Reformation: Losing Silence

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'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. Today Diarmaid MacCulloch takes us inside Martin Luther’s home in Wittenberg, Germany, to explore how Luther’s message rewrote the lived experience of Christian silence from the moment he burst onto the scene with his radical, reforming message. The monasteries, as factories of silent prayer, were symbolic of the majesty of the medieval western Church, and so they became the chief casualties of the Protestant Reformation. It took the most radical spirits of the Reformation to realise that something precious was in danger of being lost: the Quakers, who have often found that silent gatherings are the best settings in which to worship. Modern Protestants can still be very noisy, says Diarmaid, and he recalls visiting a revivalist megachurch in South Korea that was the loudest of them all. Producer Melissa FitzGerald A Blakeway Production