The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  There is something deeply touching about an old monk’s affection for every detail of the community life; perhaps the most affecting of all is the fact that his love for every precept of the Rule, every rubric of the liturgy, is the fresh, wide-eyed love that a child has for all the things that go on in his own household. To be in the infirmary, with a cell all to himself, with a softer bed, and with meat for dinner is no pleasure for a monk who has prayed and labored and meditated for fifty or sixty years with his brethren. His heart is down in the cloister and the choir and the monastic scriptorium. This is, indeed, one of the classic Cistercian types, and the literature of the Order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shows us plenty of such characters.

  Perhaps one of the most indomitable of all diehard Trappists was the founder of Bricquebec Abbey, Dom Augustin Onfroy. Born in 1777, he had gone through the French Revolution as a militant, if not truculent, Catholic, was ordained priest and, after peace was restored, was given a country parish in Normandy. He had always dreamed of being a Trappist. But this was the period when the monks were struggling to get themselves re-established in France. Instead of merely entering one of the monasteries that Dom Augustin de Lestrange had reopened, Father Onfroy started a monastery of his own. He bought a mill at Bricquebec in 1824 and moved into it with a couple of disciples and began to live the Rule as best he knew how. Eventually they were received into the Order.

  But the first days of that foundation were marked by the most phenomenal poverty. Thirteen Trappists had only twelve shirts among them. When they were short of vegetables, they would try to give substance to their soup by throwing some of the more edible forest leaves into the pot. They ate a great deal of “salad”—which means dandelion leaves—and when these ran short, they tried the shoots of young ferns. Their bread was so coarse that the abbot of La Trappe, after an official visitation of Bricquebec, took a loaf home to his own abbey and put it on display with the notice: “This is the kind of bread they have to eat at Bricquebec: so stop complaining about what you get here.”

  But above all, Dom Augustin was a tireless laborer. He not only led his monks out to work in the fields, he was often there before them. In the spring he would take one of the lay brothers with him and hitch up an ox team to a plough and start turning up the fresh, stony earth of their fields as the sun came up over the hills. Peasants in the district remembered seeing Dom Onfroy ploughing at four o’clock in the morning in 1848, when he was seventy-one years old. But he, like other diehards in the Order, gave trouble to his superiors when it came time for him to accept mitigations that doctors said he needed. When the Vicar General of the Trappists ordered him to follow his doctors and eat meat in his old age, he obeyed with such fuss and unwillingness that he could well be called non parum obstinatus. But that was the way he had been formed.

  The Trappist of the nineteenth century was cut on the De Rancé pattern. Penitential practices, vocal prayers, and farm labor—or perhaps one of the monastic industries that began to flourish in that age—these were what filled his mind. These were his life. He was practical and intensely energetic. He was extremely austere and not a litle rigid. He was intolerant of less muscular conceptions of the monastic life than his own, and his ambition was to take heaven by storm, carry off the prize of a supernal crown by an onslaught of irresistible energy. Underneath all that, he was intensely simple, and in his soul burned the vigorous faith of a child. He was content with his life and his penances and his work. The deepest needs of his soul were satisfied by these things, and they did not usually present any particular problem to him: if he managed to survive the life long enough to make his vows, he turned out to be equipped to stand all that the Rule had to offer in the way of austerity. Those who could not do so had found it out long before and had quickly dropped out of the running. The Order—or rather its various congregations—did not number very many monasteries, and the selection of vocations seems to have more or less taken care of itself. If you could stand the life you became a monk, and if you could not you went somewhere else. Apart from that, the monasteries were poor, and the life of the monks was dominated by the labors necessary to keep body and soul together. So they did not leave us any special record of their spiritual problems.

