In a world that hums, pings, and chatters without pause, quiet has become one of the rarest resources we have. Yet a growing body of research suggests that the healing power of silence is real and measurable — that stillness does quiet, patient work in the brain and body that no soundtrack can replicate. Nine centuries ago, Hildegard von Bingen built her entire life inside a rhythm of chosen silence, punctuated by song. Her monastery understood something modern science is only beginning to confirm: silence is not an absence. It is an active, fertile state in which body, mind, and soul are knit back together.
What Modern Science Says About Silence
For decades, researchers studying sound and health treated silence as a mere control condition — the blank space against which noise or music was measured. Then it began behaving like a treatment. In a widely cited 2013 study published in Brain Structure and Function, Duke University regeneration biologist Imke Kirste and her colleagues compared the effects of white noise, animal calls, and ambient sound on the brains of mice. To the team’s surprise, it was two hours of daily silence that was associated with the most robust growth of new cells in the hippocampus — the region tied to memory, emotion, and learning — and those gains persisted longest. Silence, the researchers suggested, may act as a kind of gentle challenge that invites the brain to grow.
A quiet cloister garden at first light — the kind of ordered stillness in which Hildegard spent her listening life.
An earlier study points the same direction. In 2006, physician Luciano Bernardi and colleagues, writing in the cardiology journal Heart, played volunteers musical tracks of varying tempo while monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. The finding that endured was an accident of study design: the two-minute silent pauses inserted between tracks relaxed listeners more deeply than any of the music itself — even slow, soothing music. Meanwhile, public-health bodies including the World Health Organization have long identified chronic environmental noise as a genuine burden on health, associated with elevated stress hormones, disturbed sleep, and cardiovascular strain. Psychologists studying attention restoration add that environments with low sensory input allow our finite powers of focus to replenish. None of this makes silence a medicine in the clinical sense. It simply suggests that quiet is a condition the body recognizes — and responds to with gratitude.
Silence in Hildegard’s Monastery: The Listening Life
Hildegard did not need a laboratory to reach a similar conclusion. From the age of eight she was raised in the Benedictine enclosure at Disibodenberg, in a tradition whose founding document — the Rule of St. Benedict — opens with a single command: listen. The Rule devotes an entire chapter to taciturnitas, the disciplined restraint of speech, not as punishment but as posture. The monastic day alternated between the sung liturgy of the hours, communal work, and long stretches of deliberate quiet. Speech was precious because it was rationed; hearing was sharpened because it was rested.
That listening life shaped everything Hildegard became. In the opening of Scivias, she describes her visionary call as something first heard in attentive stillness — a voice instructing her to “say and write what you see and hear.” Her medical writings in Causae et Curae likewise assume a whole person whose body and soul flourish together in ordered rhythm — sleep and waking, fasting and feasting, sound and stillness held in balance. As we explored in our reflection on the spiritual meaning of rest, Hildegard treated restoration not as idleness but as participation in a divinely ordered rhythm. Silence was the rest of the ear and of the restless, planning mind — the fallow field in which her viriditas, the green life-force she saw animating all creation, could quietly regenerate.
Symphonialis Est Anima: Why Silence and Song Belong Together
It would be a mistake, though, to imagine Hildegard as an advocate of silence for its own sake. The most revealing episode of her long life came at its very end, in 1178, when she was roughly eighty years old. Her community at Rupertsberg had buried a man whom church authorities considered excommunicated. When the prelates of Mainz ordered the body exhumed, Hildegard refused — she maintained he had been reconciled to the Church before death — and her monastery was placed under interdict. The nuns were forbidden to sing the Divine Office. The punishment, for Hildegard, was a kind of starvation.
Her response was one of the most remarkable letters of the Middle Ages. Writing to the prelates of Mainz, she argued that music is no ornament: the singing soul participates in the praise of the angels, and the human voice was given so that the spirit’s harmony could become audible. Symphonialis est anima, she wrote — the soul is symphonic. To silence a community’s song unjustly, she warned, was to injure the very worship of God. The interdict was eventually lifted, months before her death in 1179.
A single flame in a quiet room: for Hildegard, stillness was never emptiness but attention.
Here is the paradox worth sitting with: history’s great composer of sacred song was formed by decades of disciplined quiet, and history’s great defender of quiet fought her final battle for the right to sing. For Hildegard these were never opposites. Silence was the soil; song was the bloom. Chosen stillness makes music — and speech, and thought — meaningful again, just as Bernardi’s volunteers found the pauses between tracks more restorative than the melodies. Imposed, empty silence starves the soul; embraced, attentive silence feeds it. The difference is not in the decibels but in the heart’s orientation — what Hildegard’s tradition called discretio, the wise measure that keeps every good thing in proportion.
Practicing Sacred Silence Today
You do not need a cloister to recover this rhythm. What the monastic tradition offers is not an escape from modern life but a pattern for ordering it — a few minutes of fallow ground amid the noise. Some places to begin:
Keep one small hour. The monastery’s power lay in regularity, not heroics. Ten minutes of true quiet at the same time each day — no phone, no podcast, no background television — gives the mind its own version of the silent pause Bernardi observed between songs. Our guide to a digital detox offers gentle ways to carve this space from a connected day.
Let nature do the quieting. Hildegard’s stillness was rarely soundless — it held wind, birdsong, water. A slow, wordless walk among green things joins silence to awe and wonder, two practices her tradition understood as nourishment for the whole person.
Begin meals in stillness. Benedictine meals were taken largely in silence, the community listening rather than chattering. A single quiet breath before eating — a moment of gratitude for what is about to nourish you — turns a meal into a small liturgy. Many friends of this site pair that pause with a traditional European table ritual: a few drops of herbal bitters inspired by Hildegard’s herbal tradition, taken slowly and attentively before the first bite.
Let silence lead to song. End your quiet time the way Hildegard’s nuns ended theirs — with a little music, fully heard. After even ten silent minutes, you may find a single piece of chant or a favorite hymn sounds newly alive. The soul, as she insisted, is symphonic.
Bring a moment of Hildegard’s stillness to your own table. Hildegard’s Bitters is a traditional herbal preparation inspired by the botanicals she documented — crafted for the unhurried, attentive pause before a meal. You can find Hildegard’s Bitters on Amazon here, or read more about Hildegard’s herbal legacy at Eurbal.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Herbal bitters are traditionally used to accompany meals; consult your healthcare provider with any questions about your health.
Hildegard praised chosen quiet, but she protested bitterly when silence was imposed on her community. On that distinction, and on what the WHO and the U.S. Surgeon General now say about loneliness and health, read Hildegard on the withering soul.