The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  St. Bernard opened his long series of sermons on the Canticle of Canticles with a clear statement that the monks of Cîteaux were called, at least in a general way, to breathe a higher and more rarefied spiritual atmosphere than Christians in the world outside.27 The best modern historians agree28 that the truly characteristic note of the Cistercian vocation is that it understands the Rule of St. Benedict as, above all, a preparation for the mystical life and that it travels toward contemplation by a purely cenobitic way.

  It is this that truly explains the strict legislation of the first Cistercians, St. Alberic’s instituta on fasting and poverty, and the jealous zeal with which the White Monks hid their monasteries in deep woods and mountain valleys to keep away from “the world.” It explains the great reluctance of the Cistercians to undertake the direction of nuns and their absolute refusal, for many years, to have anything to do with parishes. Even in the thirteenth century there is repeated legislation in the General Chapter against the tendency of some monasteries to mix in the exterior ministry. And the basic collection of statutes made in 1134 even forbade the monks to hear the confessions of seculars or to give them Communion or burial unless they were actually guests in the monastery or hired hands working with the monks.29 For the same reason, to preserve their silence and peace, the Cistercians refused to undertake the education of boys, even to prepare them for their own cloisters. When some of the Cistercian saints began to acquire reputations that attracted pilgrims to their tombs, the monks walled up the doors that gave access to their places of burial and suppressed the accounts of their miracles.30 The early Cistercians had no desire for publicity and made no attempt to draw attention to the austerity of their lives or to the sanctity of their members.

  At the same time, this desire for contemplation as the final consummation of the monastic life was what led the first Cistercians to reestablish the original sane balance of the Benedictine Observance, which is divided into three essential parts: the Divine Office, or liturgical praise of God in choir; manual labor, and lectio divina. Lectio divina means spiritual, meditative reading, especially of Scripture or the Fathers of the Church. It excludes the intense, analytical application of the scholar and aims less to endow the mind with information than to lead the whole soul to an affective union with God in contemplative prayer. The Cistercians made sure that the two or three hours a day allowed in the Rule for the lectio divina were not replaced by public vocal prayers or manual labor, under the guise of giving more glory to God. They frankly admitted that they found the inordinately long offices of the Cluniac monks an insupportable burden.31

  The Cistercian life, in the Order’s Golden Age—which lasted until the middle of the thirteenth century—was a life of marvelous simplicity and joy. Later on in this book we will consider its harmony and balance in greater detail. For the moment it will be enough to remark on the monuments which the Cistercian spirit of the twelfth century has left for us to admire today. We have already spoken of the White Monks’ architecture. The same mixture of solidity and luminous order and supernatural joy is found in the magnificent theological prose of St. Bernard’s school. True, there were also many poets in the Order of Cîteaux.32 But the greatest Cistercian poets did not write in verse.

  There is in the Latin of St. Bernard, Blessed Guerric, or William of St. Thierry a melody and a freshness that are incomparable, even in the Middle Ages.33 But the vitality of their writing does not lie merely in their poetic prose, enriched with all the deep music of Scripture. It is not so much the way they say things, as what they have to say, that wakes up the mind and heart of anyone capable of appreciating them and leads him to a rediscovery of the old Cistercians’ paradise of peace. Their prose does not talk, it sings: but it would not have such an effect if it did not have so much to sing about. Anyone who will go to the effort to master their language will find in the twelfth-century Cistercian writers the pure joy of souls in possession of God, souls to whom God has revealed His secrets in luminous and simple experience. . . .

