by

Denis Cleary

Rosmini, as he lay dying at Stresa, in what was then known as the Casa Bolongaro, was frequently visited by his great friend, Alessandro Manzoni, author of I Promessi Sposi, Italy’s most famous novel. One of these visits was marked by an extraordinary episode in which Manzoni, fearful of his friend’s approaching death, asked what was to become of those whom the dying man would leave behind. Rosmini’s answer was short, to the point and deeply spiritual. It included the words: "Be silent." They were not a rebuke, but an invitation to Manzoni to remain in silence before God, adoring him and savouring his ways. Spoken only a few days before Rosmini’s passage from this life, they express an attitude, or better a way of life, which Rosmini had made his own from his youth, and constantly recommended to those who came under his spiritual care.

Listening to the world that batters our ears today, we may be tempted to wonder whether Rosmini’s words still have any validity. Stresa itself, where Rosmini spent the last years of his life in solitude, has become a symbol of the problem which prompts the question. The quiet, eighteenth-century fishing village on the southern shore of the Lago Maggiore, whose peace was broken during Rosmini’s time only by the clip-clop of horse-drawn traffic moving along the Simplon road to Domodossola and Switzerland, is now a thoroughly modern holiday resort for thousands of Italians and for others from all over Europe and beyond. The population rises from its normal 3,000 inhabitants to about 30,000 during the summer months and occasionally at other times. Queen Victoria, holidaying more than a century ago at Baveno, the next village to Stresa on the lakeside, first brought the area to fashionable attention. Since then, and especially after World War II, Casa Bolongaro, where Rosmini eventually died on July 1st 1855, has gradually found itself surrounded by hotels of every kind. Noise, often deafening, is the order of the day and night for many months of the year. Is silence relevant, or even possible, in such an atmosphere, so indicative of our daily life?

If Stresa provides a symbolic problem, it also offers a symbolic answer. Amidst the strident noise, Casa Bolongaro, now the Rosminian International Study Centre, preserves its own peace and restfulness. Set back, with its own garden, from the main road, and partly hidden behind two immense cedars, it has a tranquil, gracious dignity which immediately marks it out from its bigger, bustling neighbours. Its promise of silence is not betrayed on closer inspection. Its huge library, the delicacy of the columns upholding the facade of the building and the general air of recollection in the house provide the perfect antidote to the din surrounding it. It is apart from, but still a part of Stresa — a world within a world, and in some ways the inner heart of the outward existence of the town. It is the perfect reply to our question about the relevance and meaning of silence today, and sums up much of the direction coming to us from Rosmini about the inner meaning of silence.

There is no doubt that silence was of immense importance for Rosmini. Like all the others with him at Calvario di Domodossola in the early days of the Institute of Charity, he had chosen a scriptural phrase to place over the entrance to his cell. His choice was the words: Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei [It is good to await in silence the saving power of God] (Lam 3: 26). They sum up his aspirations and his hope, and immediately recall the echoing phrases in Scripture: In silence and in hope lies your strength (Is 30: 15) and Be still, and know that I am God (Ps 46: 10).

Rosmini’s acceptance and spiritual love of silence did not begin, however, at Calvario. At the age of seventeen, he wrote a work entitled: The Day of Solitude (Il Giorno di solitudine). In this colloquy with his soul, he speaks as dwelling with himself and his God (cf. p. 9), and concludes:

It is already clear that Rosmini is on his guard against noise which deafens rather than enhances understanding, and that his purpose in the self-imposed solitude is to listen more easily to the Word of God. This kind of solitude is essential to him and, according to him, essential to every Christian, as he says in Maxims of Christian Perfection (MP) (6: 1–2):

The tranquillity which Rosmini craved, and which he saw as essential to the Christian life is not, however, some exterior silence or solitude. Rosmini concentrated, for himself and others, on an inner, spiritual message. He makes this clear in his description of the means necessary to Christians if they are to attain their end:

Describing his own solitary life at Calvario in that first Lent spent there alone (1828), he says:

