The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  So, from the very outset, even the site of a Cistercian monastery is, or ought to be, a lesson in contemplation. And the monasteries built by the White Monks made it all more explicit.

  At this point we are not so much concerned with the architectural beauty and austerity of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, except to say that it was not only in keeping with the natural surroundings but largely influenced by them. You cannot put a basilica on the scale of Cluny or Vezelay in a narrow valley or a mountain ravine. Nestling in a wooded hollow between hills, the Cistercian abbey was a structure in low elevation and had no stone tower. Towers were forbidden by the General Chapter in one of the few pieces of explicit legislation on architectural matters.16

  The monastery conformed to a well-established type and was always a simple, four-sided group of buildings around a cloister garth, dominated by the monastic church with its low belfry generally perched on top of the transept crossing. There was usually a rose window in the façade of the church, another at the end of each transept, and a fourth at the end of the apse if, as was so often the case, it happened to be rectangular. But on the whole, one was struck by the lack of large windows in the rough stone walls of the exterior. All around the outside of the buildings you met a sober, austere bareness, broken up by small windows arching to rounded tops, as if questioning the traveler with the simplicity of peasant children. The sun poured down on the mellow brown tiles of the roofs. The place was so quiet you wondered at first if it were inhabited, until you heard the sound of hammering or sawing or some other work.

  Not till you got inside did you realize, suddenly, that the whole monastery was lighted from within. That is to say, it was centered upon a quiet pool of pure sunlight and warmth, the cloister garth. All around this central court, invisible to anyone outside, the wide bays and handsome open arches of the cloister allowed the light to pour in upon the broad flagstones of the floor, where monks walked quietly in their hours of meditation or sat in corners with vellum manuscripts of St. Augustine or the Old Testament prophets.

  For the rest of the buildings, light was no particular problem. In church the monks chanted the offices mostly from memory, and in any case, the most important of the canonical hours were sung in the middle of the night. Often the windows did not open into the nave itself but into the side aisles. The sanctuary, however, was lighted by a big, simple rose window or by three or more small arched windows, through which the morning light poured in upon the altar as the ministers ascended for the conventual Mass. Since the church was always orientated, the rays of the rising sun shone into the apse and shot long spears of light at the monks gathered under the bare stone arches to sing the hymn of Prime, Jam lucis orto sidere. In most Cistercian churches all the side altars were so arranged that the priest saying Mass faced the rising sun.

  The chapter room opened into the cloister and had some fair-sized windows of its own. The refectory was sufficiently lighted by a few high windows. The only person who really needed a good light in the refectory was the monk appointed to read aloud to his brothers. He usually sat in a lectern built into the wall and reached by a flight of steps let into the wall itself, and lighted by its own little window. Light was not important in the warming room. This was where the monks were allowed to gather around the only fire accessible to them in cold weather, although they could not stay there for any length of time or read books there. Still less were large windows needed in the dormitory; here, the high stone ceiling gave the monks a cool and pleasant gloom for the midday siesta so necessary in summer, when they had longer hours of work and less nighttime sleep.

  Everything in the monastery was centered on the cloister and dominated by the church. It was in the church that the monks prayed, in the cloister that they lived. The cloister was, in a certain sense, the most important of all. It was the meeting place of all the different elements of the monk’s life, the clearinghouse where he passed from material to spiritual things and settled down for the moments of transition between work and prayer, prayer and work.

  He came in from the fields, took off his wooden sabots, and sat under the sunny arches to read and meditate while the tension induced by activity seeped out of his muscles and while his mind retired from exterior things into the peaceful realms of thought and prayer. Then, with this preparation, he passed into the dark church, and his mind and will sank below the level of thoughts and concepts and sought God in the deepest center of the monk’s own being as the choir began to chant, with closed eyes, the solemn, eternal measures of the liturgy.

  When the monk returned from the inscrutable abyss of a contemplation which he himself could scarcely fathom, he emerged once more to the cloister, to sit or walk silently under those sunny arches or in the open garth itself, while the fruit of his prayer expanded in him and worked through his whole being like oil in a woolen fabric, steeping everything with its richness and life.

  Yet, we must not think of the cloister as something altogether esoteric, a place filled with the same kind of sacrosanct hush you expect in a museum. It was a place where men lived. And the monks were a family. The cloister was not exempt from the noises of a society that was at the same time monastic and rustic. The young monks might practice difficult passages of chant that they had not yet mastered by heart. Others might be engaged in their laundry (for each monk washed his own clothes) or in repairing their shoes. Others might take it into their heads to bring their blankets down from the dormitory and beat the dust out of them. So, although they did not speak, the monks had to know how to be contemplatives in a busy and not altogether noiseless milieu.