  However, the old Spiritual Directory survives as a witness to the solid and serious character of their austere spirit. The monk who wrote it had read deeply in St. Bernard, although he had used the saint chiefly as a quarry of suitable quotations in defense of penance and austerity—without arriving at any special appreciation of his doctrine on the contemplative life.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, and especially after the reunion of the three congregations, the interior life of the Order entered upon a new stage of growth, and we soon observe its effects in the lives of the monks themselves. Among the young men who entered Cistercian monasteries about the time the spiritual tide was changing, we find certain difficulties and problems of adjustment. The new generation includes not a few souls who do not readily fit into the mold devised by the Abbé de Rancé, and their maturing is attended with much anguish. In many cases that anguish contributes to a deeper and purer spirituality, and this in turn leavens the whole Order and contributes to a new spirit, until finally the Cistercians become conscious of their new direction and begin to formulate new aims. The monks come to realize an essential lack in a life that claims to be contemplative yet makes its contemplation consist in a multitude of “devotions” and “practices” and, above all, “macerations.” They seek a solution of the problem in the Cistercian writers of the twelfth century and gradually acquire some sense of the scope and depth and beauty, as well as the sane and healthy simplicity, of Cistercian mystical theology. A whole new doctrine of contemplation opens out before them, and the Cistercian vocation takes on an entirely different meaning. . . .

  But even today this is a work that has barely been begun, although it has been maturing slowly for some fifty years. The movement has not yet reached maturity in all the monasteries. The full warmth of the new fire has not yet spread to the remotest parts of the Order, where the members of the body still are somewhat stiff and cold with the formalism of an earlier day. But there can hardly be a house of Cistercians that has not, to some extent, begun to exchange the new spirit of confident love of God for the old rigid concentration on one’s own sins and on one’s own penances to destroy sin.

  If Father Joseph Cassant is ever canonized—and there is a possibility of it, since his process has been passed on to Rome by the archdiocese of Toulouse—it will be because of what he suffered in the beginnings of this new development. The soul of Father Joseph Cassant is given to us as a living psychological case history of the transition. Not that the transition was by any means fully worked out in his life. It was never to be so. He died too soon. Only the conflict was there, sketched out in its broad lines: and underneath the conflict a modern observer can easily work out the essentials of a Cistercian solution—so that Dom Etienne Chenevière, the present abbot of La Grande Trappe, has been able to write an illuminating study of Father Joseph specifically as a Cistercian. L’Ame Cistercienne du Père Marie-Joseph Cassant13 is more than the usual pious biography. It brings to life the soul of a young man who had very few natural gifts, yet was haunted by a deep, spiritual ideal. Instead of trying to dress up Father Joseph into something that he was not, Dom Etienne takes every opportunity to let him speak for himself in his own tortured and often ungrammatical language. Father Joseph left a couple of boxes of notes, most of which were quotations from the books he had read; but the pile also included spiritual observations and, especially, records of the desires and resolutions that took shape in his soul at various points in his religious life. These documents give us a fascinating insight into the heart of a monk of our own time in various stages of formation.

  Father Joseph was the son of a southern French farmer. His character was strong and positive and practical: and he had his countrymen’s love of clear-cut decisions. His whole
life was a struggle of will to get things worked out and in their proper places, in spite of the slowness of his mind. He was meant to be a priest and a saint, and there seemed to be an infinite number of obstacles in his way. One of the greatest was the fact that it almost required a miracle for him to pass the necessary examinations. Then, too, his health was so poor there was a chance that he would not live long enough to realize at least the first half of his ideal.

  His realistic and energetic character predisposed him to embrace Trappist asceticism. He had all the courage, but none of the strength, necessary for this. And his sense of the concrete made it a temptation to attach great importance to penances and labors which showed a tangible result—at least to the extent that they made you feel the price you were paying to carry them out. Father Joseph Cassant labored under such physical and spiritual handicaps that things which the other monks took in their stride could be negotiated by him only with extreme effort and patience.

