No doubt, there were some rough spots at first. The rigidity of Frater Maxime’s nature did not become supple and pliant all at once: yet there were surprisingly few exaggerations. True, in times of trial, the young Cistercian could be overcome by an extremely pessimistic view of his own failings, and he was perhaps too quick to proclaim himself the “worst sinner in the world.” That is a statement which too many novices try to make, and which few of them succeed in pronouncing with any degree of conviction.
Practices of this kind have a strongly human tone about them, and they lend themselves singularly well to strain and scrupulosity when carried too far. They were in favor at La Trappe in De Ranch’s heyday. At Chimay, Frater Maxime quickly outgrew them. Instead of encumbering his spiritual life with imaginative tricks and complexities of method and device, he soon came to that general and peaceful awareness of God which never reached a very precise definition but which grew from day to day and created an aura of peace about him in which he lived and moved and performed all the actions of the monastic day.
It was the normal and logical fruition of the Rule of St. Benedict: a humility that concentrated not on his own self and its miseries but on the greatness and nearness of God, the constant presence of His indispensable grace and the action of His will in all things. Walking the paths of simplicity, humility, obedience, love, Frater Maxime eventually began to live on a completely different level—in a spiritual climate that was altogether new.
One day he realized suddenly that he was a new man. He had learned the real meaning of God’s love, and he saw that, until then, he had been crawling along the ground, while now he seemed to fly. Before, he had struggled along by his own efforts, without ever achieving more than a negligible success. Now, the work had been so much lightened that he did not seem to work at all. On the contrary, it seemed that everything was being done for him. All he had to do was abandon himself, give his consent, yield up his confident love, and God in return flooded his soul with grace. Je sens l’amour qui m’envahit (“I feel myself invaded by love”), he wrote, “a love that is very tender, very sweet, and carries one away. . . . Somehow, I don’t quite know how it was, my soul entered upon a state in which all its desires seemed to be fulfilled. It enjoyed the delight of resting in a feeling of secret happiness. I felt myself to be under the eyes of God, and that they were fixed upon me. I discovered a great facility for loving God in my neighbor and for seeing Him in all things and I no longer did anything except in order to give Him glory. His love became everything to me and I forgot all the rest. . . . ”
The context in which these lines were written shows them to be something deeper than the passing sensible consolations of a beginner. The young Cistercian had entered upon the ways of infused prayer; he had been drawn into the close and intimate control of the Holy Spirit and was now in the strict sense a contemplative. His Cistercian vocation had flowered to a rich maturity.
Yet, infused contemplation is only the beginning of a long road. It is not the reward for consummate sanctity: it is a powerful, perhaps even an essential, means to help us attain sanctity.1
Having tasted the first clean and intoxicating joys that come with the gift of wisdom, Frater Maxime Carlier entered into the state of passive purification in which the real work of the contemplative life is accomplished. It became impossible for him to pray, yet the need for prayer, for union with God, became a hunger that devoured him to the very roots of his soul. Unable to understand his impotency, he nevertheless remained at peace, was held in a state of confused, obscure resignation. Sometimes this mixture of peace and aridity was deepened and enlightened by a strong sense of the actual presence of the Blessed Virgin, who played a dominant role as Frater Maxime’s spiritual guide and took charge of his mystical formation: an office which belongs to her, above all others, as the Queen of Contemplatives.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1913, he made his simple profession, pronouncing his temporary vows in the chapter room of Chimay. His dispositions could be summed up in the two words ovis occisionis. He was offering himself entirely to Christ as a sheep for the slaughter. “I no longer belong to myself in anything,” he wrote. “Total abandonment. Let me remain in Thy hands, O my God! Do with me whatever Thou wilt!”
And the God of heaven replied to that challenge with a demand that was terrible.
One day in July, 1914, a messenger came to the silent Cistercian abbey with the news of the declaration of war. Frater Maxime was one of the first to go. The Church in France and Germany had not wished to insist on the rights of clerics and religious to be exempt from military service, because such an insistence would only mean trouble, suppressions, expulsions.