  The monk’s life was lived on three different levels. On each, there was the common element of constant prayer, constant union with God by the simple intention of love and faith that sought Him in all things: but apart from that, the three levels were characterized, respectively, by the predominance of bodily activity out at work; of mental activity in the readings and meditations of the cloister, and spiritual and affective activity in the church. If the monk happened, also, to have the grace of infused contemplation, he would be able at times to rise above all these levels and all these activities to a pure contact with God above all activity. But ordinarily speaking, even the contemplative monk lives and loves and therefore acts on these three levels.

  Now, the cloister was the scene of the monk’s most characteristically human mode of being. It was there that he met God and his brothers as a social and thinking and affective and perhaps affectionate creature: St. Ailred testified that the bond between brothers might be expected to be warmed by a glow of genuine and holy fondness. But in any case, all these elements made the cloister the place where the monk was most truly on his own level as a human being. That was why it was the solvent, the common denominator, of everything else in his monastic life.

  The cloister was his base of operations. It was from the level appropriate to the cloister that he set out on his flights into the areas above and beyond his nature, in church and liturgy. It was also from there that he went forth to the realms in which he commanded natures lower than himself and, by the work of his hands, diverted the things of the woods and the fields to the material uses of his brethren.

  So, the Cistercian monastery became the perfect picture of the soul of the contemplative. Perhaps it was because the Cistercians were such refined psychologists17 that they could not help building themselves houses that reflected all the interests that most intimately concerned their own hearts. But the cloister, with its adjacent chapter room, symbolized the soul operating in its own human mode by a free play of the reasoning intellect and the affective will—making practical and speculative judgments and carrying them out in the light of reason and grace—always drawing strength and meriting fresh grace from the operation of the social and Christian virtues so necessary in the monastic community.

  Firmly established in peace and harmony within himself, when all the powers of his soul are united by grace and virtue, the contemplative receives into his s
oul, into his intellect and will, the choice graces of God’s light and love.

  Under the impulsion of these forces within him, he can go out of his cloister into the exterior world and do his share of the world’s activities, performing good works for Christ and the Church and enriching himself still more with the fruits of his activity.

  But he does not stay active all day. Outside his cloister, he has no place to rest; he is only a wanderer, and soon he returns to the peace of recollection, where he is again flooded by the light of God’s grace.

  This time, however, he is drawn further within and above himself. He passes from the cloister of his active faculties to the church—or innermost substance—of his soul—which the Cistercians called the memoria. By that word, they did not mean memory. It was the term they had inherited from St. Augustine to describe the very essence of the soul considered as the actus primus from which the faculties emanate and pass into action.

  It is by the activity of our mind and will that we know and love: it is in the cloister that the monk finds his sunlight and companionship and books. But above activity, in the dark church of the memoria where there is no explicit thought, and where acts of the will are mute as in the depths of their ultimate causes, the soul meets God in the ineffable darkness of an immediate contact that transcends every activity, every intuition, every flame of virtue or love. Not that love and intellection have here ceased, but they have been drawn up to a level so transcendently simple that the soul acts without knowing that it acts, and loves and knows all at once in a movement so pure and so free of all expense of human energy that it seer not to be acting or knowing or loving at all.

  It is in the inner sanctuary of the spirit that the monk achieves the supreme purpose of his whole life and really fulfils his vocation—by union with God in perfectly pure and disinterested love that seeks no reward, because God Himself is its reward; the soul now loves God with His own love of Himself.

  But just as the monk could not enter his church except by passing through the cloister, so the ordinary preparation for perfect union with God was the exercise of his faculties in the knowledge and love of God and his brethren, in which are included all virtues. Plenitudo legis est dilectio.

  The Cistercian fathers looked upon the monastery as a school in which men acquired the supreme art that transcends all others, the art of love, ars artium, ars amoris.18

  The cloister and chapter room, centers of the community life, as such, were also properly the school where charity was learned by humility, obedience, and brotherly love. Here, the monk was taught by other men, the abbot, the novice master, and the example of all his brethren. But nothing he could learn from them would be anything but a preparation for the real knowledge of God (Who is Himself substantial love) taught by experience in a union with Him consummated in the very substance of the soul by His own Holy Spirit.

  Everything in the Cistercian life, every detail of the Rule of St. Benedict, was ordered and interpreted and understood in relation to that one end: perfect union with God.19

  This explains the austerity which banished sculpture and painting and stained glass and mosaic from the Cistercian abbey: the monk must not only be stripped of all right to own rich and beautiful and precious things, but his mind and imagination must be delivered from all attachment to, and dependence upon, the means that led to God by a less direct road. Only die Crucifix remained for him to fix his eyes upon, if he could not close them and find God in the depths of his heart. All the rest was proscribed with a severity that nevertheless had its point. The General Chapter explained the reason for the ban on pictures and statues and stained glass in any part of the monastery by remarking that they often interfered with the profit of a good meditation: Dum talibus intenditur utilitas bonae meditationis vel disciplina religiosae gravitatis saepe negligitur.20

  The White Monks were applying principles that have also been made famous by St. John of the Cross. The Spanish Carmelite, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, admitted the usefulness and even necessity of sensible means to awaken the spiritual life in beginners and even certain advanced souls, but he declared that, for those who wanted to progress in the ways of mystical prayer, the time would come when God would demand the sacrifice even of one’s own interior fancies and images and concepts and memories:

  Since no created things can bear any proportion to the being of God . . . nothing that is imagined in their likeness can serve as a means of proximate union with Him, but quite the contrary. All these imaginings must be cast out from the soul, which must remain in darkness as far as this sense is concerned in order to attain to divine union.

