The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  St. Bernard tells us that this presence of God has nothing in it of an imaginary vision, nothing in it that appeals to sense or to mere emotion. Vide tu ne quid nos in hac Verbi animaeque commixtione corporeum seu imaginatorium sentire existimes. And he goes on to give a classical description of the way the Word is present to the soul in mystical experience:

  Not in any figure, but infused into the soul: the Word is apprehended not under any outward appearance but by His effect. . . . He is a Word that does not sound in the ear but penetrates the mind; He does not speak, He acts; He does not make Himself heard in the senses but in the desires of the will. His face has not a visible form, but impresses a form upon the soul; it does not strike the eyes of the body but fills the heart with joy.39

  The secret of Cistercian spirituality was simply to seek the perfect possession of God through the love of Christ: a love that expressed itself in the search to know Jesus in His mysteries and in all Scripture, and in the ardent desire to serve Him by the perfect observance of the Rule of St. Benedict. Qui habet mandata mea et servat ea, ille est qui diligit me.40

  But it would be an error to think that, for St. Bernard, the whole contemplative life was summed up in the love of Christ as Man. This is only the beginning. It has a definite purpose: to prepare us for the infused and experimental knowledge of Christ in His Divinity as it has just been described. The importance of devotion to the Humanity of Jesus in Cistercian spirituality is that the White Monks considered it the simplest and most effective preparation for infused contemplation.

  This is the point where a superficial study of the Cistercian spirit will generally go off the rails. As soon as we begin to talk about devotion to the Humanity of Jesus, we think of all the books of meditations and all the devotions and all the pious art that abound in our time, and we unconsciously assume that St. Bernard was thinking of all this when he urged his monks to cultivate an ardent love for Christ. Yet, we have already seen how rigorously all such means were banned from the Cistercian abbey church. The monks were not allowed to use books of devotion or even to meditate from books in church; they had no pictures to look at; they had their “devotions” but these were simple and unadorned, unlike those of our own day. There was not even a time prescribed for formal meditation. Yet, to tell the truth, there has never been such rich and vital and perfect interior life in Cistercian monasteries as there was in the twelfth century—the age of the great Cistercian saints and of the purest Cistercian mysticism. How did they manage to nourish their interior life under such conditions?

  The answer is simple. The whole harmonious structure of regular observances, the monastic life we have been discussing, the simple round of prayer and labor and reading, the life of the cloistered cenobite, far from the activities of the world, close to nature and with God in solitude—all this was saturated in Scripture and in the liturgy. In fact, the liturgy elevated and transformed every department of the monk’s existence, penetrated to every recess of the monastery, and incorporated all the monk’s activities into a vital and organic whole that was charged with spiritual significance. The monk lived by the sun and the moon and the seasons, granted: but all nature was elevated and made sacred by the liturgy, which gathered up all the monk’s acts and all his experience, ordering and offering everything to God.

  Perhaps, at first sight, that may look complicated: but it was really extraordinarily simple. The liturgy, far from complicating life with ritualistic functions, had been purified by the Cistercians and stripped down to its primitive essentials and was therefore doing the work it had done in the days when St. Benedict wrote his Rule. Nothing was plainer and at the same time richer than the liturgy of primitive Cîteaux, in which, stripped of all conflicting elements, the temporal cycle of the Church’s year dominated all.

  In other words, the Cistercian really worked his way through the liturgy of the fundamental seasons—Advent, Christmas, Septuagesima, Lent, Easter, and post-Pentecostal—in all their fulness. The mighty lessons taught by the Church in every Nocturn and every Mass had a chance to work themselves right into the blood and marrow of the monk’s existence. In Advent he virtually lived and breathed Isaías. The words, which he knew by heart, sang themselves over and over in his mind and soaked themselves into the landscape of the season and its weather and its every aspect, so that when December came around, the very fields and bare woods began to sing the Conditor alme siderum and the great responsories of the night offices. In the snows of January, the triumphant antiphons of Christmas or the mysteriously beautiful responsories of the Epiphany followed the monk to the bare forest. Later, the office Domine ne in ira began to echo through his mind and prepare him for the austere and somber cycle of offices that would go from Septuagesima to Passion Sunday and Holy Week in an ever-increasing seriousness and dramatic power until the final anguished katharsis of Good Friday.

  Then suddenly the dazzling joy of the Easter liturgy and its incomparable lightness and relief and triumph led the monk into spring, and the budding woods and the songs of the birds and the smell of flowers and the first green blades of the coming harvest filled the sunlight with silent alleluias: and on to another climax of confidence and vision and peace at the Ascension. Then Pentecost gave the whole interior life of the monk a new direction, and he entered the summer and the long series of Sundays that discussed, in poetry and music, every phase of Christ’s public life and teachings, while in the night offices he chanted his way through the Books of Kings. In August he was in the Books of Wisdom; in September, Job and Tobias; in October, the Books of the Machabees, and in November, Ezechiel and Daniel.