  They play only a few variations on the same fundamental theme: the love of God, the knowledge of God in contemplation, the life of virtue, humility, and obedience that prepares the soul for contemplation. Yet, although they are writing, most of all, of the experience of God, these deeply speculative minds could not pass over their subject without analyzing the nature of charity itself and the make-up of the soul in which this experience was received. The Cistercians were the greatest psychologists of their age. Most of the writers of the Order have left us tracts De Anima; all of them have gone deeply into the nature of love. Generally, they found themselves inevitably discussing both at the same time, as St. Bernard so frequently does in his sermons on the Canticle, or St. Ailred of Rievaulx in his Speculum Caritatis. However, since it is not enough to have a soul that is capable of love, and love which is capable of filling it, there must be a Mediator to bring the supernatural love of God down to man and raise man up to God. The Cistercian writers, therefore, find the exemplar, the efficient and meritorious cause of all contemplation in Christ, the Word Incarnate, Who was, in Gilson’s happy phrase, “a concrete ecstasy in Himself.”34

  At the very heart of Cistercian spirituality lies a poignant devotion to the sufferings of Christ and to His death on the Cross. St. Bernard and his disciples entered deeply into the mystery of the Passion—more deeply than any one before their time, except perhaps St. Paul. They saw in the Passion the greatest proof of God’s love for men. Constant meditation on Calvary, or rather an uninterrupted contemplative awareness of the love of Christ for men, expressed by His Cross, was one of the characteristics of the interior life of St. Bernard. Compassion for the crucified Savior was as important a means to dispose the soul for mystical prayer as compassion for one’s neighbor.35

  Finally, St. Bernard and his school were the greatest of the medieval panegyrists of the Mother of God. Indeed, it is the Blessed Virgin herself who seems to have been mostly responsible for the magnificent vitality and freshness of the Cistercian spirit. The White Monks were not slow to recognize their indebtedness to her. They were the most explicit in proclaiming Mary as the mediatrix of all graces, through whom came all God’s gifts to men.

  When the Cistercian Order was at the height of its spiritual vigor and this rich surge of the contemplative spirit was filling the young mystical vine of Cîteaux in all its widespread branches, Eugene III, himself a White Monk, wrote to the General Chapter from Rome, warning them that the life and death of the Order depended on their fidelity to the contemplative ideal.

  Look back, I beg you, to the Fathers who founded our holy Order and consider how they left the world and contemned all things, left the dead to bury their dead and fled to solitude; consider how they deputed to others all care to be busy with much serving of souls, and for their own part sat like Mary at the feet of Jesus: and thus the further they departed out of Egypt, the more richly did they receive manna from heaven.36

  It was more than a hundred years after this letter was written that the Order entered upon a decline visible enough to be recognized by historians. But if we look for causes of the decline only in the period after it had already taken place, we will not stand a very good chance of finding them. That is why the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War and, last of all, the commendam, were not responsible for the corruption of Cîteaux. The corruption was already secretly at work, even at the end of the twelfth century, when the Order, outwardly so powerful, still was at a high tide of interior fervor.

  Yet, the decline had already begun. Even though there were many great contemplatives in the Order during the early thirteenth century—and afterward, for that matter—the vast expansion and material power of the Cistercians could not help but corrupt the simplicity of their original spirit. The General Chapters put up a magnificent reaction, and the forces of decay were held in check for many years to come; but they were definitely working.

  It was not the austerity of the monks themselves that began to weaken. Thei
r fasts, their personal poverty, their manual labor, continued for two centuries in all the rigor of St. Alberic’s instituta. But if the monks themselves did not get rich, their monasteries did, and one of the first fundamentals of the Cistercian reform to be disregarded was the prohibition of parishes and other sources of income, like tithes. Even before the end of the twelfth century it was not infrequent for abbeys to accept benefices and sources of revenue forbidden by the founders of the Order. What was worse, the very virtues of the Cistercians tended to contribute something to their decline. The man power of huge abbeys, operating in a far-flung system of granges and distant estates, was immensely productive in its labors, and the Cistercians became one of the most powerful economic forces in the Middle Ages. If the Cluniacs had been implicated in worldliness by their feudal estates, the Cistercians suffered the same disaster in the marketing of great supplies of wheat and wine and oil and wool. The important abbeys had to maintain warehouses and commercial agencies—staffed, of course, by monks and brothers—in the nearby cities. The cellarium, or agency, of Clairvaux can still be seen in Dijon today. Monks had to travel to the great international fairs to put their produce on the market, and we read of Cistercians manning riverboats to ship cargoes of wine from the Moselle down the Rhine to Holland. Eventually, the contemplative spirit caved in under the pressure of so many active and material interests, and the Cistercians tended to lose themselves entirely in the active side of their lives. Still faithful to their liturgical obligations and their fasts, they also poured out the surplus of their riches in great abundance on the poor and the sick, on travelers and pilgrims. They continued to do a tremendous amount of good for the society of their times, but the unum necessarium, the contemplative spirit, was gone.