  In order that one may attain supernatural transformation it is clear that he must be set in darkness and carried far away from all that is contained in his nature, which is sensual and rational . . . The soul must be like to a blind man leaning upon dark faith and taking it for a guide and leaning upon none of the things which he understands, experiences, feels and imagines. For all these are darkness and will cause him to stray; and faith is above all that he understands and experiences, feels and imagines.

  And thus a soul is greatly impeded from reaching this high estate of union with God when it clings to any understanding or feeling or imagination or appearance or will of its own.21

  It was simply an extension of the monk’s flight from the world. The need to build a monastery in physical solitude was supplemented by the much more fundamental need for interior solitude and exspoliation. Hence, too, the need for silence, for humility, for fasting, for subjection to superiors: all this was to help the monk to divest himself of every selfish desire, every shred of human attachment, because he knew that, once he was empty of self-love, he would be filled with the love of God.

  Thus every human affection in the saints must, in an ineffable way, melt away from itself and flow over entirely into the will of God. Otherwise how is God to be all in all if in man there remain something that is still man?22

  We have been speaking of the cloister. Certainly it was a rugged life the monks led, under those stone arches open to all winds. That was their place of rest and reading and meditation in winter as well as in summer. True, it was the north side of the cloister, opening to the noonday sun, that was the usual place of reading. It was here that the books were kept in their armarium. It was also the most convenient place for prayer, for the church door was close at hand, and if one were moved to lay aside the book and enter into the silence of contemplative prayer, one could slip into the dark sanctuary—provided the book was left outside.

  Remember, too, that the Cistercians had monasteries in Norway and Sweden and Denmark, not to mention the Highlands of Scotland, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Apennines. However, the usages explicitly allowed them to wear several robes and both their cowls in cold weather.23

  They had longer labor and longer fasts than the Cistercians have today. The ordinary workday in Lent began with several consecutive hours of reading and study after Prime, but the community went out to work in the fields, still fasting, about half-past nine in the forenoon, and worked until the tenth hour, which came late in the afternoon, about four or half-past four. Only then did they return home and sing Vespers and take their single meal of the day. By the time they rose from table in the refectory and made their way to church through the cloister, chanting the Miserere, the shadows of twilight were enveloping the gray walls and tile roof of their monastery, and the setting sun was withdrawing the little light that still touched the tops of the hills or the crowns of the budding trees. In a moment it would be time for Compline, and the community would retire to their straw mattresses. However, once they were there, they might perhaps get a longer sleep than the Trappist does today. It varied with the time of sunset, because they were in bed half an hour or so after the sun was down and rose at the eighth hour of the night. That granted them, in the wintertime, at least eight hours’ sleep; but in summer, sunset was much later and “hours” were much shorter.24

  We who live in an a
ge that has developed so many accurate instruments for measuring out all man’s activities into exact periods of time and calculating the precise money value of every piece of work done and measuring the calories we consume and the vitamins we need, would find it hard to live by the easy and natural approximations of the Middle Ages. In a Cistercian abbey of the twelfth century the absence of the clocks and machinery and instruments and devices to which we have become conditioned gave the life of the monks a completely different tempo from ours. Their days had their own vital rhythm, something quite different from our own days—even where a modern monastery strives to keep the same Rule as the one they lived by.

  The ordered sequence of prayer and work and reading and eating and sleeping into which the monastic day is divided could not be made to depend on any instrument. It followed the sun, the moon, the stars. It was integrated not into some abstract and mathematical norm of time but into the earth’s actual journey around the sun.

  Therefore, the rhythm of the monk’s existence was something free and natural and organic. It was attuned to the waxing and waning seasons. It followed the sun’s course along the ecliptic. It knew the same free moods of expansion and contraction that made the sap swell in the trees or the leaves fall from their branches.

  Monastic historians have not given an altogether satisfactory answer to the question of just how the monks managed to get up at the eighth hour of every night, when the eighth hour fell each night at a different time. Perhaps the bell ringer or the abbot had developed some sixth sense that told him when to crawl out of his blankets and wake the brethren. Perhaps the first cockcrow, which is supposed to come a little after midnight, gave the necessary alarm. But in any case, the Rule provided for the accident of a late rising: the cantor would shorten the night office by cutting some of the “lessons” (lectiones) read aloud at each nocturn. And the bell ringer would do a suitable penance.