On August 2, Frater Maxime knelt in the muddy road to receive the blessing of his abbot while rain poured down on the drab fields of a Belgium that was already invaded. Soyez bon soldat! (“Be a good soldier!”) were the words he carried with him to the barracks in Lille.
His own answer was: “The Justice of God demands victims. I am going to be one of them.”
But what a sacrifice! It was more than the long, drawn-out immolation of a bodily life, more than the acceptance of all the hardships and sufferings and degradation of trench warfare that dragged on month after month and year after year.
Within a few days Sergeant Carlier was at the front. But the Germans had the advantage all along the line in Belgium, and orders were given for a general withdrawal. The French army began an immense retreat. As they retired before the advance of the enemy, the soldier who was also the Cistercian monk, Frater Maxime, soon recognized familiar landmarks. Long before they got there, he knew that his retreating section would pass right through the monastery farm of Chimay!
Soon they were actually in a wood that was sanctified by the memories of silent workdays, and he could still hear the ringing of the axe that had accompanied the deep, peaceful prayers in the soul of the novice he had once been. As they emerged from the wood, his heart knew every step of the way that could have taken him across the fields to the abbey, whose slim white spire rose up over the trees and the cluster of slate roofs. But his orders made it impossible. He could only gaze across the fields which had once grown to be almost part of him, to the place from which he had been so violently uprooted. His brethren were there still, except for fifteen or more who had been called, like himself, to the army. But he could not even stop and say a word to them, exchange an embrace, a sign of affection, a demand for prayers. . . .
He wrote afterward: “For a long, long time, right up to the moment when we went over the rise, I remained with my eyes fixed upon the abbey where I had so hoped to end my days.”
One would think it rather unkind of God to drive home His hard demand with such obvious bluntness: but Maxime Carlier was able to understand what it was all about. This was his sacrifice. It was the greatest thing he had to give: the security of his monastery, his very vocation itself and even his hopes of becoming a saint as a contemplative monk. But these are precisely the things that God demands in sacrifice from the ones whom He means to lead to perfection by the contemplative road. They have to be ready to suffer with equanimity the terrifying loss of all that seems to constitute the indispensable means to perfection, and let God alone lead them, in darkness and emptiness, to their end.
Frater Maxime’s true vocation was to become a contemplative in the trenches by living his Cistercian life, as best he could, on the battlefield. His sanctity was to consist in suffering the darkness of passive purification amid the chaos and cruelty of organized slaughter, and in passing through all this in the spirit of a monk of St. Benedict. Like all the other Cistercian monks who had had to go to war with him, Frater Maxime Carlier had a very definite mission from God: a mission of sacrifice, first of all, and an apostolate of example.
His sacrifice was one of atonement, and the love with which he accepted the physical and mental sufferings both of a soldier and of a mystic was intended by God as a holocaust of reparation for the sins of all t
hose who had brought this war upon mankind by their greed and their lust. In the furnace of these trials his soul was brought, without his ever knowing it, to a degree of perfect interior purity and selflessness that reacted profoundly on everyone who came in contact with him.
What was true of Maxime Carlier was true, in proportion, of all the other monks of the Cistercian Order in the war, and of all the other religious and all those who shared his faith and his love of God.
For the next three years the young monk passed through most of the hardest fighting in the war. He was twice wounded and was decorated for bravery with the Croix de guerre. This mystic was astonishingly cool under fire, and the whole record of his military life, which has come down to us in considerable detail, is the story of a powerful and well-balanced soul. His long letters describe the fighting with all the vividness and objectivity of the most dispassionate artist. If he had wanted to do so and had lived long enough, Frater Maxime Carlier would have been capable of writing one of the greatest books about that war.
