Nothing disturbs so much as talkativeness, and nothing is so harmful and so capable of wiping out the state of the soul as an intemperate tongue. For what we build each day, it destroys. And what we gather with great labor, the soul scatters to the wind through thoughtless speech. What is worse than this tongue? It is an irresistible evil. Therefore, we must impose certain controls on it, resist it and, so to speak, stifle it and force it to serve only where it is necessary. Who could recount all the harm that the tongue does to the soul?
Philotheus of Sinai, Forty Neptic Chapters, 5. In Filocalía de los padres népticos, vol. 2, Spanish trans. Juan María de la Torre, Ediciones Monte Cassino, 2017, p. 501.
We talk a lot, much more than necessary. We talk to assert ourselves, to be right, to criticize or judge, to ramble along with others; we talk to forget ourselves, or to distract ourselves from the inner emptiness, to numb ourselves; we talk and talk and sometimes we don’t even know why. Besides being a waste of energy, this is an automatism that shows how much our mind is in command. The fathers of the Philokalia exhort us to set the spirit as ruler of our body and our mind, those beautiful tools that God gave us to co-create the world. Speaking to encourage others, to help, to bring joy, or staying silent as much as possible, or saying only what is necessary, remaining in a serene disposition, seems to be one of the most important facets of sobriety.
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