Even his religious, who are called in the first instance to a state of prayer and consequently to all those conditions which are necessary to such a state, cannot appeal to external silence as a necessary way of life. It is true that

Nevertheless, in setting out and explaining the plan of his Institute to St. Maddalena di Canossa, he states with some force:

He also speaks of

We have to emphasise also that the call to silence is addressed to all. The words quoted from Maxims of Perfection are addressed to every Christian by force of the opening sentence of this spiritual classic:

Yet, once again,

An interior silence is seen, therefore, by Rosmini as essential to the Christian life; the exterior silence will be maintained as far as possible, but it is the inner silence which expresses the Christian’s self-annihilation before the all of God.

What are the motives for this interior silence? The first is what we may call the need for ‘ontological silence’. In other words, our very being as creatures requires utter silence, total dependence, upon the Creator. In his presence, and we are always present to our Creator, we can do nothing except wait on his word. From this point of view, we see our own nothingness, recognise this total dependence that is precisely our existence as creatures. In the awe-inspiring statement of St. Thomas Aquinas:

Our silence is called for because it is our very dependence on the One who made us. And God said and so it was (Gen 1: 6–7). Gen 1: 6–7

The power of this word contrasts forcefully with the only too frequent effect of our word: ‘I might as well talk to the wall.’ Our silence before the Creator is broken only by the noise and confusion brought about by the so-cal1ed independence of sin. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord... (Deut 6: 4) — Deut 6: 4

but there can be no hearing without the silence of dependence in which to listen.

The second motive for interior silence is the need for what I will call ‘faith silence’. We are indeed creatures, but sinful creatures no longer of ourselves in contact with the God who created us. We need the gift of redemptive faith: Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith (Rom 3: 21–25). The moment of redemption is marked in the Old Testament by silence. As Pharaoh drew near to the fleeing Israelites, Moses’ word to his people was simple: The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still (Ex 14: 14). It is good to await in silence the salvation of the Lord.

And in the New Testament, it is even more imperative to receive the Word of God by faith if salvation is to be ours. We live in the last age in which God has spoken to us through a Son (Heb 1: 2) Heb 1: 2

and we cannot come into our own unless we receive the Word made flesh: to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God; who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (Jn 1: 11). Jo 1: 11–13

No word, however, is ever spoken by the newly conceived, although they receive the power to speak. Their acceptance lies only in their silence, in their receiving the Word who, having laid down his life for them, will speak in them and save them. Rosmini expresses this with tremendous clarity, conciseness and beauty when he says in a prayer of his: ‘Father, as your Son would pray in me, so I would pray to you.’

He does not mean that he wants to use the Son’s prayer simply as an example; he is echoing St. Augustine’s ‘He [Christ] prays in us’ which in turn re-echoes St. Paul’s: When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God and fellow heirs with Christ (Rom 8: 15–17).

The third motive for interior silence is our need to practice that self-denial which, under the grace of God, provides the occasion for perfect listening to the Word. This is what we may call ‘ascetical silence’, and is summed up by Rosmini in this way:

This does not prevent holy people

This ascetical aspect of silence is what we have to insist upon for the moment if we want to come to grips with the whole teaching in our daily lives. Before we do so, however, let us try to indicate in a more graphic way what faces us. The kind of asceticism we are dealing with may have to be carried forward at quite a banal level, and this we shall examine in a moment. But it is also required at the very height of mystical prayer where it transforms itself into the supreme sacrifice of which human beings are capable through the workings of grace. This is what Rosmini says about it (the quotation is rather long, but it would be difficult to curtail):

But, as we said, we need to begin our consideration of silence in our daily lives on a rather lower plane than that. So, as we look at modern conditions, we realise without difficulty that what was affirmed a century and a half ago about the need for silence is even more imperative today. Or do we? I wonder whether perhaps we are so immersed in noise of every kind that we remain almost oblivious to the need for any kind of silence? Whether perhaps we are so accustomed to noise of every kind that we are oblivious to the problem entailed in attaining the silence of heart wherein we can listen to God? We are faced with our own intellectual chatter in which we seem incapable of any serious thought or concentration, with sheer physical noise which has replaced meaningful words, with material communication which tells us nothing. Think for a moment of what you have heard and seen on the radio and television recently. Ask yourselves what you have read today in the newspaper. Go over in your own mind any serious discussion you have had during the past week. How much time given to nonsense could have been spent in silence instead? And perhaps we see no problem!