The secret of his courage and unshaken balance and undimmed clarity of mind and firmness of will is to be found not only in his nature but, above all, in his Cistercian spirit. In the soul of Maxime Carlier the war was putting the Rule of St. Benedict to the test. The devil was trying to break a soul that had been formed by that Rule. But the devil suffered defeat.
Frater Maxime’s secret was his faith in the presence of God. When seventy-fives were blasting all around him and German machine guns were making the earth jump and dance before his feet, Maxime Carlier was in the presence of God and clinging to God’s will by obeying blindly the orders of his military superiors. These two things, obedience and the presence of God, the two foundation stones of Benedictine spirituality, were absolutely all he had left. Everything else had been taken away. He could not pray. Even in quiet sectors or behind the lines or on furlough he was never able to pray in a way that made sense. Yet the immense, insatiable need for prayer kept driving him into the half-ruined churches they came upon in the fighting. There, he would kneel like a blind and dumb creature and turn his paralyzed mind to the Crucifix and remain fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour, in impotent and anguished silence. Then he was out again on the road or in the trenches.
One Christmas night his men were camping in an unmolested wood, and Frater Maxime seized the opportunity to slip out of the hut. From nine to midnight he thought about the monks who were chanting the vigils of the feast in the monastic choir of his beloved Chimay; he walked up and down, fingering his rosary under the bare branches and the icy stars. Convalescing from his wounds, he had even better opportunities to pray—on the rocks by the sea at Biarritz and even in two Cistercian monasteries where he spent a few weeks: Our Lady of the Desert, near Toulouse, and Our Lady of Sept-Fons. But always the same aridity and helplessness pursued him. It was the dark night of a perfect sacrifice—the dark night of a contemplation too pure for human taste or sight, too pure for emotion, and God was supporting him constantly in the most difficult circumstances by what could only be a moral miracle.
When the work of this purification was done, and when God was content to call the sacrifice complete, it ended in one swift and merciful stroke.
Frater Maxime was ready to go on furlough. He should have left his men hours before, but he remained with them out of charity until the very last minute. Just as he was about to start for the rear sector, a German bombardment opened up, and one of the first shells came screaming down upon the shelter where he was. His practiced ear must have told him, a fraction of a second before the explosion, that this was going to be a direct hit, and his supple, purified will had time for that last act of love, of self-oblation to the will of the ever-present God.
And then the veils of faith were suddenly shattered, and the noise of the world ended forever, as the Cistercian soldier entered into the sounding silence of a contemplation without obscurity and without end.
The story of Frater Maxime Carlier was also the story of all the Cistercian abbeys in the war area. Like the monk who had to be a soldier and who had to struggle to keep hold of the pure essentials of the interior life, many monasteries and convents had to bid farewell to contemplation. All were affected to some extent. Sept-Fons remained well behind the lines. Twenty-one of its monks and lay brothers were under arms by 1915. Dom Chautard, their abbot, with characteristic energy and charity, sought them out even in the front lines, finding his way through all the barriers of military red tape with a Red Cross arm band on his overcoat. He had a hand in starting a special magazine for mobilized priests and contributed regularly to it. Meanwhile, Sept-Fons had opened its doors to refugee Trappists from Belgium, to the orphans from a bombed asylum at Arras, to the inmates of an old men’s home, and to the monks of their own daughter house in Palestine, El Athroun, which had been closed by the Turks.
The situation at Sept-Fons was typical. Every monastery and convent in France had either refugees or wounded soldiers under its roof. Besides that, the monks who were not mobilized left their enclosures to help in parish work, and the rest not only ran their own monastery farms but helped their neighbors as well. In many parts of France the Trappistine nuns helped their peasant neighbors bring in their wheat and wielded pitchforks with dexterity and energy in the sweet-smelling fields of hay. It was work to which they were accustomed, but it was not quite the usual thing for them to come out and do it in public.
