Recently, I had a bad cough. You know, the type that causes your chest and throat to burn and gives your once-six-pack-abs a good workout? Yes, that kind. The kind of cough that lingers as an evil tickle in the back of your throat. Once false word, one false breath will cause it to explode and send you red-faced and running out of the room with tears in your eyes as you try to hold it in. That terrible type of a cough.

As the days wore on, I found myself growing more and more silent. I could speak, but if I spoke, I knew it would hurt and I knew it could cause me to start coughing. Consequently, I had to weigh each word. Was it worth saying what I was about to say? Was it worth the cost? Was it worth the cough? Generally, as I thought through what I would say and if it was necessary, I found that most of the time, it wasn’t necessary and if it was, I could say whatever it was in fewer words — a fraction of what I would have said had I not thought deeply about how I should say it.

While it may have been for a kind of medical precaution, this experience made me realize silence is a precondition for discretion. Said another way, it’s hard to exercise discretion if you’re distracted and jabbering away all the time. 

In chapter 64 of his Rule, St. Benedict calls discretion the “mother of all virtues.” He says this regarding the qualities of an ideal abbot, who ought to be “discerning and moderate,” and “must so arrange everything that the strong have something to yearn for and the weak nothing to run from.”

Discretion has to do with making the right choice to achieve an intended outcome in a given set of circumstances. Far from being a strict rule, it is truly a virtue carrying with it the flexibility of the virtuous choosing-of-the-good in whatever the circumstances — choices which may shift and change depending upon those circumstances.

The Benedictine practice of discretion grew out of a long tradition of monastic discernment of spirits. Discernment focuses on making a choice for God and against the world, flesh, or the devil. It has to do with choosing God and his way regardless of the circumstances and precisely within those circumstances. For example, one of the sayings of the Desert Fathers goes like this: “Abbot Ammonas said: One man carries an axe all his life and never cuts down a tree. Another, who knows how to cut, gives a few swings and the tree is down. This axe, he said, is discretion.”¹ Don’t use the axe in one instance (especially if you don’t know how), and use it on the other (if you do know how). Both men exercise discretion.

By the time the tradition reaches St. Benedict, discernment/discretion refers to moderation, being a balance at an equilibrium, not tipping the scale too far in one direction or the other. Discernment of spirits has moved beyond a spiritual gift or even a virtue, to, as Joseph Lienhard, SJ says, “a control on other virtues, the fine intuition into his subjects’ strengths and weaknesses that allows the abbot to guide them and foster their growth without straining them or letting them become lax. Even so, the trail leading back from Benedict to the deserts of Egypt has not been obscured.”² Discretion guides the exercise of the other virtues, hence why Benedict calls it the “mother” of all virtues. Along this line, Sister Therese Haydel, OSB, of Sacred Heart Monastery in Alabama, describes discretion and its importance as follows:

But why does St. Benedict consider discretion the mother of virtues? The likely answer to this question is because discretion lets us know what actions are appropriate based on the desired outcome, even if the action itself is unpleasant or undesirable in itself. Curbing one’s speech when one would rather defend one’s own opinion can form us in the virtues of humility and obedience. Speaking up about an unjust situation when one would rather not draw attention to oneself can promote the cultivation of honesty, courage, and integrity. Accommodating a sister or brother so that she or he may be at peace when we would prefer to do things our own way might help us to grow in the virtue of patience.

I think we can see that silence and silencing the tongue are a kind of prerequisite for a fruitful exercise of discretion. But the converse is also true. Discretion guides the exercise of silencing the tongue. St. Benedict himself indicates this in chapter 6 of the Rule:

Let us follow the Prophet’s counsel: I said, I have resolved to keep watch over my ways that I may never sin with my tongue. I have put a guard on my mouth. I was silent and was humbled, and I refrained even from good words (Ps 38[39]:2-3). Here the Prophet indicates that there are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.

The value of silence warrants discretion and the curbing of words — even good ones. GA Simon, author of the Commentary for Benedictine Oblates, says that discretion results from the love of silence.³

Discretion serves silence, as silence fuels and makes possible discretion. The two go hand-in-hand. There is no true discretion without some interior silence, and discretion makes interior silence possible by limiting external and internal noise.

In sum, if you want to make better decisions, be quiet. And if you want to be quieter, make good decisions that will cultivate that spirit of silence in your life.

1. Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 43. ↩︎
2. Joseph T. Lienhard, “On ‘Discernment of Spirits’ in the Early Church,” 528. ↩︎
3. GA Simon, Commentary for Benedictine Oblates, 81. ↩︎