THE POWER OF SILENCE
Robert Cardinal Sarah
with Nicolas Diat
The Power of Silence
Against the Dictatorship of Noise
with an Afterword by
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
Translated by Michael J. Miller
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Original French edition:
La force du silence: Contre la dictature du bruit
© 2016 by Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, France
Front cover photograph:
The Pantheon, Rome
© iStock photo / Barcin
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 2017 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-191-9 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-758-7 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016963052
Printed in the United States of America
For Benedict XVI, great friend of God,
master of silence and prayer.
For Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo,
former Archbishop of Conakry,
prisoner and victim of a bloody dictatorship.
For all the unknown Carthusians who have been seeking God
for almost a thousand years.
What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
O dialect of my interior village,
Sweet speech of my imaginary lands,
Riverside jargon of my invisible stream,
Language of my country, of my spiritual fatherland,
O word more dear to me than French itself,
O my silence! I speak you and recite you.
I sing you a thousand times for my soul’s delight
And I hear you resound like triumphant organs.
—Jean Mogin, Pâtures du silence
[Pastures of silence]
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Silence versus the World’s Noise
“Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Thought 142
II. God Does Not Speak, but His Voice Is Quite Clear
“The silence of God is elusive and inaccessible. But the person who prays knows that God hears him in the same way that he understood the last words of Christ on the Cross. Mankind speaks, and God responds by his silence.” Thought 167
III. Silence, the Mystery, and the Sacred
“There is a real warning that our civilization needs to hear. If our intellects can no longer close their eyes, if we no longer know how to be quiet, then we will be deprived of mystery, of its light, which is beyond darkness, of its beauty, which is beyond all beauty. Without mystery, we are reduced to the banality of earthly thing.” Thought 240
IV. God’s Silence in the Face of Evil Unleashed
“Sickness is an anticipation of the silence of eternity.” Thought 349
V. Like a Voice Crying out in the Desert: The Meeting at the Grande Chartreuse
“There are souls who claim solitude so as to find themselves, and others who seek it in order to give themselves to God and to others.” Thought 117
Conclusion
Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Why did Robert Cardinal Sarah decide to devote a book to silence? We spoke for the first time about this beautiful subject in April 2015. We were returning to Rome after spending several days in the Abbey in Lagrasse.
At that magnificent monastery, located between Carcassonne and Narbonne, the cardinal paid a visit to his friend, Brother Vincent. Shattered by multiple sclerosis, the young religious knew that he was reaching the end of his life. In the prime of life, he found himself paralyzed, confined to his bed in the infirmary, condemned to merciless medical protocols. The smallest breath was an immense effort for him. On this earth, Brother Vincent-Marie of the Resurrection was already living in the Great Silence of heaven.
Their first meeting had taken place on October 25, 2014. That day left a deep impression on Cardinal Sarah. Right away he recognized an ardent soul, a hidden saint, a great friend of God. How could anyone forget Brother Vincent’s spiritual strength, his silence, the beauty of his smile, the cardinal’s emotion, the tears, the modesty, the colliding sentiments? Brother Vincent was incapable of uttering a simple sentence because the sickness deprived him of the use of speech. He could only lift his gaze toward the cardinal. He could only contemplate him, steadily, tenderly, lovingly. Brother Vincent’s bloodshot eyes already had the brightness of eternity.
That sunny autumn day, as we left the little room where the monks and the nurses ceaselessly took over from one another with extraordinary devotion, the Abbot of Lagrasse, Father Emmanuel-Marie, brought us into the monastery gardens, near the church. It was necessary to get some air in order to accept God’s silent will, this hidden plan that was inexorably carrying off a young, good religious toward unknown shores, while his body lay tormented.
The cardinal returned several times to pray with his friend, Brother Vincent. The patient’s condition kept worsening, but the quality of the silence that sealed the dialogue of a great prelate and a little monk grew in an increasingly spiritual way. When he was in Rome, the cardinal often called the Brother. The one spoke gently, and the other remained silent. Cardinal Sarah spoke again to Brother Vincent a few days before his death. He was able to hear his breathing, husky and discordant, the attacks of pain, the last efforts of his heart, and to give him his blessing.
On Sunday, April 10, 2016, when Cardinal Sarah had come to Argenteuil for the conclusion of the exhibition of the Holy Tunic of Christ, Brother Vincent gave up his soul to God, surrounded by Father Emmanuel-Marie and his family. How can the mystery of Brother Vincent be understood? After so many trials, the end of his journey was peaceful. The rays from paradise passed noiselessly through the windows of his room.
During the last months of his life, the little patient prayed a lot for the cardinal. The monks who cared for the Brother at every moment are certain that he remained alive for a few additional months so as to protect Robert Sarah better. Brother Vincent knew that the wolves were lying in wait, that his friend needed him, that he was counting on him.
