions of both Christian and UK history, and in his books A History of Christianity [reviewed in the Taipei Times Sept. 26, 2010] and now Silence: A Christian History as a scrupulous and deeply-burrowing scholar.
But it’s easy to see the stalwart MacCulloch, be-hatted against the sun, staring out across some desert when making his TV series about Christianity, listening to the silence, and contemplating what was once heard there, but is now lost.
This new book has a general subject, of course, but the feeling reading it is that it’s really a series of additions and footnotes to the History of Christianity. The technique is the same, for instance — a huge number of topics, each researched via scholarly articles and the like, strung together in an awe-inspiring sequence.
Lost texts are certainly one concern, and MacCulloch quotes an estimate that 85 percent of documents known in the first 150 years after Christ have now disappeared. But there are other kinds of silence too. “The history of Christianity,” the author writes, “is full of things casually or deliberately forgotten, or left unsaid.” Historical amnesia and prudent silences abound.
Certain preoccupations are discernible, in this book as in the last. Among these are the long subjugation of women in all Christian traditions from the earliest years (when women were quite important), that an enforced chastity for priests is unique to Roman Catholicism (and by implication the cause of many of its current woes), that homosexuality isn’t necessarily sinful (MacCulloch comes out as gay loudly and clearly in this book), and that the Roman church suffers from its centralization, something that only dates back 200 years. Many of these issues are summarized in comments he made for The Guardian after the resignation of Pope Benedict, also conveniently available on YouTube.
It’s important to understand that there are many different kinds of silence covered here. There’s the not-invariable silence of the Almighty, for example. There are the multiple silences of the various Christian monastic orders, as well as the opposition of many Protestant leaders to church music, plus the silent prayers of the Quakers, together with many other denominations. Silence was simultaneously a way to approach the mysteries of creation, in other words, and a way to begin to emulate the ultimate silence of the creator himself.
But MacCulloch also includes another kind of silence, the refusal to talk about embarrassing or shameful historical incidents, and no doubt the combination of all these different sorts of silence attracted him in the first place. Either way, the later sections of the book, covering Christian silence about slavery, the oppression of women, and gays, are the most accessible and the most interesting in the book. Elsewhere MacCulloch’s fascination with the minutiae of ancient ecclesiastical controversies can make for hard reading, though his undoubted expertise in unraveling them usually wins the day.
Some critics have found Silence poetic, but I wouldn’t go that far. G.K. Chesterton’s poem The Rolling English Road is more likely to convert me to Christianity than this book, though MacCulloch’s aim isn’t evangelical, nor is he these days so much a Christian as a deeply sympathetic observer of multiple Christian traditions.
There are numerous topics covered which silence barely touches — the presence of Armenian bishops in Medieval Iceland, the “Family of Love” in 16th century England, the writer intriguingly known as the Pseudo-Dionysius, the Gnostic texts contemporary with Jesus discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, Orthodox icons, the fact that the last Papal Index wasn’t abolished until 1966, and many more.
Sometimes, indeed, MacCulloch has to lean over backwards to make even a negative connection with his main subject. “Silence is a word conspicuous by its absence from the writings of [Ignatius] Loyola” is one example, while another man’s death by fire resulted after he “refused to remain silent.”
Nonetheless, fascinating observations on silence proliferate. The alleged visions of the Virgin Mary at Knock in Western Island in 1879 were characterized by her silence. But, comments MacCulloch, which language she might have spoken — Gaelic or English — was politically sensitive at the time. Similarly, we tend to remember the dead in silence these days, often because any spoken remembrance would be likely to offend, or omit, someone in a modern pluralistic society.
For the rest, there’s a side-swipe at Mozart (operatic where he should have been reverential), an observation that shrines in Western Europe are more visited today than at any time since the Reformation, and a reminder that things can indeed change — the taboo on menstruating women at the altar was virtually uniform across all denominations for 1,700 years, but is now forgotten.
If you asked me what was most memorable in this densely-packed book I would say its seven pages on “Gay Anglo-Catholics.” They’re quite astoundingly revealing.
Once, as a teenager, I stood outside a bookshop window in the UK’s Stratford-upon-Avon and saw displayed a book on Shakespeare. I was at the time beleaguered by contrasting critical opinions on the bard, and decided that I would solve the problem by buying this book and making it “what I believed.” I was soon cured of this absurdity, I’m happy to say, but it strikes me that many people attach themselves to a religious denomination for the same kind of reason.
No one could be further removed from this type of panicking short-cut than Diarmaid MacCulloch who appears to know almost everything about Christianity in its innumerable manifestations, but keeps his head and resolutely refuses to commit himself to any of them. This is true wisdom, and no one reading this book can fail to be touched by it.
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