A more important question is: ‘Can I live without all this?’ Or more important again: ‘Can I live with God and myself?’ These questions are important because they help to clarify the real problem for the world at large. In our Western culture, it is commonly acknowledged that there is no God to live with. The question becomes, therefore: ‘Can I live with myself?’ Put like that the answer is immediately clear, and the flight from silence is explained. We use modern technology — the media in one form or another — to escape from self. We will not go into the desert, to use a great scriptural image, because we do not believe that we will find anything worthwhile there. That is the modern humanistic attitude, and it is an attitude that faith has to combat by showing that there is something in the desert-solitude and silence other than contingent self. It is there that we find the saving power of God.

In every life of the spirit we have to insist on the desert as the first explicit step, and the never-ending implicit attitude. The desert is a constant in Scripture, and features large in the life of our incarnate Lord himself. It cannot be gainsaid in the life of his followers whatever ‘their state or condition’. Rosmini points to this and more when he writes to a woman living in the world:

The desert is hard at first because we enter what appears a wasteland. Like the Israelites in the desert we complain: O that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing but this manna we look at (Num 11: 4–6). Num 11: 4–6

We have no taste for the manna, the bread of angels, because our taste has been vitiated; we have no ear for silence because we fear to lose the noise that provides us with the spurious security of something other than our empty selves.

We know, deep down, that it is better to live with a genuine problem than abandon ourselves to a facile, "instant-coffee" solution.

We also need to take cognisance of our Western temperament and culture which tends very decisively to the analytic. So often we look to reasoned conclusions for our security. We want explanations, and fail to see that all explanation, if it is to be truly explanation, must finally be rooted in what is self-evident, in what is itself inexplicable but, for that very reason, stands at the source of explanation. In the life of the spirit this attitude can become a genuine temptation. Often we resemble nothing more than people who use a candle to light their way as the sun blazes down rather than allow their vision full play through the instinct of grace.

Rosmini’s practical advice on exterior silence in our daily lives shows how serious he was about the matter; it will also help us to understand the warm reality that underlies his concise, rather dry way of stating what may seem at first reading facile and pious exaggerations. In Maxims of Perfection we often find phrases such as this: for his part, the Christian chooses for himself ‘a retired life, a life that is as far as possible solitary, silent and hidden’ (MP 6: 17); ‘love of seclusion will make him reluctant to establish relationships with those towards whom he has no obligation’ (ibid., 5); ‘The Christian…who wants to be perfect will choose a secluded, silent and busy life. His choice of seclusion includes a resolve not to go out unnecessarily…The silence he has chosen will lead him to avoid idle words as a far as possible, that is, words unrelated to his own and others’ growth, or unnecessary for the duties and needs of his own life’ (MP 5: 9–11). Superficial reading of such phrases could easily lead us to think that they are nothing more than extreme examples of the conventional bag and baggage of ‘spiritual’ writers. But understood as the practical step we must take ‘to be borne…totally into God’ — and implicit reference by Rosmini to Exod 19: 4, You have seen…how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself — they become a call drawing us out of the dream world of our own creation into the world of reality dependent upon God’s loving act of creation and redemption.

This Christian instinct for silence is wholly in keeping with the tradition lived out by holy men and women throughout the history of the Church.

One brief example of tradition will have to suffice here. It lies at the heart of Carthusian life and as such may seen unsuitable for us. On the other hand, it is a word about essential silence and, in that respect appropriate for everyone. It will certainly serve to sum up what we have been trying to express so far.

