Studying to Be Quiet

Midway through my twenties, I spent the best part of a year walking across Europe. Often I passed the night with monks, nuns or religious communities, arriving on their doorstep to ask for shelter. I was always grateful for the kindness they showed me, and curious about the quiet dedication of their lives, withdrawing from the world to devote themselves to prayer.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous account of his walk across Europe had inspired my trip, but on returning home I began to read a less well-known book of his, A Time to Keep Silence (1957). It’s a slim volume, less than a hundred pages long and comprising three essays that started life as letters to his partner, Joan Rayner. The letters describe a series of monasteries he visited in the decade after the war: the first a retreat at St Wandrille de Fontanelle, a Benedictine abbey in Normandy; the second moving from the Abbey of Solesmes – another Benedictine foundation – to La Grande Trappe, the mother-house of the Trappist order; and the third featuring the abandoned monasteries of Cappadocia, in Turkey, once occupied by the region’s Greek Orthodox monks. Leigh Fermor was no believer. He went to the first of these monasteries seeking a quiet place to work, away from the temptations of Paris. In fact, he was a little embarrassed by his lack of faith and relieved that nobody ever questioned his reasons for coming. However, he was profoundly affected by the monasteries he visited and made several more retreats over the course of his life. That mixture of admiration and bewilderment is what gives these essays their particular charm and interest. It has to be admitted that his first impressions were less than positive. Soon after arriving at St Wandrille, ‘It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.’ Then came lassitude: ‘I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating.’ Next came exhaustion: ‘After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug.’ When at last he emerges from this cataleptic state, he experiences ‘nineteen hours a day of absolute and god-like freedom’. This sequence will be familiar to anyone who has stayed for more than a few days in a monastery, and now, in an age of mobile phones, the effect is even more pronounced: a retreat often serves as a digital detox. To begin with, the lack of distraction causes boredom, despondency and fatigue, but then the visitor gets used to an enforced disconnection and finds an abundant sense of calm. Though Leigh Fermor adjusts to the monastic timetable, he’s still struck by the strangeness of the place. After all, in a religious community most of the motives and ambitions we take for granted in society are either suspended or inverted.

Only by living for a while in a monastery can one quite grasp its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead. The two ways of life do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, light, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse.

When he travels to La Grande Trappe, that strangeness only intensifies. He describes how the Trappists spend their lives in silence, praying in church seven hours a day and labouring in the fields the rest of the time, with no opportunity for relaxation or study. In his own freezing cell, a sheet of paper pinned to the wall lists three columns of priestly attributes. One column ends with the words: Plus on est mort, plus on a la vie. Another concludes: Le prêtre est un homme crucifié. However, Leigh Fermor is still able to imagine his way into this dismal calling. As he explains, while Benedictines spend their days in prayer to make up for those who cannot pray, providing a kind of spiritual windfall, the Trappists take this one step further, performing vicarious penance to lessen the whole world’s burden of sin. And the result of all this mortification is not sadness but a surprising serenity: ‘the lightness, the spiritual buoyancy, the experience of liberty regained by the shedding of all earthly possessions and vanities and ambitions’. By the end of his stay, the Trappist calling remains a mystery but no longer seems a madness. Leigh Fermor is conscious of the romantic expectations he brings with him on retreat, and of how the nineteenth-century restoration of monastic life encouraged this romance. So he’s amused by the ‘baronial chimneypieces and heavy Norse vaults’ in the refectory at Solesmes, and the rumour that the refectory of a German-speaking Trappist abbey contains a painted skeleton holding a scythe, with the motto ‘Tonight perhaps?’ inscribed on the wall above. At the same time, he’s sensitive to the beauty of monastic architecture and the ancient routines taking place among the cloisters. That beauty seeps into his prose. Critics of Leigh Fermor argue that his style is too Baroque, too indulgent, but here his language has been tempered by the austerity of his surroundings. As a result, the occasional lyricism is much more enjoyable:

As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows – oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery – as the Abbey prepared itself for the night.

By contrast, when he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, that lyricism becomes elegiac. Little is known about the inhabitants of these foundations – when the churches and cells were built, who lived in them and why they were abandoned – but the sparseness of their settlements provides a corrective to the medieval fantasia he encountered in Western monasticism.

Remote and unstirring and unproblematical as they may appear, these outlandish places are far closer to the primitive beginnings of monasticism than the dim northern silence and the claustral penumbra which the thought of monasteries most readily conjures up. The scenery of early Christendom lay all around us.

Leigh Fermor led a fascinating life, but his books often read as if he’s trying to dazzle: all those erudite references, all those elaborate metaphors, the endless parade of aristocratic friends. In A Time to Keep Silence, he has absorbed something from monastic humility, desiring less to impress the reader than to understand the subject. As a result, it’s the book of his I most like to reread, returning to the stillness he found in these sacred places, and the ‘message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit’. In the months after the pandemic, I visited Solesmes myself and found the plain church, the romantic refectory and the glorious Gregorian chant exactly as Leigh Fermor described them. Of course, that’s the point of monastic life: to be a still point in a turning world. During the author’s stay the community numbered over a hundred members, but now that number has dwindled to forty. In the decade or so after the war, monastic life enjoyed a brief boom in popularity, with numerous former servicemen taking their vows. Several of the monks Leigh Fermor met during his stay had followed this trajec- tory – one English Trappist had been shot down in his bomber and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp – but the 1960s brought an end to the trend. Instead, spiritual seekers turned to Eastern and New Age traditions, or else the growing number of counter-cultural communities. In a coda to these essays, Leigh Fermor laments the British monasteries lost during the Reformation, but he also celebrates the new foundations established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to revive the monastic tradition in Britain. Most of those foundations remain intact but, as with La Trappe and Solesmes, their communities are ageing and their numbers shrinking. Of course, this simply reflects the wider state of Christianity in Western Europe, but it means that Leigh Fermor’s hopeful tone about the future of monasticism looks misplaced. Whereas suppression was once the main risk to religious life, nowadays apathy is a much greater threat. What’s more, the sacrifices of the monastic calling seem even harder to understand in an age bent on personal freedom and self-fulfilment. These deep and delicate essays teach us to appreciate how much we have lost.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Guy Stagg 2024