St. Basil, who traveled up the Nile in the middle of the fourth century, was quick to sum up the weakness of the monastic life that he saw. The cenobitic system of Pachomius, he said, was too complex, too noisy, too active. Tabenna was a huge affair—a town, or rather an armed camp, of five thousand ascetics. They were divided up into platoons and regiments, under a hierarchy of military officials dependent upon the abbot, who was the general-in-chief. The vast machine worked efficiently enough, but with a kind of inhuman ponderousness. Labor was so arduous that it resembled modern sweatshop production. So great was the number of monks that all life was depersonalized. There was no intimate contact with superiors. Instead of real spiritual direction, the monks were subjected to a system of formal humiliations and public insults. It was only the extraordinary spiritual vitality of the monks themselves that kept this process from being altogether brutalizing.
It remained for St. Benedict, in the sixth century, to transform monasticism into a life that ordinary men could stand. Instead of letting men harden themselves in confirmed self-worship by striving to become heroes of physical endurance, St. Benedict shifted the whole impact of asceticism to the interior—from the flesh to the will. His monks had plenty to eat and plenty of time to sleep. He reduced the choral offices of the Egyptians by about two thirds and sent the community out to work in the fields for seven or eight hours a day. Extraordinary mortifications were forbidden or discouraged. Virtue consisted in not attracting attention rather than in doing things that were conspicuous. The sacrifices that really mattered to him were those that were exacted in secrecy from the deepest veins of selfhood. In such sacrifices, vanity could find no part; they undermined the whole foundation of egoism and self-idolatry. One of St. Benedict’s secrets was to purify the hearts of men by acts that were outwardly ordinary, simple, insignificant: the common lot of men, one’s daily work, the petty business of getting along peacefully with other people.
At the same time, St. Benedict developed a deep and healthy and Catholic mysticism of grace which is as simple as it is broad and practical. The mortification imposed by obedience, humility, the common life, is not sought for its own sake: it is given us only to open our eyes to the deifying light3 which God is waiting to pour out upon us, and to make us ready for His action within us, so that in all things the monks may see and praise God. Their every action will be more His work than theirs and will shine with the radiance of His peace. They will taste His presence and thank Him with their praise. Operantem in se Dominum magnificant. 4
St. Benedict’s true contribution to European civilization is not that his monks were pioneers and builders and scholars and guardians of the classical tradition. These were only insignificant by-products of the wonderfully simple and Christian communal life that was led in the early Benedictine monasteries. The influence and the example of that life leavened, more than did anything else, the Europe that had been invaded by wave after wave of barbarian tribes. That influence and example kept alive the central warmth of peace and unity among men in a world that seemed to be wrestling with the ice of death.
Monastic perfection was not, of course, uniform and constant. From time to time, reforms were needed. Charlemagne found European monasticism in general decay, and his suggestions of reform were put into effect by a second St. Benedict—of Aniane—after the synod of Aix-la-Chapelle in A.D. 802. This reform put new life into the monasteries of the empire, but it also thrust them into the very center of the social and political arena.
The reform of St. Benedict of Aniane was not able to weather the invasions of the ninth century, but in 910 St. Berno and twelve monks founded Cluny in the woods of Burgundy, and the result was the most powerful monastic family that had so far existed in the Church.
Cluny rose up in the thick of the battle over lay investitures. It stood for a certain independence from secular influences, but the independence was to be in the political and ecclesiastical orders rather than in that of the spirit. With Cluny, the monk became, in the fullest sense, a public adorer for the whole of his society and for the entire Church.
There was something very admirable about this wedding of religion and secular life, at least in theory. But in practice the monks no longer led anything like the simple, hidden life of labor and solitude which St. Benedict had prescribed to bring them to the contemplation of God. Though Cluny had many saints in its two thousand abbeys and priories scattered all over Europe, and though it pulled the Church out of the perils of its darkest age, men began, by the end of the eleventh century, to look back with regret to the purity of the old monasticism.
