The Silence of the Monks

Two abbots offer their churches to the Virgin Mary,
while below a scribe offers his manuscript.
Image from the Citeaux illuminated manuscript from
the 1100s.   Cisterians observed silence.   Courtesy of this site.

Monastic silence is the providence of many religions.  It is thought to offer the best opportunity for meditation, purity of thoughts, and closeness to God.  It can be observed for short or long periods of time, for certain occasions or situations, and can be communal or individual.

Statue of Amitabha Buddha quietly meditating, circa 1865.

Since ancient times, the observation of silence has been practiced.  Pythagoras had a strict rule of silence for his disciples.  The Roman Vestal virgins were bound by vows of silence.

A monk prays.

Nearly every monastic tradition all over the world has a tradition of silence.  In the West, it is more highly developed in Catholicism than in Protestantism.  Silence, in a monastic setting, can mean absolute quiet, or speaking in low tones.  Some monasteries had rules for silence in certain areas or specific times.  Practicing silence applied to guests as well as resident monks.

Alphabetic gestures being used in Fernando Gallego's
retablo panel, circa1485.

Certainly there was a need for communicating the basic needs, and to this end a code of hand gestures developed to convey basic thoughts regarding work and spirit.  Most of these gestures dealt with food, people, and items used in worship. A lot of them are mimetic, such as the gesture of a hand ringing a bell to express a deacon, since he was the one to ring the bell in rituals.

Hand gestures are still used today.

In the West, monastic sign languages were used in Europe since the 10th century, and are still in use in the Cistercian and Trappist traditions.  They are not like the sign languages that deaf people use, but are more gestural, leading some scholars to refer to them as sign lexicons.

St Anthony the Great, considered the
father of Christian monasticism.

In medieval Benedictine monasteries, from Portugal to England, there is documentation for these sign lexicons.  Most are nouns, and the few verbs deal with sitting, standing, kneeling, and confessing.  There was no grammar assigned to these gestures, and they probably used the word order of the language most spoken, whether it was Latin or a vernacular.  Vocabulary lists from medieval texts range in number from 52 to 472 signs, with an average of around 178.

A manual alphabet from 1815.

Fingerspelling was also used.  The most simplest form is writing letters in the air or tracing them on the hand.  This sort of communication serves as a bridge between spoken and sign languages.  People who are adept at both sign language and fingerspelling communicate by looking at the "speaker's" face, and reading the signs peripherally.  While fingers have been used for counting, scholars think that the practice of substituting letters for numbers, called gematria, was also common in ancient times.

Hand memory system from 1579, showing three
variants.  Published in Venice, 1579.

The earliest known finger alphabet was described by Bede, the Benedictine monk, in the 8th century.  While his purpose is unknown, it may have been devised for teaching deaf people.  (Bede became deaf late in life.)  Some scholars consider this a game.

1494 woodcut is a modification of Bede's "finger calculus",
made by Luca Pacioli.

Monks may have influenced, and in turn been influenced, by the popularity of manual alphabets for secret communication.  Arthrological systems, where letters are indicated by pointing to different parts of the fingers and palm, were in use by hearing people for some time in England.  Some have speculated that they were derived from early Ogham manual alphabets.

Plate from John Bulwer's Philocophus, 1648,
London, showing an arthrological system.

Sign languages for the deaf developed independently, although it is hard to not think there must have been some interaction.  The monastic gestures were all common sense:  to ask for a candlestick, blow on your forefinger; if you wish a person to rise, turn your hand and move it up quickly in stages;  the sign for porridge was to move your fist as if stirring porridge;  the sign for honey was to set your finger on your tongue; if you wished to have more fish, you would put your hands together and move them back and forth like a fish waving its tail.

Today we have some iconic gestures, understood the world over.  The "victory" or "peace" sign, above, is certainly one of them.  Then, for us geeks, there is the one below, meaning "live long and prosper".

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Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Pope John Paul II, the Holocaust, and Star Trek

The Western Wall in Jerusalem.

In March 2000, eleven years ago, Pope John Paul II visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial in Israel.  He also made history by going to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where he left the following note:

"We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the 

course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, 

and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to 

genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."

As part of an address he gave he said, "I assure the Jewish people the Catholic Church...is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."  He added that there were "no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust."

Pope John Paul II in Denver in 1993.

Israeli cabinet minister Rabbi Michael Melchios commented on the Pope's gesture stating, "It was beyond history, beyond memory"

It is not surprising that the Pontiff had such strong feelings about the Holocaust. He had spent his formative years with close relationships within the Jewish community of his hometown.  As a young priest in his native Poland, he had to hide in his uncle's attic from the Nazis, and according to B'nai B'rith and others, he helped protect many Polish Jews from the Nazis.

In January 2005, John Paul II became the first pope in history to receive a priestly blessing from a rabbi.  Rabbis Benjamin Blech, Barry Dov Schwartz, and Jack Bemporad were visiting Pope John Paul II at Clementine Hall in the Apostolic Palace when they bestowed it.  The priestly blessing is a Jewish prayer based on scriptural verse (Numbers 6:24-27).  It can only be performed by a Kohen (plural Kohanim), a Jewish priest.  It is the oldest Biblical text that has been found, and is said to be connected to the three Patriarchs:  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

During the course of the blessing the Kohen holds up his hands with the fingers separated to make five spaces between them, his head and hands covered so neither he nor the congregation can see his hands.  The position of each hand forms a Hebrew letter which is the first letter in the name of God that refers to him as a protector.

The hands are divided into twenty-eight sections, each with a Hebrew letter.
At the bottom of the hand are two letters, which combined are the name of God. 

In the mid-60s, Leonard Nimoy created a one-handed version of this gesture to accompany Spock's Vulcan greeting, "Live Long and Prosper".  He explained that as a child, raised in a traditional Jewish home, he peeked under the cloth and saw the gesture.  He and Gene Roddenberry thought it would be a good physical accompaniment for the greeting, and it went on to great fame.

Vulcan Salute.

Pope John Paul II will be remembered for his apologies.  Beside his apologies to the Jews, he also made public apologies for: the legal procedure on Galileo; the Catholics' involvement with the African Slave Trade; the Church's roles in the burnings at the stake and religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation; and injustices committed against women, the violation of their rights, and their historical denigration.  (Although he upheld the traditional Catholic take on birth control and women in the priesthood.)

In a time when religious persecution is rearing its ugly head again, when people are dividing each other into biased groupings, we need to remember people like Pope John Paul II.  As an atheist even I can remember with gratitude his good works.  May the whole world live long and prosper...

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Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

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