Noise is a curse of our age. The roar of traffic and machinery in the street, the blare of music from every bar and building site, the bark of Tannoy and television in every public place and the chatter of mobile phones all ensure that our ears stay permanently tuned. We are never quiet, never alone, except when asleep or dead. We hear everything that goes on in the world, but cannot find time to make sense of it.

No wonder that city dwellers dream of retiring to the country, or that pensioners sit on the seafront listening to the waves and staring at the horizon, or that growing numbers of Britons are escaping to retreats – instead of going on holiday.

To escape the noise of the world for a few days or weeks is one thing. To commit yourself to a life of contemplation and seclusion in a monastery or convent is quite another. These four books, covering different aspects of the monastic life, help to explain why, after 1,700 years, people are still doing it. Of course, they don’t make that sacrifice merely for the sake of a little peace and quiet; they are looking for something called God. The interesting question for the rest of us is: does their search have any relevance to us?

Life behind the walls is often projected in terms of sinister, hooded figures shuffling about in sandals and chanting in the gloom of medieval vaults. As a monastery school pupil myself, I had no fear of monks – they were an everyday occurrence. But I could never understand anyone wanting to become one. I was shocked when young contemporaries took that fearful first step on a path that led – so it seemed – straight to the tomb. Some of the older novices had given up good careers in the army, business, or sport. Many monks were very intelligent, so it was difficult to dismiss them as credulous. If monks suffer from the “God delusion” imagined by Richard Dawkins then some very sane, wise and kindly men are deluded.

Monastics explain that their vocation is literally a calling: they do not make a career choice, but hear a command from God. In the past not every contemplative was called, however, as Silvia Evangelisti reminds us in Nuns, her history of women’s religious orders from the late 15th to the early 18th century. She relates how dowry inflation in Renaissance Italy deterred many fathers from putting their daughters on the marriage market. They found it, instead, cheaper to send them to a nunnery. Other girls fled into convents to avoid marrying the unattractive husband chosen for them. But self-propelling nuns could be extremely feisty in their own defence. Sisters who ministered to the city’s poor resisted enclosure (being locked indoors) when it was ordered by the Council of Trent in 1545. Others fought, sometimes literally, against Reformation attempts in northern Europe to close down their convents.

Evangelisti’s survey of convents in (mainly) Italy and Spain includes writer nuns, mystic nuns, feminist nuns and theatrical nuns. It has touching accounts of the Ursuline missionaries who taught American-Indian girls in Quebec, and of the doughty Mary Ward. (Her teaching order, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded in 1609, is still in business.) But Evangelisti’s history is more anthropological than spiritual - her style is that of a doctoral thesis, replete with jargon: “elites” are discovered pursuing “strategies”, and nuns come with “gendered perspectives”.

Silence and solitude, desirable as they may seem to us, take on a terrifying aspect when they are all you have. Nancy Klein Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours is a remarkable account of life inside the Charterhouse of Parkminster in Sussex in the early 1960s. Carthusians are, as the book’s subtitle says, the world’s most austere monastic order. Maguire describes the postulants’ terror of the “noonday demon” or “dark force” which slows time to a crawl and turns life to dust. The novice master tells her: “There is no getting away from oneself.” The cell becomes a desert, the solitude “a box filled with resonance”.

Young men who sign up for the Carthusian life are like mountaineers, and the Charterhouse of Parkminster is the spiritual equivalent of the north face of the Eiger. The regime, unchanged between the order’s founding in 1084 and the Second Vatican Council of 1965, was modelled on something still older: the community of hermits established by Saint Pachomius (about AD 292 to AD 346) in Egypt, the world’s first monastery.

Maguire, who is married to an ex-Carthusian, gives us the hooded figures, looming vaults, damp, cold, hair shirts and solemn liturgy. But she also gives us - – thanks to the extraordinary co-operation of inmates past and present – glimpses of what goes on inside the monks’ heads and hearts. She reveals the inner process for which silence and solitude provide the indispensable medium.

Cucullus non facit monachum, says Lucio in Measure for Measure: it’s not the cowl that makes the monk. A young monk I questioned in a Benedictine abbey in Switzerland told me: “It’s not day-dreaming kind of work, I assure you. It’s very hard and objective.”

No better description of this work has been written than that by Thomas Merton, whose bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain influenced three of the five postulants followed by Maguire. Merton, who died in 1968, was perhaps the most famous monk of the last century and was torn between his vocations as a monk and as a writer, a struggle recorded in Echoing Silence. He was a Trappist, the strict observance wing of the Cistercian order, and when from his cell in the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky he turned his critical eye to the world outside, denouncing racial discrimination, war and political rhetoric, he could be as fierce and elegant as George Orwell.