The eleventh century was an age of experiments and trials and new departures in western monasticism. The great founders and reformers manifested their avidity for perfection by wandering from country to country, always in search of a wilder solitude in which to settle down. The journeys of St. Romuald, St. Stephen of Grandmont, St. Bruno, St. Bernard of Tiron, St. Robert of Arbrissel and the rest of them, plotted the map of Europe with crossing and recrossing paths that made of the land a labyrinth. The only one who stayed in one place was St. John of Vallombrosa.
All these men were in frankly open conflict with the conventional monastic and clerical life of their time. St. Bruno and St. John of Vallombrosa endangered their lives by open attacks against simony. It was common for such reformers to be invited to “reform” a monastery, only to be threatened with physical violence when the monks discovered how drastic a change of life they themselves were expected to contribute to the process.
St. Romuald wanted men to have the advantages of both the hermitage and the common life. So he hit upon the expedient of a combined community of hermits and cenobites. One first entered the monastery and led the common life. Then, after a period of trial, the monk could, if he so desired, live in an enclosed cell in the monastery or go off to a hermitage in the woods. He remained always subject to the abbot’s control and to obedience. On certain feasts all the hermits came to the monastery and joined with the others in the choral office.
Two of the other great foundations of the eleventh century pursued the same kind of purpose: to bring hermits into communities and combine the advantages of solitude and obedience. Grandmont and the Grande Chartreuse sought to give men that isolation from temporal things that makes a life of pure contemplation possible and, with the grace of God, even easy. Grandmont was a much rougher experiment than the Chartreuse, however, and the order had a stormy history before it finally ceased to exist at the French Revolution.
The Carthusians founded their order on one of the most detailed and practical documents in monastic history. After almost fifty years of experience, the solitaries who had settled in the lonely Alpine valley of the Grande Chartreuse finally drew up their Consuetudines. These usages were written by Prior Guigo, but they were probably based on the oral instructions of St. Bruno. Every line of the Carthusian rule5 convinces the reader that the men who framed it knew precisely what they were looking for and had a very good notion of the best means of finding it. They were able to put it all down in precise terms, even though what they were doing amounted to a revolution in monastic life. Without any of the complexity of St. Romuald’s compromise between the hermitage and the cenobium, the Chartreuse was a compact and well-ordered house, a ringed citadel of contemplation. The outworks were occupied by the lay brothers and oblates, and the central keep was a massive block of “cells,” or stone cottages, each with its own oratory, workshop, and garden. These, in their turn, clustered around the monastic church.
At the Chartreuse, emphasis was on the monk’s private adoration of God in the solitude and silence of his own cell. Here, he not only slept and worked and read and meditated, but also recited all the day hours except Vespers. On feast days, however, the solitaries chanted the whole office in choir, ate together in the refectory, and assembled in chapter. From the very beginning the Carthusians have jealously guarded against too many feasts in order to keep to the purity of the solitary life. They have suc
ceeded better than most orders in keeping to the ideal of their fathers and have been willing to pay the price to do so.
All the other great monastic reforms of the eleventh century explicitly looked back to St. Benedict. Just as certainly as the Camaldolese and the Carthusians wanted to be hermits, St. John Gualbert desired the perfection of cenobitic life. His way was bound to be simpler than theirs: he had only to go back to the letter of St. Benedict’s Rule, and there is no denying that this was a matter in which St. Benedict had said the last word.
As far as the good of monasticism as a whole was concerned, St. John Gualbert did precisely what needed to be done. It was all very well for the Camaldolese to experiment in a specialized, restricted vocation: that, too, was something the Church needed. But after all, the life of the solitary, even when it was modified by cenobitic elements, still was a matter of limited appeal. Was there, then, no possibility of monastic life in its purity and simplicity, a life that everyone could live, one that was contemplative, isolated from the world, and centered entirely upon God, yet not beyond the strength of ordinary men? That was the question that most needed to be answered, and the most satisfactory answer was given by Cîteaux.
