The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Members of the active religious orders take care of the sick and directly feed the poor and teach children in schools. The contemplative monk also contributes indirectly to this work, even in a material way, because the surplus of his farm is given to the poor, and the monastery helps to support hospitals and schools when it is able to do so. So, when the monk works in the fields, he knows he is not merely working for himself; he is working to feed others. But no Trappist monastery can accomplish anything much in the material order. Its greatest work is spiritual. In a world in which men have forgotten the value of prayer, it is the monks who pray for the world and for all those in the world who have forgotten how to pray. If there is some small degree of happiness and spiritual joy and faith to temper the despair of our time, it has been obtained by prayer. And if people have been able to discover any ultimate meaning of the chaos of our world, they owe it to the grace of God, which was obtained for them by somebody’s prayer.

  However, there is much more than that to the contemplative life. The monk does not merely exist from day to day, feeding his interior life on the hope of future felicity or the assurance that someone, somewhere, somehow, is profiting by his sacrifice. The substance of the contemplative life is contemplation itself, the possession of God by knowledge and love. That is why contemplation is the perfection of love, the perfection of Christian charity. And for that same reason, since “charity is the fulness of the law,” contemplation is the perfection of Christianity and the highest form of Christian living. And this is most true when contemplation—that is, the wisdom born of charity—becomes so superabundant that it has to pour itself out and communicate to other men what it knows of God and God’s love.

  But perfect love for God implies perfect sacrifice. God’s love is infinitely selfless and disinterested: what can He possibly gain from the love of His creatures? He seeks our love, not in order that we may give Him something, but because He knows that for us the highest happiness consists in loving Him. But in order to love Him perfectly, we have to love Him with something of the disinterestedness with which He loves us: we have to love Him because He is God.

  Love is a union of wills. The perfect love of God is a perfect union of wills with God: that means the inability to will anything that God does not will. In the words of the Cistercian mystic, William of St. Thierry: “Man’s perfection is to be like God . . . in unity of spirit, whereby man not only becomes one with God in the sense that he wills the same things as God, but in the sense that he is unable to will what God does not will.” Non tantum unitate volendi idem, sed aliud velle non valendi. 2

  This is not something that is arrived at overnight. Nor can any man arrive at it by the practice of virtues that are accessible to his own powers, even aided by ordinary grace. It is a pure gift of God, and it corresponds to what modern mystical theologians call “transforming union.”

  But this perfection of love for God is the reason for the existence of Trappist monasteries and of every human soul that comes into the world, because all are created for this union with God and for the tremendous and everlasting joy that it brings with it. Therefore, men who enter Trappist monasteries may seem to be throwing their lives away, and in a sense they are: but only to find them again, immediately and more perfectly. Because this is one sacrifice which terminates in the perfect fulfilment of everything for which we were created.

  And this too, says St. Thomas, is the sacrifice that is most pleasing to God: for the closer a man unites himself to God, the more pleasing a sacrifice it is to God. Quanto autem homo animam suam vel alterius propinquius Deo conjungit, tanto sacrificium est Deo magis acceptum 3

  The young army lieutenant who stands uneasily at the gate of Our Lady of Gethsemani and pulls the bell rope and hopes this is the last time he will be standing outside those walls as a stranger, does not clearly know all these things. But the urge in his heart that has brought him to that place to give himself to God by embracing a hard rule that he does not yet understand is destined, by its very nature, to lead to a perfect union of wills with God. That is why God has brought him there. And if he does not arrive at the term of his journey while he is still on earth, he will reach it more quickly and more perfectly after he has passed out of the world and found the God to whom he has sacrificed his life.

  Is it any wonder that Trappist monasteries are places full of peace and contentment and joy? These men, who have none of the pleasures of the world, have all the happiness that the world is unable to find. Their silence is more eloquent than all the speeches of politicians and the noise of all the radios in America. Their smiles have more joy in them than has the laughter of thousands. When they raise their eyes to the hills or to the sky, they see a beauty which other people do not know how to find. When they work in the fields and the forests, they seem to be tired and alone, but their hearts are at rest, and they are absorbed in a companionship that is tremendous, because it is three Persons in one infinite Nature, the One Who spoke the universe and draws it all back into Himself by His love; the One from Whom all things came and to Whom all things return: and in Whom are all the beauty and substance and actuality of everything in the world that is real.

  If you ever receive a letter or see a document signed by someone who puts the letters O.C.R. or O.C.S.O. after his name, you can tell yourself that he is someone who has found out the meaning of life. He is a monk, a Trappist, a contemplative. The initials mean “Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance” or Or do Cisterciensitem Reformatorvm (“Order of Reformed Cistercians”). That is the real name of the Order to which these monks belong. The term “Trappist” is only a nickname. And how does it happen that the “Trappist” really ought to be called a Cistercian? How is it that, unless a Trappist is a Cistercian, he is not quite what he ought to be?

