Silence

Saint Jerome, or 'Heirom', as we should call him: 'Jerome used a quote from Vergil — “The horror and the silences terrified their souls” — to describe the horror of hell.' The 'horror' here is tautologocal ('the horror of hell horrified them') but the silence is interesting: presumably its a metonym for isolation and intersubjective disconnection, but the first thing that occurs to me is that silence has such a central place in so many spiritual traditions.