  The liturgical cycle took the monk through all Scripture, all the Old and New Testaments, with commentaries and explanations by the greatest of the Fathers, all of it chanted and prayed and absorbed and literally lived. The attitude of the Cistercians toward all this is doubly clear when we reflect that the books of the Bible sung in the church were also, at the same time, read in their entirety in the refectory during the same season.

  In this way not only did the monk live in the midst of nature and the joys and beauties of the woods and mountains, but his whole life was steeped, besides, in perfect poetry and music, and his mind was filled with fascinating stories and images and symbols and pictures. He moved and breathed in the spiritual world of the prophets and patriarchs. He was familiar with Gedeon and Joshua and Moses and Aaron and Elias and Jeremías. He lamented with Job and he praised God with Daniel and he saw the heavens open in the wild, brilliant theophanies of Isaias and Ezechiel.

  The Vulgate became so much a part of the monk’s mind, that he could not help thinking in its language and seeing things in the light of its symbols and images, and gradually the whole universe became impregnated with the poetry and the meaning of Scripture. And this was all the more simple and easy because there was nothing else to get in the way. The monk had no other interests. All his other reading revolved around Scripture, because the monks read nothing that was not more or less a commentary on the Vulgate.

  The influence of this kind of interior life is obvious the moment anyone reads a page of St. Bernard or St. Ailred. Bernard, especially, is a poet after the manner of Isaias (although his best poetry is all prose), for his language is full of the vegetal exuberance of the great prophet of the Incarnation. So fresh and rich and ingenuous and outspoken is the style of the abbot of Clairvaux that one wishes his sermons on the Canticles had been illustrated by Eric Gill.

  Such is the atmosphere of all Cistercian spirituality: and it is incomparable.

  The Cistercians transfigured the Old Testament with their one great obsession, the love of Christ. For it was, precisely this that was their “method” of arriving at Christ and of keeping in touch with him. They did not have any systematic meditations on Christ—still less, scientific or psychological histories of Christ’s life. But they developed the habit of seeing Christ in every page of the Bible, whether of the Old Testament or of the New. And carrying the substance of the Vulgate
in their memories, they went about everywhere with an inexhaustible mine of material in which their faith found Christ under every symbol and every allegory and every image; all spoke to them of the union of the contemplative soul with the Word of God by pure love. What is more, the monks’ simple faith and ardent desire often bore fruit in the one thing they longed for: the ineffable “touch” of the Divine Substance meeting the depth of their own being in the direct contact of mystical love, and filling their very substance with wisdom and with peace.

  Infused contemplation was the end to which all this simple and harmonious interplay of liturgy and prayer and reading and sacrifice and poverty and labor and common life was directed. Mystical prayer was the fullest expression of the Cistercian life: the end to which all were encouraged to aspire, although it was to be expected that not all, perhaps not even a majority, would reach it. If they did not taste the perfection of that experience on earth, that did not matter. What was important was to love God’s will and live to do His will and contribute as best one could to His glory by the perfection of obedience and humility.

  But the final result of this combination—a hundred or two hundred monks and brothers living out this existence in all its ramifications—was that for a few score of years and in a score of the most truly Cistercian of the Cistercian abbeys, the contemplative life was lived, and lived in community, with a simplicity and completeness and a perfection that had scarcely been known in the world since the days of the Apostles.

  This still constitutes the peculiar function of the White Monks in the Church: to contemplate God as perfectly as it can be done by men living in common, to contemplate God day and night, winter and summer, all the year round, not merely as individuals in a community but precisely as a community.

  And that is the Cistercian vocation.

  XIII

  The Cistercian Character and Sanctity

  THE Cistercian life of the twelfth century was a seamless garment, a perfect unity, whole and complete. It lacked nothing, and it was of a single piece. It was simple and it was total, and the whole integrated unit gave God the perfect praise He looks for from men living together on the face of His earth.

  By the time the seventeenth century came around, that garment had been torn into many pieces in the decadence of the Order. And the pieces had been scattered. Father de Rancé managed to get most of the fragments together and connect them up more or less in the right relation to one another. The result was no longer the same seamless unit that it had been before. It was patchwork. But since it was a tour de force merely to get those pieces together again, it attracted much attention. The attention was directed, most of all, to the clever way all those segments had been joined and to the individual merits of each piece in relation to the others; as a consequence, men somehow lost sight of the wholeness and the simplicity which were the most characteristic qualities of the Cistercian life.

  Ever since the seventeenth century, Trappists have tended to look at their life not as a single organic whole directed to the glory of God but rather as a complex assemblage of fragments, or “exercises,” each one with some special purpose: one to obtain grace for the world, another to make the monk himself do penance, another to help him grow in this or that particular virtue, another to give edification to outsiders, and yet another to earn his daily bread.

  But once the life was broken up into fragments, even the individual sections ceased to have quite the same meaning they ought to have if they were to be thoroughly integrated in an essential whole. Therefore, many Trappists were able to consider the offices in choir and, a fortiori, manual labor primarily as penances, and then to neglect the third essential element in the Cistercian life—reading—as something accidental and unimportant because it was restful rather than penitential.

