Of the many memories that Patrick Leigh Fermor made during the course of his iconic travels throughout the world in the twentieth century, none endured in his imagination like his visits to the ancient Christian monasteries. His brushes with monastic life throughout Europe and Byzantium resulted in his brief but superb travelogue A Time to Keep Silence (the title referring to Ecclesiastes 3:7) in 1953. Almost a secular companion to the vocational journey of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which was published only five years prior, A Time to Keep Silence harnesses the discerning and wide-eyed gaze of a world traveler, which would later delight readers in his tales of exotic excursion in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water, to assert the presence of that same exotic energy in the quiet and magnanimous space of an abbey.
Fermor was an exceptional prosaist, brilliant with languages, dearly fond of the classics, and fiercely unrooted. At eighteen, he left home in England to cross the European continent on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, with nothing but Horace’s Odes and the Oxford Book of English Verse in his pack. He never returned home in any kind of formal sense, roving and exploring every place on the face of the earth that he could reach. He took a brief pause from his adventures around the world to serve his country during World War II, and he won military acclaim for his role in the abduction of Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe on the island of Crete, the story of which lives on famously in the riveting memoir Ill Met by Moonlight, written by Fermor’s comrade and fellow schemer W. Stanley Moss.
His whole life, Fermor was well disposed toward the Church, despite not being a Christian. During the war, he had even registered in the military as “Roman Catholic” so that if he died in action, he could receive a Catholic burial and have a Requiem Mass offered for him. It was only by accident, however, and through a friend’s recommendation that Fermor first encountered the monastic life. He had resumed his travels after the war and commenced his career as a travel writer, and after some rather exuberant and draining weeks in Paris, he was searching for a cheap and easy place to stay so he could complete his next book. The Abbey of Saint Wandrille de Fontenelle, first founded in the seventh century, came up in conversation, and he quickly gathered his things and made his way to the ancient Benedictine monastery.
“There were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.”
Fermor’s account of his initial days at Wandrille resembles the experience of any person who attempts a drastic shift in daily habits, particularly a transition from a schedule dictated by indulgence to one dictated by austerity: One’s entire conception of existence is briefly thrown into question. Describing a night at the monastery after Compline, he writes,
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. . . . The Abbey was now fast asleep but it seemed ridiculously early—about the moment when friends in Paris (whom I suddenly and acutely missed) were still uncertain where to dine. Having finished a flask of Calvados, which I had bought in Rouen, I sat at my desk in a condition of overwhelming gloom and accidie [acedia]. As I looked round the white box of my cell, I suffered what Pascal declared to be the cause of all human evils.
After a few days, Fermor grew accustomed to the rhythm of the monastery’s life, his perception transforming and his own body even adjusting to the schedule followed by the monks. The effect gave Fermor an impression of healing, as if merely taking on the bare physical practices remedied many of the harmful inclinations he had sunk into over the years. “The explanation is simple enough,” he writes. “The desire for talk, movement, and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment.” Fermor also discovered that the burdens of fatigue, depression, and distraction, which he notes were common for most people even in the mid-twentieth century, were decisively yet almost invisibly lifted.
The tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity.
Fermor’s description of both the “hundred anxious trivialities” and his experience of liberation from them, composed decades before the world embraced omnipresent screens and even before television sets held a regular presence in homes, only deepens the precarious nature of the current human situation and suggests how even more extreme the difference has become between the ordinary and monastic modes of life.
Within and around the narrative of his personal transformation at Wandrille, Fermor weaves anecdotes on the history of the abbey, the splendor of Benedictine plainsong, the role of the Benedictine order in preserving the liberal arts in the Middle Ages, and the dynamics of the monastic vocation, whose significance grows more and more obscure and repugnant in the unstoppable march of modernity. Throughout the entire book, and perhaps contrary to usual expectations, Fermor stays consistent in his admiration and reverence for monasteries and their hidden action, resisting the condescension that often accompanies the outlook of travel writers. His non-Christian commendation of the monks’ mission has no equal in secular writing:
It is curious to hear, from the outside world in the throes of its yearly metamorphoses, cries of derision levelled at the monastic life. How shallow, whatever views may be held concerning the fundamental truth or fallacy of the Christian religion, are these accusations of hypocrisy, sloth, selfishness and escapism! The life of monks passes in a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which there is never a holiday; and no living man, after all, is in a position to declare their premises true or false. They have foresworn the pleasures and rewards of a world whose values they consider meaningless; and they alone have as a body confronted the terrifying problem of eternity, abandoning everything to help their fellow-men and themselves to meet it.