This friendship was born in silence, it grew in silence, and it continues to exist in silence.
The meetings with Brother Vincent were a fragment of eternity. We never doubted the importance of each of the minutes spent with him. Silence made it possible to raise every sentiment toward the most perfect state. When it was necessary to leave the abbey, we knew that Vincent’s silence would make us stronger to confront the world’s noises.
On that Sunday in spring when Brother Vincent joined the angels of heaven, the cardinal wished to come to Lagrasse. A great calm reigned over the whole monastery. The Brother’s silence had descended upon the places that he had known. Of course it was not easy to walk past the deserted infirmary.
In the choir of the church, where the Brother’s body reposed for several days, the prayer of the monks was beautiful.
An African cardinal came to bury the young religious with whom he was never a
ble to have a discussion. The son of the Guinean bush spoke in silence with a little French saint; this friendship is unique and indestructible.
The Power of Silence could never have existed without Brother Vincent. He showed us that the silence into which illness had plunged him allowed him to enter ever more deeply into the truth of things. God’s reasons are often mysterious. Why did he decide to try so severely a joyful young man who was asking for nothing? Why such a cruel, violent, and painful sickness? Why this sublime meeting between a cardinal who had arrived at the summit of the Church and a sick person confined to his room? Silence was the salt that seasoned this story. Silence had the last word. Silence was the elevator to heaven.
Who was looking for Brother Vincent? Who came to take him without a word? God.
For Brother Vincent-Marie of the Resurrection, the program was simple. It fit into three words: God or nothing.
Another stage marks this spiritual friendship. Without Brother Vincent, without Father Emmanuel-Marie, we would never have gone to the Grande Chartreuse.
When the idea germinated of asking the Father General of the Carthusian Order to take part in this book, we scarcely thought that such a project was possible. The cardinal did not want to disturb the silence of the principal monastery of the Order, and it is extremely rare for the Father General to speak.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday, February 3, 2016, in the early afternoon, our train stopped at the station in Chambéry. . .
The gray sky was suspended over the mountains that surround the town. The sadness of winter seemed to set the landscape and the people in a sticky glue. As we approached the Chartreuse mountain range, a snowstorm started and covered the valley with a perfect white. After coming through St. Laurent du Pont on the famous way of Saint Bruno, the road became almost impassable.
Driving along by the high walls of the monastery, we came across the novice master, Father Seraphico, and several young monks who were returning from their walk. They turned around as the cardinal’s automobile passed, greeting him discreetly. Then the car stopped in front of a long, solemn, austere building: we had arrived at the Grande Chartreuse. Thick clumps of snowflakes fell, the wind rushed into the fir trees, but the silence already enveloped our hearts. We slowly crossed the main courtyard, then were directed to the large priors’ house, built by Dom Innocent le Masson in the seventeenth century, which opens onto the imposing officers’ cloister.
The seventy-fourth Father General of the Carthusian Order, Dom Dysmas de Lassus, welcomed the cardinal with an especially touching simplicity.
At the heart of this mystical geography, Saint Bruno’s dream of solitude and silence has taken shape since the year 1084. In the historical anthology La Grande Chartreuse, au-delà du silence, Nathalie Nabert speaks about an incomparable blend: “Carthusian spirituality was born of the encounter of a soul and a place, from the coincidence between a desire for a quiet life in God and a landscape, Cartusie solitudinem, as the ancient documents describe it, the isolation and wild beauty of which attracts souls to even greater solitude, far from the ‘fugitive shadows of the world’, allowing men to pass ‘from the storm of this world to the tranquil, sure repose of the port’. That is how Bruno of Cologne would refer to it in the evening of his life in the letter that he writes to his friend Raoul le Verd to attract him to the desert.”
Quickly, after a conversation that lasted no more than five minutes, we arrived at our cells. From the window of the room where I was settled, I could contemplate the monastery, clothed in its white mantle, nestled against the overwhelming slope of the Grand Som, more beautiful than any of the images that have built up the immutable myth of the Grande Chartreuse. The long, solemn series of separate buildings lined up in a row, then, down below, the buildings housing the “obediences” or workshops of the lay Brothers.
Very rarely can an outsider pass through the doors of the citadel. In this inspired place, the long tradition of the eremitic Orders, the tragedies of history, and the beauty of creation cross paths. But that is nothing compared with the depth of the spiritual realities; the Grande Chartreuse is a world where souls have abandoned themselves in God and for God.
At half past five, Vespers (Evening Prayer) gathered the Carthusians in the narrow, dark conventual church. In order to get there, it was necessary to walk through endless cold, austere corridors, where I kept thinking about the generations of Carthusians who had hastened their steps in order to participate in the Divine Office. The Grande Chartreuse is the house of the centuries, the voiceless house, the holy house.
