So, St. Bernard and William of St. Thierry, who certainly agreed on the principles of mystical and ascetical theology, seem to be contradicting themselves and each other when they insist the cenobite can never be a solitary, yet must be a solitary in order to arrive at the logical term of his vocation-mystical union with God. The answer is that there are two kinds of solitude, one which is not permitted and the other which is not only permitted but absolutely necessary.
The first kind of solitude, the wrong kind, is a man’s isolation from other men by selfishness and pride. William of St. Thierry clarifies his own statement, Nullum inter se patiuntur esse solitarium, by explaining what he means by a “solitary” in this context. It is, he says, a monk who refuses to let anybody else in on the movements of his interior life and who upsets the community with eccentric devotional practices.12 It is the contemplative who imagines he is the only one in the monastery who knows anything about the spiritual life, believes no one else is capable of directing him, and insists on directing everybody else, beginning with the abbot. St. Bernard, in a famous passage, describes the false solitaries with a text from St. Jude: “These are they who segregate themselves, brute beasts, not having the spirit of God.” 13 He explains that these “solitaries” are contentious, evil-tempered men who spend their time raising Cain in the community, and he goes on to show why “the Spirit of God is not in them”:
Consider the soul of a man, how it gives life to all the members of the body in their union with one another. But separate any one member from its union with the rest, and see how long it will continue to receive life from the soul! . . .But that is what happens to every man who is cut off from unity [i.e., love, the common will] with other men: there can be no doubt that the spirit of Life withdraws from such a one.14
The Holy Spirit, the living bond of charity which unites all the saints into one Mystical Body in Christ, does not enter into the soul of the monk who does not love God in his brothers. Consequently, that monk’s soul is dead. To be separated from the living vine, from the source of life without which we can do nothing, is not a very desirable form of solitude.
The other kind of solitude, which the cenobite must desire, is the exact opposite. True interior solitude is simply the solitude of pure detachment—a solitude which empties our hearts and isolates us from the desires and ambitions and conflicts and troubles and lusts common to all the children of this world. And so, in urging his monks to leave the world and all it stands for, St. Bernard insisted they should concentrate on being unlike the common run of men and enter into the loneliness of the saint, whose heart, isolated above the level of the world, exists in a rarefied atmosphere where there is no desire but the desire of God alone.
However, the more a monk is able to isolate himself from the desires and agitation of the world, and the more he isolates himself in the will of God, the more he becomes one, by charity, with all the others who are united in the same love of God. So, the whole problem clears up like magic, the solitude which St. Bernard recommends, far from being opposed to the common will, is, after all, the common will seen from a different point of view.
Thus, in the “communism” of the Cistercian cenobite, even solitude and silence and interior contemplation are viewed as functions of the common life. Each monk is taught, therefore, to treasure certain moments of deepest silence and recollection and even physical solitude, that he may enter into communion, in the depths of his own soul, with the spirit of God, Who is the common life of the monastic community and of the whole Church of God. His solitude, therefore, instead of separating him from his brothers, unites him more closely to them. The closer the contemplative is to God, the closer he is to other men. The more he loves God, the more he can love the men he lives with. He does not withdraw from them to shake them off, to get away from them, but, in the truest sense, to find them. Ormes in Christo unum sumus.
In its highest expression, the fraternal charity of the contemplative seeks a union with other men far beyond mere benevolence and mutual tolerance and good fellowship. It is a union in which all souls are fused into one—into the soul of the Mystical Christ, in Whom they all become one Person.
Now, the true end of the monastic vocation is the perfection of this Mystical Person, not only the perfection of individual sanctity. To view the monastic life merely as a school of individual perfection would be a serious diminution of the Cistercian ideal. The monastery does not exist just to form individual saints and contemplatives, but to form one Saint, one Contemplative, Who is the little Mystical Body of the monastery itself. Each monk contributes to the spiritual perfection of the whole by the purity of his contemplation and by the sanctity of his life: if God has made him a contemplative and a saint, it is, ultimately, that he might so contribute. Needless to say, the monastery is only a member in the great Mystical Body of the Church. Therefore, in the long run, the purity of heart produced in each monk by the monastic rule, by obedience, humility, labor, charity, solitude, recollection, and prayer, adds to the sanctity of the whole Church.