  That was why the periods devoted to lectio divina (spiritual reading) came to be spoken of as “intervals.” It was as much as saying that these were moments grudgingly conceded to the body for rest, and that any excuse would serve for cutting them down or suppressing them altogether.

  So, the old Spiritual Directory of the Trappists, written in the past century by a certain Father Benedict, who ended his days at Gethsemani in the time of Dom Benedict Berger, can sum up the life of a Cistercian monk in this strange sentence: “All the exercises of the contemplative life combine to make ours an essentially penitential order.”1 Never was a cart put more squarely before the horse. Instead of penance serving as a means to contemplation, contemplation is offered to us as a means to penance.

  In this sense, contemplation was something you measured by the clock. If you spent a certain number of hours in some formal kind of praying, you were a contemplative. And to judge by the words we have just quoted, the more your prayer exhausted you, the more truly could you be called a contemplative.

  The Cistercian who carried this principle to its extreme was not the Abbé de Rancé but Dom Augustin de Lestrange. When he and his religious determined to sing the whole night office every day—a practice that had been abandoned for several centuries—it was not so much out of love for the liturgy—still less, of Gregorian chant—as out of a desire to spend more hours in a formal exercise of prayer which demanded generosity and stamina and labor. In order to do this, they got up earlier each night—rising before midnight on the big feasts, for they still recited the little office. And then, to make sure that they spent a certain fixed amount of time in choir, the Val Sainte regulations stipulated that the night office must never, under any circumstances, end before four o’clock. That meant that it always lasted at least two and a half hours and might last four, or four and a half. A similar ironclad injunction determined that the conventual Mass must end precisely at eight-thirty (in the winter season). Among the many supplementary devotions introduced by Dom Augustin, we read that the Litany of the Blessed Virgin was recited at eight-forty-five on the mornings of Sundays and feast days and that “this must always last about a quarter of an hour.” 2 The beautiful Salve Regina was also subjected to this harsh treatment. When sung properly, it takes about four minutes. The Trappists of La Val Sainte stipulated that it must be prolonged for a quarter of an hour.

  The timetable of the Val Sainte monks is one of the most perplexing and complicated documents in monastic history, and it is not made any clearer by some of the expressions they used in measuring time. For instance, when they wanted to say “seven and a half minutes to six,” they were liable to put it down as “three quarters and a half quarter after five” (Cinq heures trois quarts et demi quart).

  All these extras, of course, tended to whittle down the monks’ time for spiritual reading and private meditation. Where St. Benedict and the Consuetudines of Cîteaux left the monks one or two or even three hours at a stretch to meditate, Dom Augustin and his followers seem to have exerted their ingenuity in finding ways to break up every “interval” into small segments of fifteen minutes or half an hour. The morning interval never seems to have been longer than an hour, and this period might be cut in half by a litany. This new system was designed expressly to prevent the monks from becoming too interested in their books or lapsing into a form of contemplation that was not in every way active and laborious. The afternoon interval was more or less suppressed by devoting the time to communal practice of Gregorian chant. Knowing the style of their books of chant, we can state with certitude that this, also, was more a penance than anything else. It was practically impossible to sing prayerfully from those chunky black notes, bunched into arbitrary spaces and having no notation of the neumes.

  With the addition of various practices of their own choice, the monks of La Val Sainte succeeded, without realizing it, in making their day as overcrowded as the Cluniac schedule; this was one of the things that St. Robert and his companions had tried to escape when they left Molesme. By trying to be more Cistercian than Cîteaux, Dom Augustin had managed to devise a splendid method for defeating the true end of the Cistercian usages, which is contemplation.

  This cond
ition was intensified by one other notion that had the force of a de fide definition in the spirituality of De Rancé and Dom Augustin, namely, that the merit and value of the things a monk did were measured by the physical effort he had put into them. The monk was urged to drive himself through his heavy day and throw himself into every exercise “with all his might.” As a corollary, if he noticed that he was actually enjoying what he did, he must do something to spoil his joy, and work up some degree of compunction. If anything was pleasant, there was probably something wrong with it. These Trappists could not be persuaded that merit and joy could go together. To be meritorious in the sight of God, your activities had to make you miserable. Said De Rancé to his monks:

  I have often told you that monks should live in groanings; that they were obliged to weep not only for their own offenses but also for the iniquity of the world; that their whole life was nothing else but a state of dolor and compunction; but again I repeat that if monks only realized the extent of their obligation to lament, and if they thought about the account they will be called upon to render God in this matter, they would ask Him for compunction without ceasing and their greatest sorrow would be that they did not have enough of it to weep in torrents.3

  And he added:

  Bathe your faces constantly in the bitter waters of penance. Take no care for anything else but to shed tears and leave God to wipe them away. . . . Take heed to avoid everything that might dry up the fountain of your tears. Have no business or employment or occupation that might be capable of dissipating your sorrow and compunction: but rather make use of everything that can feed and strengthen them.4

  The Abbé de Rancé’s notions about sanctity and the monastic life can also be judged from the lives of the monks who died at La Trappe, in his time, with the reputation of saints. The series of their short biographies5 fills several volumes, and most of the stories came from the pen of De Rancé himself.