In this collection we hear him talking to his literary friends and heroes: Boris Pasternak, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus, Jacques Maritain and James Baldwin. Merton, writes his editor, Robert Inchausti, was the man who “translated the insider speech of Catholic monasticism into a universal language”.

Nowhere is Merton more eloquent than when describing the workings of the monastic mind. The monastery is not a refuge, he writes. It is a place where one faces responsibility at the deepest level, a place where one has to give an account of oneself to others. Monks go to work on themselves, critically and detachedly, in order to find a true self behind the false selves they – like the rest of us – have acquired. “So that when you say ‘I’ there is really someone present to support the pronoun you have uttered,” and when you say ‘I think’ it is you speaking and not “the anonymous authority of the collectivity speaking through your mask”. The idea that we are complete from the start is an illusion that allows us to feel contempt for others, to treat them as objects and to ignore our dependence on them for the realisation of our own identity.

Abbot Christopher Jamison of Worth Abbey devotes a section of his book, Finding Sanctuary, to Merton and concurs. “People fail to be themselves because it is easier to be somebody else,” he tells us. The remedy is “slow and profound work” which can only be achieved by “listening to God”.

Worth Abbey was the location of a popular BBC Two TV series, The Monastery, in which five men from diverse backgrounds spent 40 days and nights living the monastic life. Addressed primarily to non-believers, Jamison’s book attempts to broadcast more widely the lessons of that experiment. It describes how the Rule of St Benedict, the father of western monasticism (born circa AD 480), can be applied to modern life.

The first step, says Jamison, is to acknowledge that lack of time (“busy-ness”) is not the employer’s fault, but one’s own. He prescribes daily meditation and the cultivation of the virtues of humility – not, he says, to be confused with servility or humiliation – and obedience, a word whose Latin root means to listen. Obedience, says Jamison, is not the antithesis of freedom because freedom has become wrongly defined as maximising choice, as being always in control, and following where your own feelings lead. True freedom is not for self, but from self.

Politicians talk incessantly about “community” but seem to have little understanding of its dynamics. Jamison, who plainly knows the dynamics well, says they were well understood by the early monastics and have been too little studied since. He argues for the restoration of daily rituals such as family meals, and explains the difficult personal compromises required in large groups, where hatred and jealousies can flourish without conventions – “rules” – to defuse them. Too often, community means “a shared postcode rather than a shared life”.

Jamison applies these ideas to business management and office life (Worth Abbey runs courses for business leaders). Like Merton, he finds in the experience of community living a paradigm for international relations. The effort required to live at peace with colleagues, which is brotherly love (caritas in Latin, agape in Greek), is also the prerequisite for settling conflicts in the wider world. It is the readiness to respect and engage with the humanity of the neighbour, the stranger and the enemy, however unjust, cruel or violent his actions.

As a Benedictine, Jamison harks back to a pre-Reformation world, where individuals were not yet individualists, and disputes the idea that spirituality is a private affair. “Pick-and-mix spirituality” he condemns as just another therapy: only traditional religion can provide the support and framework for a meaningful life.

“Life is the desert, life the solitude”, wrote Edward Young, a Georgian scholar and poet better known for his saying “procrastination is the thief of time”. From the time of the first hermits who fled into the desert to escape the noise of their world right down to the present, the warning runs like a thread through literature: there is no escape from oneself. What these four books offer us is the vision of an alternative – and antique – interpretation of the meaning of human existence. This interpretation rejects the modern liberal market model of society that allows individuals to do what they please so long as they harm no one else, and substitutes something altogether more demanding: the need to see one’s life as part of a collective project in which individuals are bound to express themselves reciprocally.

I find the convergence of opinion here impressive and the message oddly liberating. Reduced to its essentials the message from the monastery is this: only by standing aside from the world can one make sense of it; only by standing outside oneself can one make sense of one’s own life; and only by attending carefully to other people can one become one’s true self. And that, in the end, is what silence is for.

Nuns: A History of Convent Life
By Silvia Evangelisti
Oxford University Press £17.99, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order
By Nancy Klein Maguire
Public Affairs £7.99, 264 pages
FT bookshop price: £6.39

Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing
Edited by Robert Inchausti
Shambhala £9.99, 224 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.99

Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everday Life
By Abbot Christopher Jamison
Phoenix £6.99, 182 pages
FT bookshop price: £5.59