The ferment of monastic reform that had brought so many new communities into existence in the eleventh century culminated, in 1098, with the foundation of a monastery whose filiations would soon develop into one of the greatest contemplative orders in the Church. Cîteaux is supposed to have taken its name from the reeds—cistels, in Burgundian patois—which abounded in the marshy woodland where its twenty-two founders came to settle on Palm Sunday, 1098. The land was not far from Dijon, and it belonged to the Duke of Burgundy. He made no difficulties about ceding it to the austere colonists: it was practically useless to anybody in the world except penitent monks, and he happened to share the general respect for their abbot, Robert of Molesme.
This Benedictine, who was now close to his nineties, had acquired an enviable reputation, in the course of his long career, as an abbot and director of souls. At different times in his life he had been the center of minor conflicts between communities of monks that contended with one another for possession of him as their superior. And these contentions were not yet at an end. His old abbey, Molesme, would soon appeal to Rome to recover him from Cîteaux. Perhaps they hoped that this would finish the new reform at one blow. Fortunately it did not. For although Robert was ordered to go back to Molesme, the other pioneers had more than enough energy and determination to carry on without him. They began laying down the foundations of what was to prove a mighty and well-regulated monastic order, and they lost no time in having it approved by the Holy See.
They knew they would need protection. Cîteaux began its existence in stormy days. The founders of the new monastery had walked out of Molesme, publicly lamenting the fact that they had vowed to keep the Rule of St. Benedict yet found it impossible to do so in a Benedictine monastery. For some time past they had been complaining of the discrepancies between the Rule, as it was chanted in chapter every morning, and the complex network of monastic usages which had corrupted the primitive simplicity and austerity of that Rule in past centuries. The strong conventional element in the monastery—made up of converted knights and noblemen who were as belligerent as they were shortsighted in spiritual things—had so strongly resented this criticism of the accepted order that they had beaten their prior, Alberic, and thrown him into the monastery jail. This was the man who would take over the direction of the new monastery when St. Robert returned to Molesme. St. Alberic drew up the fundamental instituta which were the basis of the Cistercian reform.6
In these few points St. Alberic sketched out a program of simplification that seemed wildly revolutionary to the men of his time. His “austerity” raised such an outcry that people paid no attention to the modest claim of the Cistercians that they were attempting nothing new. But the Cistercians were quite right. There was nothing whatever new about Cîteaux. The monks simply wanted to return to the Rule of St. Benedict in all its simplicity. Far from being innovators, they were making it their chief concern to clean house and rid the Order of the many innovations that cramped the monastic life and made contemplation difficult or even impossible.
The first thing that shamed them was the realization that, in the course of centuries, monks had devised specious excuses for softening the Rule and making its burden easier and easier on the flesh. Some of these excuses were legitimate. When the Cluniacs asserted that monks in northern climates ought to be permitted to wear warmer clothing, they had been quite within their rights. St. Benedict explicitly allowed a certain freedom in the matter of clothing.7 However, the Cistercians seem to have felt that the use of fur coats and fur-lined jackets, not to mention long, flowing robes and garments that were more or less ornamental, went beyond the legitimate interpretation of this rule. For their part, they would allow the monks to increase the quantity of their clothing in winter, without any substantial change in the quality. They could wear both their robes and both their cowls at the same time if they had to—but no furs! Less legitimate, however, was an interpretation of the Rule of abstinence from meat. St. Benedict had prohibited the flesh of four-footed animals.8 These casuists pointed out that chickens and ducks and quails and partridges and turkeys and pheasants had only two feet and therefore were not forbidden. Not everybody made use of this loophole, but the Cluniacs were notorious for their ingenuity in dressing up fish and vegetables and serving up spiced and seasoned dishes in quantities and varieties that made meat unnecessary. One of the chief concerns of the founders of Cîteaux was to return to St. Benedict’s “two portions” (duo pulmentaria), with black bread and a few extra fruits in season.