  And when a contemplative order ceases to produce contemplatives, its usefulness is at an end. It has no further reason for existing.

  II

  De Rance and La Trappe

  BY THE middle of the seventeenth century the huge Cistercian Order made a curious picture, a kind of ragged patchwork quilt flung over the chilly bones of monastic Europe. It was still a powerful order, materially, ecclesiastically. It was an influence that had to be reckoned with in politics. But for three hundred years it had been a huge shell, the sepulcher of the spirituality of St. Bernard. It had its great doctors in the Sorbonne. It had its colleges in the university cities of Europe—colleges that had begun to appear when the mendicant orders inherited the dominance of religious life from Cîteaux in the 1200’s.

  Of course, there were plenty of Cistercian bishops and cardinals. There were Cistercian theologians and historians and moralists, not the least of whom was John Caramuel, whom St. Alphonsus called “the prince of laxists.” It would be wrong, probably, to say that there were no Cistercian saints: but there were very few in the Order who would be considered likely candidates for canonization.

  The huge organism had long been too big for the feeble life that was guttering out in its heart. It had already begun to split up into small, isolated congregations in the sixteenth century. That was the only way it could live. There was nowhere in the Order a vital force capable of reforming the whole body from within: but there were men who had enough energy and sanctity to reform single houses, then gather around them groups of ten or fifteen more houses to form a congregation.

  One by one these new organisms would form, against the feeble, complaining protests of the parent body-complaints which emanated from Cîteaux and the rare General Chapters: and one by one they would break away. Two of the earliest and strongest of these were the congregations of Castille and the Feuillants.

  Martin Vargas formed a solid block of regular and fervent Cistercian houses in Spain, which were able to keep something of the spirit of the Order alive. Jean de la Barrière took charge of the abbey of Feuillants, which he held in commendam, and introduced a reform that was extremely austere and had practically nothing to do with St. Benedict or St. Bernard. The monks slept on boards and ate on the floor and went barefoot. What they ate when they were sitting on the floor was mostly black bread, and where they went on their bare feet was on processions all over France. They were scarcely Cistercians, and for once even the General Chapter was glad to have no part of them.

  For the rest, there were congregations in Tuscany and Lombardy, in Portugal, Aragon, Poland, and Ireland, in southern Italy and northern Germany.

  But the reform that really mattered was the one that had made shy beginnings in the abbeys of Charmoye and Chatillon and was soon taken up at Clairvaux by Denis Largentier. By the year 1618 the “Strict Observance” had spread to eight monasteries, and it went on growing, despite the suspicious attitude of the General Chapter. By the middle of the century some sixty monasteries were making a show of keeping the Rule, although it was far from being strict, in the sense of primitive monasticism.

  The fact is, this Strict Observance could not break away from the rest of the Order, and its history in the seventeenth century was nothing but a series of petty and sordid intrigues that proceeded from Cîteaux itself and aimed at the abolition of this timid reform. Matters took a somewhat diverting turn in 1636 when the General Chapter elected Cardinal Richelieu Abbot General of the Order, in the hope that he would do away with the reform: but Richelieu proceeded to expel the Common Observance from Cîteaux and install the reformers in the very heart of the Order. It was a state of affairs that could not last beyond the death of His Eminence. The Strict Observance once more retired and took the defensive, fighting for the privilege of not eating meat.