Fermor proceeds, in his physical travels as well as the book, to the heart of the Trappist order at La Grande Trappe, pausing briefly to remark on the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, where he stayed for two weeks before meeting the Trappists. He outlines its monumental history in a concise two pages, from its heavy presence during the Crusades, through its constant persecution during the Protestant Reformation and French Revolution, and lastly to its restoration and renewal overseen by Dom Prosper Guéranger.
From this interlude follows an extended examination of the Trappists, whose heavy ascetic regimen, marked by such demands as waking up an hour after midnight, keeping a strict meatless diet, having no heating in the winter, and wearing the same heavy habit in the summer, differed tremendously from what he saw with the Order of Saint Benedict. “Compared with the Trappist horarium,” he writes, “it is the mildest villeggiatura [vacation].” Fermor navigates the development of the Strict Observance over the centuries, sifting out and denouncing the many horrific legends about the Trappists that arose during the Romantic period (William Blake’s “binding with briars my joys & desires” comprising the sentiment) while also detailing the cruel excesses of reformers like Armand de Rancé who went to deplorable lengths to exact and enforce monastic discipline. The general analysis of monastic asceticism in A Time to Keep Silence, which was published just before the Second Vatican Council, struggles to hold weight in the wake of the reforms following the council, having acquired a hint of the obsolete; yet his dazzling prose, combined with his affection for his subject, complements the perennial monastic charm that emanates throughout the narrative.
The last segment of his chapter on the Trappists explores the divergent approaches to the monks’ battles against temptation taken by both theology and psychology, a theoretical opposition characteristic of academic study at that time both within and outside the Church. Rather than surrender to the growing positivist majority that came to reduce such spiritual strife to an elaborate act of repression (“If the principles of psychiatry are exact, these men must be Pandora’s boxes that no amount of prayer or faith or willpower could save from eventual explosion”), Fermor stands neutral, maintaining that the theological and psychological modes of knowledge in contention are, in fact, distinct and that psychologists must admit when the monks’ existence ranges out of their depth of study: “The secret of monastic life, that entire abdication of the will and the enthronement of the will of God which solves all problems and trials and turns a life of such acute outward suffering into one of peace and joy, is a thing that it is given to few outside a cloister fully to comprehend.”
Fermor concludes his book with a turn to the earliest sources of monasticism, giving a small report of his wanderings among the ancient monastic ruins in Cappadocia. Pivoting from the heights of the Western cenobitic tradition to the relics of the Byzantine heritage, Fermor gazes upon ecclesiastical foundations veiled in mystery. There are no meticulously kept records or scrupulously preserved archives in what he calls the “scenery of early Christendom”—only weathered monuments subject to the elements for centuries, gesturing ever so slightly toward the original contemplative existence, propagated by the Church Fathers, that grounded and forever memorialized the place.
It was in just such a habitat . . . that early Fathers like St. Paul and St. Anthony and St. Pachomius . . . spent their arduous eremitical lives. This cruel and flaming territory is precisely the sort we must imagine as the background for the great St. Basil, for St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Gregory of Nyssa, and it is in just such a burning wilderness that St. Jerome shared his Palestine cell with a lion and compiled the Vulgate. Thus, remote and unstirring and problematical 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.
Extending from the East to the West and from the origins of the monastic life to its nearly current state in the mid-twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s chronicles in A Time to Keep Silence reign among the most compact and illuminative of all attempts to illustrate the consecrated life for a post-Christian audience. Even the most modern person starved of transcendence, he concludes in his postscript, can discover within this vocation “an ancient wisdom . . . that brings its message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit.”