  That is more than a formality and a matter of names. It is a question on which the essence of a religious vocation depends. And that is most important, because the fervor and success of a religious order depends entirely on how close it can manage to keep to the object for which it was founded.

  It seems quite probable that the reason why there is such a ferment of new life and spiritual energy in the Trappist monasteries of the world today is that they have become something more than just “Trappist.”

  The Cistercian Order was founded at the turn of the twelfth century as a reform of Benedictine monasticism. The ideal of the founders was a return to the perfect integral observance of the Rule of St. Benedict: which meant a return to the cenobitic life in all its simplicity. But there was more to the Cistercian reform than that. Under St. Bernard of Clairvaux the Cistercians became the greatest contemplative order of their age: so much so that when Dante sought a guide to the heights of heaven in his Paradiso, it was St. Bernard who came to conduct him before the throne of God. The Middle Ages knew of no one better equipped for such a task. Bernard was the contemplative above all others, above St. Bonaventure and St. Francis and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and the rest.

  The Cistercians were the men who lived hidden in the secret of God’s face; their speciality was love, and the book of the Bible that treated the mystical union of the soul with God had become theirs by right. The Canticle of Canticles was Cistercian territory, as far as Scripture was concerned. St. Thomas of Aquin, when he fell ill at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, could think of no more appropriate way of repaying the White Monks for their hospitality than by commenting on the Canticle of Canticles for them in their chapter-room.

  When the Cistercian Order became too great for its own good, it fell into a decline, and the first thing that went out was the fire of contemplation. In fact, that had been extinct long before the edifice of the Order began to crumble.

  In the seventeenth century there was one great reformer among the group who tried to bring the Cistercians back to life. It was Father Jean-Armand de Rancé, the abbot of La Grande Trappe, of whom you will soon hear more in this book. He is famous enough, and if his name means any one thing it means aus
terity. The great Trappist reformer was a severe and ruthless penitent; he was a controversialist; his nature was ardent and active. But the warmth of deep contemplation is wanting in the spirit of La Trappe.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Trappists struggled through adventures which the pages of this book will attempt to describe, at least in outline. They were exciting and extremely active lives that these! men led. In fact, a kind of active spirit seems to have worked itself right into the Trappist system during those years, until one feels that energetic exertion, labor, bodily penance, and active methods of spirituality seem to have absorbed these monks to the exclusion of everything else.

  After the reunion of the scattered Trappist congregations into one Order in 1892, a change began to be noticed. The new Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance became much more fully conscious of its great heritage. In the half century that has gone by since the reunion, there has been a movement to recapture something of the ardent, contemplative spirit that existed in the monasteries of St. Bernard’s day.

  At first the development was slow, but since World War I it has been gathering momentum. Its effects are really making themselves felt—at least in the more important centers of Cistercian life, especially in France. However, that life is also pouring itself out obscurely into all the Cistercian houses in the world, and this accounts for the flood of vocations and the growth of new foundations in the United States.

  One of the most telling factors in this new growth has been the renewal of intellectual interest in Cistercian history and theology. Father de Rancé, in his ruthless desire to mortify all the natural faculties of his monks, believed that even their brief periods of reading should be a penance. He was suspicious of monks who became too interested in books, and he never permitted them to embark on anything that savored of “investigation” or “research.” It is quite true that the Cistercian has no vocation to advanced scholarship or technical theology: but if the Order is to live up to its real vocation, its members must go back to the writings of their fathers and find out what they had to say. There is no hope of a solid contemplative life in a monastic order which does not train its spiritual directors and novice-masters most thoroughly in dogmatic and ascetical and mystical theology, as well as in all the other branches of study necessary for a priest.

  Since the reunion of the congregations, the re-formed Cistercian Order has been fully aware of this responsibility and has done its best to discharge it. The names of three great abbots stand out in the first generation since the reunion. Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard is famous for his book The Soul of the Apostolate, which is addressed to secular priests and workers in Catholic Action, but which testifies to his own feeling for the need of a deep contemplative life. Like Dom Anselme le Bail, whom he rather resembles, Dom Chautard infused a new warmth and vitality into the Cistercian spirit by his energetic teaching, which focused the Rule of St. Benedict upon its true object—not so much the love of penance as the love of Christ. And it makes a great difference as to what goes on in your soul, whether you love a Person or an abstraction.

  Perhaps the most important effect produced by the three was brought about by the writing of Dom Vital Lehodey. His work on abandonment is the chief modern authority in that field: Le Saint Abandon 4 says all that can be said about abandonment without falling into semiquietism. This book has helped to set monks free from their obsession with pious activities, as if these were ends in themselves. It has striven to arouse in them some hunger for a close and personal union with God and has taught men to seek a fresh and vitalizing contact with a real and a living God through His will. Another book, The Ways of Mental Prayer, 5 is too little known. It surveys the whole field of active mental prayer and gives a good introduction to infused contemplation—a subject concerning which Trappists of the old school preserved a nervous and unsympathetic silence.