  When nature supplants the spirit of God in the souls of monks, the history of monastic orders can become distressingly Lilliputian.

  Physically, however, there was nothing small about the abbey of Cîteaux. The original church of the founders, the church in which St. Bernard had prayed as a novice without discovering that there were three windows in the apse instead of one—this remained only as a curiosity. It was so tiny that one had great trouble finding it in the labyrinth of cloisters and halls and galleries and new wings. It was, in fact, buried under a mountain of architecture that had accumulated in the course of the centuries. In the midst of all this lived the Abbot General of the Cistercians in a house of his own that had all the character of a chateau. He was, in fact, a great Lord, and he lived in the style that befitted a nobleman, with servants and equipage in proportion to his rank. The monks, without living in supreme luxury, at least had all the comforts of the upper class, with servants and feather beds in their own private apartments. With all this, one is surprised to read that they still got up at four o’clock in the morning for the “night office” and managed to live without meat on certain other days in the week besides Friday.

  There was an atmosphere of comfortable and pious respectability in most of the regular monasteries of the Common Observance, as distinguished from the ones that had fallen in commendam. The very existence of the Strict Observance had stimulated a new respect for regularity in the whole Order, and the seventeenth century witnessed a real revival in the Common Observance, as such. The revival took place on many different levels: spiritual, intellectual, material. The monks of the Common Observance took stock of their mitigated rules and tightened up their usages, such as they were, and took steps to live up to their obligations. If they could not muster up any enthusiasm for the austere primitive spirit of Cîteaux, they partly compensated for it by studying the history of the Order, not only with enthusiasm but even with intelligence, and it was at seventeenth-century Cîteaux that the Cistercian saints finally came into their own. Most of them had never had feasts in the liturgy of the Order, and their titles had never been officially recognized by Rome. The General Chapters now saw to it that both oversights were remedied. They did not feel that they could even make a gesture of keeping the primitive instituta of St. Alberic, but they found a place for the second abbot of Cîteaux in the Cistercian breviary and got his title to sanctity confirmed by the Holy See.

  What was the me
ntal attitude of the average monk of the Common Observance? How did he live? What did he live for?

  He entered the monastery, usually, because he wanted to save his soul. He became a “Bernardine,” a “monk of Cîteaux”—and not a monk of the Strict Observance—because he felt that he needed to save his soul in some way that was not too difficult. He balked at the notion of paying too much for his salvation. The monastery was a quiet and not too unpleasant haven, where he would receive care and shelter and could reasonably expect to keep out of trouble.

  We have some letters written by an eighteenth-century novice who prepared for profession in a Cistercian monastery in southern France.1 He is well fed. He has a room to himself and plenty of firewood to keep it warm. He is the only novice in a “regional novitiate” which is destined to supply sixteen southern French monasteries with trained subjects. He is expected to go to choir with the monks, but the rule about manual labor for novices, revived in the seventeenth century, has become a dead letter again in the eighteenth. Most of the day he is free to read or walk around in the garden. However, his letters to his friends are curtailed, and he must take time to meditate on the eternal truths—which he does seriously enough. He realizes that God has brought him to the monastery “to weep for his past failings,” and he hopes to survive the terrible “year of trial” by the grace of God. After that, things will not be so bad. He will make profession and go to his chosen monastery of Candeil, near Albi, where the prior is a “good fellow” and comes from his own home town. He will have an allowance of fifty ecus a year for his wardrobe, and if he wants some more money, he can say Mass and preach a sermon each Sunday in one of the parishes controlled by the abbey. He can have a month-and-a-half or two-month vacation each year at any time he chooses and spend it with his family or friends. For the rest, he can receive visitors at the abbey any time he likes and for as long as they care to stay. . . .