Perhaps the Cluniacs had a reasonable excuse for their big dinners. Their choral offices were four or five times as long as those prescribed in St. Benedict. To stand in choir, hour after hour, in a huge, unheated stone basilica, one needed warm clothes and nourishing food. But the Cistercians were not interested in that excuse. Their reply was that Cluny had had no business increasing the length of the office in the first place. So, Cîteaux took great pains to do what the Carthusians had done before them. They stripped the office of all the many litanies and processions and “little offices” and additional psalms and ceremonies and returned to the essentials laid down by St. Benedict.
At the same time they swept the sanctuary clean of all useless decorations. St. Bernard of Clairvaux was to launch a devastating attack on the monks who were supposed to be poor but whose churches were covered with gold, whose sanctuaries were illuminated by whole trees of candles, whose walls and pavements and ceilings were covered with paintings and sculptures and mosaics. Pictures and sculpture had their place in the churches and cathedrals open to the faithful at large; but what useful purpose did they serve in the monasteries of contemplatives, who had risen above the life of the senses and whose joy was to find God in pure faith?9
Devoured with the same hunger for the authentic, St. Stephen Harding sent two of his monks to Metz on foot to copy out the famous antiphoner that was supposed to contain the genuine notation of the purest Gregorian chant. He sent others to Milan to copy the texts and notation of the Ambrosian hymns from the earliest codices in the city of St. Ambrose himself. He sought to do away with the ornamentation that had crept into the chant in more recent centuries and return to the austere, pure simplicity of the primitive models.
The Cistercians did not always succeed in recapturing the perfection they strove for. The Metz antiphoner, for example, proved to be a disappointment. Nevertheless, St. Stephen Harding showed how serious he was about simplicity by letting the matter rest there. Instead of involving Cîteaux in a series of researches that would have taken the monks into regions of antiquarianism rather than prayer, he was content to accept the imperfect text as it stood and go no further for the time being.10
The result of this liturgical house cleaning was something of a paradox. For, while Cluny had made every effort to encou
rage all the arts and crafts, and Cîteaux had just as consciously resolved to do without sensible beauty as an aid to devotion, it was the Cistercians who, in the long run, made the more lasting contribution to Christian art.
Cistercian architecture is famous for its energy and simplicity and purity, for its originality and technical brilliance. It was the Cistercians who effected the transition from the massive, ponderous Norman style to the thirteenth-century Gothic, with its genius for poising masses of stone, as it were, in mid-air, and making masonry seem to fly and hover over the low earth with the self-assurance of an angel. Yet, the Cistercians produced a far finer and purer Gothic than the ornate masses of columns and stained glass and flying buttresses that flourished all over western Europe, when the architects of the thirteenth century got drunk on the strong wine of their own virtuosity.
The typical Cistercian church, with its low elevation, its plain, bare walls, lighted by few windows and without stained glass, achieved its effect by the balance of masses and austere, powerful, round or pointed arches and mighty vaulting. These buildings filled anyone who entered them with peace and restfulness and disposed the soul for contemplation in an atmosphere of simplicity and poverty. St. Benedict’s doctrine on humility, the basis of his teaching, was written out before them in stone. The monks had not, at first, consciously aimed at any such effect in building their churches. They had arrived at this result in trying to solve the problem of expense which the conventional Benedictine church brought up. The static opulence of Cluny and the Norman builders had expressed itself in huge masses of masonry. These, in turn, cried aloud for bas-relief and fresco to counteract the tedium of their sheer weight. One expense led to another, and display demanded still further display. The union of Cistercian asceticism and Frankish intelligence, of pure spirituality and scientific brilliance, led to a revolution in architecture when the White Monks found that, by a judicious concentration of loads and thrusts and abutments, the bulk of masonry and the consequent expense could be reduced by half.11
The Waters of Siloe Page 4