The silence of which we have been speaking is the silence of the human heart in the presence of its Maker, Lord and Saviour, an ever active presence of Power, Wisdom and Love. Through the Spirit dwelling within us, we become one with Christ and one another, and thus dwell in faith as God’s children within the love of the Father. To the extent that we surrender in silence to this infinitely active presence through acceptance of our own nothingness, we are prepared for that re-action which is called adoration.

These concise, direct words may be filled out with the following citation:

This adoration becomes a directing force in the life of the Christian; it is a principle of activity which draws its power from the presence of God, to whom no limits can be assigned. On the one hand, the adoration expresses itself in total abandonment to divine Providence; on the other, to following the indications of that Providence in all the external actions of life, wherever they may lead.

Abandonment

When following divine Providence

You will see immediately that a life of interior silence, to which we have to struggle to return, stands at the beginning of Christian existence. From it springs all truly Christian activity. Readers unfamiliar with other aspects of Rosmini’s spiritual life and teaching should read the whole of Maxims of Perfection for a better overview of his approach to Christian living. In particular, they should note his essential doctrine on active love for one’s neighbour: "On the one hand, the humble, dedicated Christian never thinks of choosing anything but a hidden life, withdrawn from danger and from humankind, entirely occupied in ceaseless contemplation, and divided between lengthy prayer and study or the exercise of some profession or technical work, the necessities of life, and moments of rest. On the other hand, he may find himself drawn from his retirement by the forces of charity. His seclusion, which he loves for humility’s sake, not through apathy, is thus replaced by an active life, and it may even be God’s will that he should be immersed in an endless sea of cares, troubles, business and work of every kind, great and small, distinguished or despised, for the good of his neighbour. In every situation he will follow God’s will and accept whatever type of work is first presented (MP, 6–17).

In other words, the interior silence is not simply an accessory to the Christian life, an act of passing devotion, if we care to express it that way, but a foundation on which rests all Christian adoration and love of our neighbour. It is, if you will, the source as well as the culmination of the Christian life.

Rosmini also urged Manzoni to ‘rejoice’, or better, to ‘savour’ what the great writer was to find in silence. There is a sense of ‘lingering to enjoy’, as it were, in Rosmini’s use of the word godere. We are more in touch with what we enjoy than we are with the enjoyment itself.

This does not hinder our enjoyment. It simply means that we are so immersed in what we enjoy that we do not reflect upon ourselves as enjoying. And this is good. We could apply to our own situation here what Evagrius Ponticus said about the monk: ‘The monk who is conscious of his prayer is not praying.’

Rosmini’s view of prayer — and it is prayer at its highest that he has in mind in his admonition about silence and adoration — is wholly in keeping with this ‘sense of lingering’. This is one of his innumerable descriptions of prayer:

Again:

He speaks also of ‘quiet union with the heavenly Spouse’, a marital metaphor that should not be undervalued in these circumstances. William of St. Thierry describes such union in deeply intimate terms:

The conclusion is that we can and must give ourselves up in faith to the kind of prayer that culminates, if God so wills, in the rapture of ecstasy, in savouring ‘the sweetness of the Lord in his holy Temple’, that is, within, where we ourselves become the Temple of the Spirit. The silence and desert where we begin our journey is replaced by the fullness of joy found near springs of living water. In the words of the Prophet: For waters will break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. And a highway shall be built there, and it shall be called the Holy Way. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Is 35: 6–10).

It would be good to conclude this paper by referring what has been said to Mary, the archetype of silent acceptance of the Word. Beautiful and very apt words about her silence can be found in the works of John Paul II, of Rosmini himself and finally of Claudel in a poem that describes his own silent union with Mary in prayer.

The Holy Father said this about our Lady:

Rosmini gives this beautiful description of the Virgin in words anticipating those of Pope John Paul II:

And Claudel? His Je n’ai rien à offrir may perhaps be rendered like this:

‘Mary’s place’ is heaven, but also the world, where she brought forth not her own word, but the Word made flesh. She is the living reality who enfleshes the lesson of silence dumbly taught in symbolic stone by Casa Bolongaro. She is ‘keeper of things best kept by silence’ whose life is ‘light on faithful minds outpouring’ (Akathistos hymn)^.