  If he had fallen into the hands of the wrong kind of director, Father Cassant would have been six feet underground within a year. Fortunately, his novice master, who later became his spiritual director, belonged to the new generation of Cistercians. Dom André Malet (he was later abbot of Sainte-Marie du Desert) was a priest of benign and gentle and prudent character, wise with the wisdom of charity. Without diminishing anything of his penitent’s ideals, he knew how to restrain and canalize his generous will and lead him on in the ways of a more fruitful sacrifice. Thanks to his guidance, Father Joseph did not exhaust himself beating the air but took up arms in an ascetic campaign against his real enemies. And it is a tribute both to the clear-sightedness of the director and to the docility of the penitent that Father Joseph was able to recognize the biggest obstacle to his sanctity in what we, today, would call an “inferiority complex.” He was keenly sensitive of his lack of gifts; but the supernatural realism of his interior life made him able to see, when it was pointed out to him, that this was precisely the providential tool with which God intended him to forge his sanctity.

  Instead of trying to beat his way through a stone wall in a vain effort to do the spectacular and heroic things that he read about in the lives of great ascetics, he would have to accept his handicaps, his weakness, his slow mind, and devote his life to the task that was to demand of him an obscure and laborious heroism: keeping the Rule of St. Benedict and living the ordinary, everyday life of a Cistercian with the most perfect dispositions God’s grace could afford him.

  His novitiate began with a dramatic scene characteristic of La Trappe. Amid all the tenseness and emotion with which a newcomer to the monastery tends to devour the spiritual food that is presented to him, Father Joseph was following the annual retreat of the community. During the retreat an old lay brother died in the infirmary. The stark austerity of the Cistercian burial rites made a shattering impression on the young man, and his father master found him afterward in tears. Joseph threw himself with ardor into the monastic life, and his desires for perfection led him to try and overdo everything. As a result, he was in danger of straining and exhausting his mind or falling into scrupulosity. Without the guidance of a wise director, his vocation would soon have been lying around him in ruins. But we read in his notes: “Penance does not consist in fasting but in following the Rule exactly in order to please God. . . . It is an act of virtue to take necessary care of one’s health with the intention of serving God better, but not to make oneself singular by useless care for the body. . . . Self-love has several skins. As soon as you peel off one of them the next one shows up. . . . If I can’t find time for my studies or haven’t got the brains, I will always do the will of Jesus without worrying about the future. . . . It doesn’t do any good to conquer your body if you still feel anger in you.”

  True, in the early days he put down some of those wild statements that De Rancé’s Trappists were so often encouraged to make about themselves: “I am the greatest sinner. Can’t spend an hour without offending God.” But soon his entire spirituality became absorbed in one thought: the confident love of Christ. His attention belonged rather to the Redeemer, in Whose presence he lived, than to his own failings and his struggles and his efforts to become a saint. After vain attempts to keep up a constant stream of vocal prayers while he was out at work in the fields, he realized that there was a much simpler way of praying and keeping united with God—by the intention with which he did all things: “If I can walk, I owe it to Jesus. If I am a man, if I breathe, etc., it’s all a gift of Jesus. So it is my intention that all these things should be acts of love, of thanksgiving, repeated over and over.”

  His deeply practical and concrete outlook on life led him to adopt a form of active contemplation, a burning faith that finds Christ’s love coming to us in all the events of our lives.

  If anyone was good to him, it was because Jesus wanted it so. If he had to suffer anything, that suffering was something he needed. It came to him from Christ’s love and was meant to do him good. By accepting it, he could prove his love for Jesus, he could show his gratitude. In everything, he looked beyond secondary causes to the First Cause, without Whom nothing else in the universe can stir. Il n’arrive que la volonté de Jésus semper.14

