Envoi: ‘þis seli stilðe’: Silence and Stillness in the Anchorhold: Lessons for the Modern World?

Summary

Catherine Innes-Parker's PhD thesis was ‘A Study of the Relationship between Sexuality and Spirituality in Anchoritic Literature’, acknowl-edging both her own feminism and her more private, but very real, spiritual side. Using ‘spiritual’ in a broad sense, I am exploring here the spirituality of anchoritic literature and questioning whether that has some personal relevance in the modern world, in particular thinking of ‘silence’ as a spiritual practice. Catherine was very supportive when I gave a version of this essay at the International Anchoritic Society (IAS) conference in Norwich in 2018; I regret that I can no longer discuss with Catherine the value of the silence of the anchorite to the present world, a world that is increasingly noisy, busy and frantic and which is beset with existential problems from pandemic to the climate crisis, but I appreciate the opportunity to give a voice to ideas about silence, medieval anchoritism and the modern world as a tribute to her. There may be a limit to how far academic analysis can explore these ideas; as the thirteenth-century Persian mystic and poet Rumi said: ‘Some commentary clarifies, but with love silence is clearer.’

SILENCE IN THE MODERN WORLD

I remember being taken for a hike up Kinder Scout in the early 1960s when I was about five years old. Kinder Scout is the highest point in the Peak District: it is not a ‘peak’ but a desolate waste of high moorland. I had never before heard the howling silence of that empty landscape and clung on to my father's hand. That moment of silence had an intensity that has stayed with me for over fifty-five years, and after my father's death I found myself studying anchoritism. Now as I write this while many people are still struggling with feelings of isolation in the aftermath of a global pandemic, it seems pertinent to look at what silence meant for those living in isolation and seclusion by choice, how valuable it was in their spiritual lives and whether their practices can offer any lessons for the modern world. A present-day Benedictine monk has written about the experience of lockdown in 2020:

It gave us silence and a deeper recollection […]. To go in that direction one needs the quiet to be able to listen to the heart, its loves, hopes and fears.