I thought again also about the hateful, disturbing eviction of the religious on April 29, 1903, following the passage of Émile Combes’ law on the expulsion of the religious congregations, which was reminiscent of the dark hours of the French Revolution and the forced departure of the Carthusians in 1792. It is necessary to reflect on that profanation and the arrival in the ancient monastery of an infantry battalion after it had smashed the heavy entrance gates, then of two squadrons of dragoons and hundreds of demolitions specialists. The magistrates and the soldiers made their way into the church, and the Fathers were brought out of their choir stalls one by one and led outdoors. The enemies of God’s silence triumphed in shame. On the one side were the fierce supporters of a world liberated from its Creator, and on the other—the faithful, poor Carthusians, whose only wealth was the beautiful silence of heaven.
On that February evening in 2016, from the first gallery, I saw the white, hooded shadows who were taking possession of the stalls. The Fathers quickly opened the large antiphonaries that allowed them to follow the musical scores of the Vesper texts. The light diminished little by little, the chanting of the psalms followed; the cardinal, who had taken his place beside Dom Dysmas, cautiously turned the pages of the ancient books to follow the prayer. Behind him, the rood screen that separated the stalls of the Fathers in choir from those of the lay Brothers sketched in the half-light a large cross that seemed to lend still greater dignity to this striking darkness.
Carthusian plain chant imparts a slowness, a depth, and a piety that is sweet and at the same time rough. At the end of Vespers, the monks intoned the solemn Salve Regina. Since the twelfth century, every day, the Carthusians have intoned this antiphon to the Virgin Mary. Today there are hardly any monasteries where these notes still resound.
Outside, night had fallen, and the faint lights of the monastery finally stopped time. The only thing that broke the silence was the rumbling of the packs of snow that fell from the roofs. A fog seemed to climb from the depths of the narrow valley, and the black mountain slopes provided grandiose, gloomy scenery.
The monks went back to the cells. After walking through the immense corridors of the cemetery cloister, each one returned to the cubiculum where he passed such a significant part of his earthly existence. The silence of the Grande Chartreuse reasserted its inalienable rights. While walking through the gallery of maps, where depictions of the Charterhouses from all over Europe decorated the walls, it was easy to see how far Saint Bruno’s Order had been able to spread so as to satisfy the thirst of so many religious who wanted to find heaven, far from the noises of the world.
While the earth is sleeping, or trying to forget, the nocturnal Divine Office is the burning heart of Carthusian life. On the first page of the antiphonary that Dom Dysmas had prepared before I arrived, I could read this notice: “Antiphonarium nocturnum, ad usum sacri ordinis cartusiensis.” It was quarter past midnight, and the monks were extinguishing the few vigil lights that were still lit in the church. Perfect darkness covered the whole sanctuary when the Carthusians intoned the first prayers. The night made it possible to observe more clearly than ever the glowing point of light marking the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. The sound of the wood in the old walnut stalls seemed to blend with the voices of the monks. The psalms followed one after the other to the slow rhythm of a Gregorian chant tone; those who regularly attend the Divine Office at Benedictine abbeys might regret the lack of
purity in the style. But Night Prayer does not lend itself well to merely esthetic considerations. The liturgy unfolds in a half-light that seeks God. There are the voices of the Carthusians, and a perfect silence.
Toward half past two in the morning, the bells rang for the Angelus. The monks left the church one by one. Is the nocturnal Divine Office madness or a miracle? In all the Charterhouses in the world, night prepares for day, and day prepares for night. We must never forget the sweet, powerful statement of Saint Bruno in his letter to Raoul le Verd: “Here God gives his athletes, in return for the labor of the combat, the desired reward: a peace that the world does not know and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
The Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments was profoundly touched by the two nocturnal services that marked his stay. He shares with Isaac the Syrian this beautiful thought from the Ascetical Homilies:
Prayer offered up at night possesses a great power, more than the prayer of the day-time. Therefore all the righteous prayed during the night, while combatting the heaviness of the body and the sweetness of sleep and repelling corporeal nature. . . . There is nothing that even Satan fears so much as prayer that is offered during the vigilance at night. . . . For this reason the devil smites them with violent warfare, in order to hinder them, if possible, from this work [as was the case with Anthony the Great, Blessed Paul, Arsenius, and other Desert Fathers]. . . . But those who have resisted his wicked stratagems even a little, who have tasted the gifts of God that are granted during vigil, and who have experienced in themselves the magnitude of God’s help that is always nigh to them, utterly disdain him and all his devices. . . . Which of the solitaries, though possessing all the virtues together, could neglect this work, and not be reckoned to be idle without it? For night vigil is the light of the thinking, and by it the understanding is exalted, the thought is collected, and the mind takes flight and gazes at spiritual things and by prayer it is rejuvenated and shines brilliantly.
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