'Talking about Silence' is a personal pilgrimage around an enjoyable paradox: that you can understand silence better if you talk about it. In his new series of essays, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores the many varieties of spiritual silence in human life and beyond, and what he's learned of its meanings in his six-decade career as a historian of religion.

Framed by his memories of filming at some of the most significant Christian sites in the world for his land-mark TV series on the history of Christianity, Diarmaid explores how even though Christianity has been a religion of the word, it cannot escape silence, because silence is wrapped up in the lived experiences of Christians through time. He presents silence in all its different forms: as the truest expression of the divine, as well as a vehicle of the greatest evil, over the course of Christianity’s two thousand years of existence.

In his first essay, Diarmaid MacCulloch introduces us to the theme of silence and how he has returned to the subject at key points during his career. Looking back on his life, Diarmaid sees it was a path laid down from the beginning, which sprang from the experience of a happy but isolated country parsonage childhood: alert already to history and its delights, but also alert as a gay teenager to the way in which things are not said, and what the meaning of that silence is. The hero of Diarmaid’s favourite story is the little boy who told the crowd that the emperor had no clothes on. That, says Diarmaid, is what his whole career writing and teaching history has been devoted to: showing up the Emperors with no clothes and ending the silences that need ending.

Produced by Melissa FitzGerald
A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 3
Photo credit: Chris Gibbions Show less