  Finally, he reached the point where his whole spiritual life could be summed up in an obedience which allowed God to work on him and guide him through his superiors. No matter what they did—and sometimes their decisions were very painful—it was God that acted on him, through them. Even when it seemed impossible to believe such a thing, he believed it. And his trust saved him from taking all the false roads he might have taken; it brought him to the altar as a priest, allowed him the happiness of offering for a few months the Sacrifice of the Mass; then, with his interior life entirely simplified and disengaged from all the conflicts and useless efforts that had tended to divide and sap his spiritual energies in the first years, Father Joseph spent his last days not merely accepting with patience the most intense suffering but rising above it and dominating it, together with all the things of time, by a blind and pure faith, a simple and total love for Christ that kept him absorbed in a contemplation that was almost entirely in the will. There is almost no intellectuality in this simple, yet intensely practical soul, and the element of vision is almost lacking from his contemplation—which boils down, in the last analysis, to one thing: a simple, resolute, constant direction of the will, with all its energies, to God. And the God Whom that will seeks and finds is not even hidden in the cloud of a definite mystical experience: He is reached through the faith of Christ’s little ones, on the most ordinary level of religious experience, by means that could almost be called banal. Father Joseph Cassant had always relied very much on books and holy pictures and all the sacramentals to aid him in his prayer: he did still, but it was now entirely simple, consisting in the renewal of a glance and the refreshing of a constant and powerful intention.

  On the afternoon of June 17, 1903, the body of Father Joseph Cassant was lowered into its grave in the préau of Sainte-Marie du Désert. Someone had thrown into the grave a few bright handfuls of petals from the flowers that had been scattered before the Blessed Sacrament in the cloister procession that same day—for it was the octave of Corpus Christi. Otherwise, it was a very ordinary Trappist funeral. Yet, in 1935, the General Chapter of the Order unanimously voted the introduction of his cause.

  Of all the Trappists who have lived and labored and suffered in monasteries since De Rancé reformed the Cistercian life in the seventeenth century, it was this humble little father, one of the most obscure and prosaic of them all, who first really attracted attention by his sanctity. Compared with the utterly fantastic adventures and labors of a Dom Augustin de Lestrange, a Dom Urban Guillet, a Father Vincent de Paul, a Dom Augustin Onfroy, a De Rancé, or all the ascetics shaped by the great reformer, the life of Father Cassant was apparently nothing at all. Dom Urban Guillet had accomplished more spectacular feats of daring self-sacrifice in a week than did Father Cassant in his whole life.
The monks of La Val Sainte had lived for years under a regime that would have killed this poor little monk in a month. Dom Augustin de Lestrange had led his men from Switzerland to Austria to Poland to Russia and then to the West Indies and America and back to France again—and Father Cassant had only struggled breathless in the vineyards of Sainte-Marie du Désert, not even able to keep up with the rest of the community. He had to start home early so that he would get back to the monastery at the same time as the rest. And when there was danger that the Waldeck-Rousseau legislation against religious orders would mean the expulsion of the monks, the mere thought of having to cross the border to some house in Spain nearly overwhelmed him with despair.

  Yet, it is Father Joseph Cassant who is talked of as a prospect for beatification rather than the Abbé de Rancé, or Dom Augustin de Lestrange, or Dom Urban Guillet. . . .

  The problem that was barely sketched out in the life of Father Cassant was worked out more fully in one of his contemporaries, a Trappistine nun. Father Cassant’s death and burial, which marked the solution of all his difficulties on earth, came at the precise moment when Mother Mary Berchmans Piguet was having the struggle of her life to keep her vocation together. This very gifted young nun had been sent from the convent of her profession, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, in Laval, France, to a new foundation in Japan. She had arrived at Hakodate in the winter of 1902 and was now living with a small pioneer community in a wooden frame building in the hills outside the city. Mother Berchmans’s spiritual director at Laval had discovered in her the ardent soul of one who needed, above all things, to find God in a pure and entire love, the only thing that was capable of delivering her from attachment to objects that were less than He. Her director had sent her to Japan because he wanted her to be a “victim,” a “martyr.” He believed the sacrifices imposed on her by the struggles of a new foundation would be the quickest way of purifying and preparing her soul for the great things that were destined for her.