  Yet, contemplation in this strict sense is the atmosphere in which the Cistercians of the Middle Ages lived and breathed. It was the source of an amazing fortitude, the fountain of a peaceful and lasting spiritual energy. More than any other monastic body before them, the Cistercians were keenly aware of the joys that Christ had promised to those who drank the living waters of His Spirit. All the strong, pure poetry of Cistercian mysticism, all the strength and clean austerity of Cistercian architecture, all the clear-cut, energetic grace of Cistercian liturgical manuscripts of the twelfth century, bear witness to the intense vitality of the interior life that was lived in the monasteries of the White Monks in those days.

  Perhaps the most significant developments in the spirit of the Order since the reunion can be traced in the changes that were introduced into the semiofficial Spiritual Directory of the Order. Again, it was Dom Vital Lehodey who was commissioned by the General Chapter to undertake this work. Since Dom Lehodey was not writing in his own name but as the mouthpiece of the whole Order—and that within twenty years of the reunion, when the ferment was only beginning to be felt—he could not give himself a free hand to reshape the whole book to suit his own farseeing views. On the contrary, he was bound by his position to restrict himself to the most conservative and cautious changes.

  He not only preserved the whole structure of the old Directory—which. was a thoroughly solid piece of ascetical writing—but he even preserved most of the material, rewriting and recasting it in clearer language and purging it of rigidity and harshness. There was no essential change: simply a shift of emphasis. That was all that was needed. Where the old Directory stresses externals, the new enters more deeply into the interior spirit of the Rule, without sacrificing anything of the letter. Where the old emphasizes the manner of carrying out various external functions in the monastic life, the new draws attention to the end for which they are to be performed and the spirit of love that should vitalize their performance. Where the old Directory places rather a truculent stress on vocal prayers and multiple devotions, the new discreetly strives to simplify the monk’s life and reminds him that, since his official day of vocal prayer is quite long, he would do well to refresh his “intervals” with mental prayer and contemplation. Above all, the new Directory makes some important and extremely pointed remarks about the essentially supernatural character of the contemplative life, recalling the transcendent part played in it by the Holy Spirit. It is God who sanctifies us, not our prayers and penances by themselves.

  Finally, in a chapter devoted to the object of the Cistercian vocation, the new Directory revises the notion that the Order is, above all, penitential. In a statement that amounts to an official declaration, we read:

  Contemplation is the primary, essential and immediate end to which all our observances are subordinated. . . . A glance at our Rules will show that our life is organized above all for prayer. . . . Everything in our life tends to protect us from the turmoil of the world and of our passions, to guarantee us solitude of the spirit, the heart and the will, in order that our monasteries may be sanctuaries of silence filled with the fragrance of prayer, where nothing is heard but the voice of the soul praising God and of God replying to the soul. . . . However, though contemplation is the chief aim of our Order, we are not obliged to arrive at mystical contemplation, in which the soul, united to God by a simple gaze of love, remains more or less passive under the Divine action and enjoys a repose full of delights. . . . No one can enter into this kind of prayer unless God brings him into it. Since He gives it to whom He wills, He does not demand it of all. The essential thing is to get our vices out by the roots and to climb step by step to the perfection of charity and to strive to be of one will with God; a monk may reach this by the ordinary way, while another may be left far behind in spite of the prayer of quiet and other mystical graces. Nevertheless we must admit that these are a tremendous help to a soul that is humble, detached, and has a good director. We are entitled to ask for such graces if we do so submissively and with a right intention, and we even have the duty to dispose ourselves to receive them by our detachment and recol
lection. There is no better way to these graces than our life of praver.6

  Later on, Dom Lehodey quotes, from an anonymous Cistercian writer of St. Bernard’s time, a passage that recalls Cassian’s first Conference:

  Above everything else, you should endeavour to keep your soul constantly lifted up in contemplation and your spirit always raised to God and the things of God. Other practises may make more of an outward impression, like vigils, the mortification of the body, fasting, and other such exercises. But you should regard all that, necessary as it may be, as a matter of relatively minor importance, and only valuable in so far as it helps you to purify your heart. 7The reason why so few people ever reach true perfection is that they spend their time and their energies on things that have relatively little value, and pay less attention to the things that really matter. So, if you want to reach your goal, enter within yourself and withdraw from everything else, as far as you can. Keep the eye of your heart in tranquil purity by disengaging your thoughts from the forms of inferior beings; set your will entirely free from the cares of the earth and cling to the sovereign Good by fervent love . . . and thus your soul, gathered unto God with all its powers and energies, will come to be one same and single spirit with Him: and this, as we know, is the highest perfection in life.8

  These quotations are enough to show where the true meaning of the Cistercian vocation is to be looked for. They explain the abounding joy, the beauty, the tranquillity, the peace of the Cistercian life. True, these things demand a great price-nothing less than complete renunciation—not only of the world and its ambitions and its multiple concerns, but also of the monk’s own judgment and tastes and his own sweet will. But once the price has been paid, the reward is greater still.