Most of the French monasteries suffered heavily from mobi-lizations; the most important houses, like La Trappe and Melleray, had approximately one quarter of their personnel under arms. However, they were not all combatants. There were not a few chaplains among them, and more Cistercians served in the medical corps than as combatants. So, Providence saw to it that most of these contemplatives were spared the degradation of shedding human blood and were allowed the privilege of serving Christ in the wounded and the suffering.
The Belgian monasteries were, in a sense, better off. Westmalle had only two priests mobilized, and both were chaplains. Chimay was soon isolated in German-occupied territory, and therefore only those who went to the army in the very first days of the war, with Frater Maxime, were actually mobilized. However, in 1916 the Germans took twenty-two members of the community and led them off into Germany for forced labor, so Chimay suffered, too.
Another monastery was in the center of fierce fighting. Mont des Cats, in the Lille sector, was bombarded and gutted by fire.
Saint-Sixte, in the Poperinghe sector in Belgium, was also destroyed but rose from its ruins after 1918. Igny, the monastery where Huysmans used to seek refuge from the noise of Paris, was turned into a hospital for contagious cases and was finally wiped out. When peace returned, it was altogether rebuilt, and a much more complete and regular monastery rose up in the quiet Champagne valley, over the ruins of what had been nothing but a seventeenth-century manor house: but this time it was turned over to Cistercian nuns. Igny is now one of the most fervent Trappistine convents.
Just as Frater Maxime had fought even harder to preserve the spirit of prayer than he had fought to keep the Germans away from Paris, so too the Cistercian Order did everything in its power to maintain the religious spirit of its mobilized monks. And no one devoted himself more effectively to this work than Dom Anselme Le Bail. Frater Maxime’s novice master had become abbot of Chimay, but he too had soon been mobilized. He went into the army as a chaplain, and for most of the war he maintained a sort of field headquarters of Cistercian spirituality in Compiegne. He collected a number of books on theology, asceticism, the liturgy, Scripture, and so on and held them in readiness to lend to any Cistercian soldier who wrote in for them. But what was more important, Dom Anselme edited and wrote a small mimeographed magazine called Le Moine Soldat. It came out every fortnight and was made up of three sections. The first was a combination of the Cistercian menology and Ordo, reminding the soldiers of the progress of the liturgical cycle and of the saints commemorated from day to day. There were also brief sent
ences on the chapters of the Rule that every Cistercian would normally hear commented on by his abbot in chapter every morning. This was followed by meditations on the liturgy and by a third section which was mainly ascetical and which tackled the immense task of keeping the spirit of Cistercian monasticism alive in the hearts of men who were up to their knees in mud and filth, devoured by vermin, and engaged in the task of hunting one another down like animals.
When the armistice finally came and the cannons were silent and the military chaplain cleared the shelves at Compiegne of their frayed volumes, leaving the town to the great men who signed a certain document in a •wagon-lit in that very place, the Cistercian Order recovered its balance and its normal existence and went on as if nothing had ever happened to disturb it. There were a few vacant places in monastic choirs when communities once more reassembled; but on the whole, there was no reason for the Trappists to sing a lamentation over their lot. The General Chapter once more began to assemble at Cîteaux, the normal way of the contemplative life was soon resumed, and monasteries that had been obliged to help in the secular ministry during the emergency gradually withdrew their men once again into the cloister. The Order itself began to advance in fervor and prosperity as never before since the reunion of the congregations. Indeed, it seemed that the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, far from being scattered by the storm over Europe, acquired a firmer cohesion and struck their roots deeper than ever into the ground.
The 1920’s saw Dom Edmond Obrecht’s zenith at Gethsemani. The year 1924 was an unforgettable date in the abbey’s history. The Triple Jubilee celebration was Dom Edmond’s triumph. One of the jubilees was, of course, the diamond jubilee of the foundation of Gethsemani, which really came at the end of 1923. The celebration was postponed until the following spring and amalgamated with two of Dom Edmond’s personal feasts: his fiftieth year as a Cistercian and his twenty-fifth anniversary as abbot of Gethsemani.
The Waters of Siloe Page 23
