Be still, and know that I am God
In Chapter 4 of Screwtape Letters, Screwtape mentions "the prayer of silence as practiced by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy's service." I saw some interesting reflections on the importance and meaning of silence as a key to the door leading to the Real.

In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper says that Prudence is the standard of all virtues. It is every virtue's "cause, root, mother, measure, precept, guide and prototype. . ." And "[t]he standard of prudence, is the ipsa res, the "thing itself," the objective reality of being." Ch. 1, pp. 8-9.

In other words, realization of the good (in virtue) presupposes knowledge of reality, which is prudence. "He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is." Ch. 2, p.10.

How does silence figure in? Pieper goes on to say, "The attitude of 'silent' contemplation of reality is the key prerequisite for the perfection of prudence as cognition." In other words, silence is the pre-requisite for hearing the (invisible) real.

He mentions three elements in prudence, including true memory, docility, and discernment. In describing docility, he says, "Docilitas is not the 'docility' and the simple-minded zealousness of the 'good pupil.' Rather, what is meant is the kind of open-mindedness which recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced and does not cage itself in any presumption of deceptive knowledge. What is meant is the ability to take advice, sprung not from any vague "modesty," but simply from the desire for real understanding . . . A closed mind and know-it-allness are fundamentally forms of resistance to the truth of real things; both reveal the incapacity of the subject to practice that silence which is the absolute prerequisite to all perception of reality." (emphasis added)

I was struck by something Emily Dickinson said in a letter to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson: " You ask of my Companions Hills - Sir - and the Sundown - and a Dog - large as myself, that my Father bought me - They are better than Beings - because they know - but do not tell - and the noise in the Pool, at Noon - excels my Piano." Dickinson listened to these quiet companions -- "took their advice" . . . in solitude and silence.

Screwtape, of course, wants the opposite, instructing his nephew incessantly to bruit up distractions - "noise" - to keep his patient's attention away from the Real. You see this in every chapter. E.g., Ch. 1: try to focus his attention on "the stream of immediate sense experiences." Ch. 2: keep his mind "full of" and "hazy with" incongruities between actual persons and his "ideas" of what a spiritual person should be like. Ch. 3: keep his mind on "abstractions," not the obvious. Ch. 4: foreclose prayer by not allowing him to cast aside "his thoughts and images" and trust himself completely to the completely real, external, invisible Presence - there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it." Ch. 5: focus his attention on a "contented worldliness" rather than on "values and causes" which are higher than himself. Ch. 6: push virtue into fantasy and vice into actuality. Ch. 7: encourage extremes, faction, "uneasy intensity and defensive self-righteousness." Etc.

Hence the remedy: Be still, and know that I am God. Psalms 46:10