A Soul of Silence: St. Elizabeth of the Trinity

“We must keep silence,” St. Elizabeth of the Trinity used to say. “It is so simple.”

Eight days after she entered the Carmel of Dijon, the young postulant was asked at recreation which point of the Rule she liked best. She answered with one word: “Silence.” Five years later she was dead at twenty-six, and the Church has since raised her to the altars.

First published in 1949, A Soul of Silence shows how she got there. A Carmelite nun follows silence through every part of Elizabeth’s life. First comes the outward silence of the eyes, the tongue and every action. The sister in the next cell suffered from severe headaches and dreaded the slightest noise, and for five years Elizabeth moved so carefully that the sister never heard a sound. Then comes the inward silence of memory, imagination and forgetting oneself. Last of all come the silence of prayer, of suffering, and of God Himself. Nearly every page draws on the Saint’s own letters and retreats, so you hear Elizabeth in her own words. The book ends with Our Lady, the “soul of silence” who kept all these words in her heart.

You don’t need to be a nun to profit from it. Elizabeth gave the same advice to her friends and family living in the world: “You must build, like me, a little silent cell within your soul.” This book is for you if you fight distraction at prayer, if the noise of modern life leaves no room for God, or if you simply want to learn to listen to Him. You can read it in an evening or two, and you will want to go back to it.

“I raise my eyes and look at God; then I lower them upon you, thus exposing you to the rays of His Love. I say nothing to Him in words, but He understands me very well, and prefers my silence.”
— St. Elizabeth of the Trinity

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mother Mary Amabel du Cœur de Jésus, O.C.D., was a Discalced Carmelite nun who lived the same hidden life of prayer and silence as St. Elizabeth. Like the Saint she wrote about, she kept herself out of sight, signing her books only with her religious name and initials. Among her other writings is À la lumière, à l’amour, à la vie (“To Light, to Love, to Life”). Those were the last words St. Elizabeth spoke on earth. When A Soul of Silence came out in English in 1949, the Dominican review Life of the Spirit praised it as “full of good things,” and singled out its “beautiful passages” on the Silence of Praise.

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A slim paperback of 55 pages, 5 × 8 inches,
newly typeset from the 1949 English edition.