Nothing could more clearly demonstrate this thesis than the fact that individual prayer, in a Cistercian monastery, is always subordinated to the liturgical praise of God, “to which nothing is to be preferred.”15 In the opus Dei the voice of the monastic choir, uniting the voices of many monks, blends into the chant of the one Mystical Christ; and one of the chief reasons why a monk ought to purify his heart in private, solitary contemplation is that this public praise, which he is officially delegated to offer in the name of the Church, may be more pure and efficacious in obtaining grace for the world.
What a transformation is worked in a community of men by the marvelous power of charity and contemplation, by the power of that pure, disinterested love which is a created participation in the sublime life of God! It turns monasteries into Edens where men recover the lost innocence of their father Adam. It turns the cloister into a Paradise where the monks begin, even on earth, to imitate the contemplation and praise of the nine choirs of angels—and the angels, remember, are cenobites. One of the greatest joys of monastic life, as of heaven itself, is the consciousness that all this happy contemplation is shared. Even if the monk cannot talk or write, and so cannot communicate the joy of his own vision of God to his brethren and to the world, nevertheless the whole atmosphere of the cloister is charged with supernatural happiness and radiant with an indefinable sense of vision which belongs to all: because the whole community is one Contemplative, one Hermit, one Angel, one Seraph in the whole hierarchy of choirs that behold and laud their Creator with tremendous and eternal praises!
Here are the words in which William of St. Thierry describes a community of contemplative monks:
The harmony of their lives and of their virtues and of their holy desires seems to be based not on the rules of music but on those of love. And they offer up this harmony to God as a perfect sacrifice, perfect because it is His likeness. In the grace which shines through all their faces and bodily movements and even flows in the folds of their garments, they show forth the presence of love of God dwelling within them, and that presence inspires them all with delight. And in this manner they live together like the Seraphim, setting each other on fire with the love of God. And they strive to honor one another and to do good to one another with such ardor that no honor and no favor done to another is capable of satisfying the desires of him who wishes to honor and do good to his brother.16’
In this atmosphere, far from being crushed in a mold that destroys individuality and stifles the gifts of nature and grace, men are, on the contrary, set free to grow and develop in the air and light of supernatural peace and fecundity. Only the monk who refuses to give himself without reserve to the “common will” becomes cramped and warped and turns into a caricature. It is only in a community where formalism has inhibited the true life of prayer that men are forced into a mold. False ideals of asceticism can disfigure the common will, the life of union with God in all its Benedictine simplicity. False and li
mited notions of spirituality can corrupt a monastic rule and turn the community into a monster which does not give life to individual monks but devours them. But where love governs the monastery, and union with God is the ideal of all who live there together, formalism is washed away by the healthy life stream of common charity. Individuals who correspond to the demands made upon them by such a community do not lose anything vital, but spiritually find themselves in God; they find all the rest of mankind there as well and learn to love everyone in Christ. Then they begin to prosper and grow to an unbelievable extent. And their eyes discover new horizons of joy that would be forever unattainable outside the claustral school of charity.
Nothing, then, could be more alien to the spirit of the cloister than regimentation. The Rule is not designed to blot out individual differences by superimposing a fixed pattern of piety. On the contrary, the purpose of Cistercian asceticism is to liberate each monk’s true self and allow his personality to develop, supernaturally, in its deepest and most vital capacities. The reason for the strict obedience which is the foundation stone of Benedictine spirituality is not to kill anything good or vital in the person of the monk. Nothing of value is ever destroyed by the Rule when it is properly observed and applied. Monastic obedience and labor and fasting and penance and silence and all the rest are directed against the enemies of a man’s true self, and their purpose is to clear away the obstacles that stand in the way of the healthy development of his personality.
After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. Many of us think, no doubt, that we are what we would like to be. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard’s language, our true personality has been concealed under the “disguise” of a false self, the ego whom we tend to worship in place of God. The monastic ascesis is entirely directed against this ego. To the worldling, who knows no other “self” than this shadow of himself, the Cistercian life will evidently spell the destruction of everything he is accustomed to think of as his real personality. But the monk who has given himself, without return, to God and to the formation prescribed by the Rule soon discovers that monastic obedience and penance are rapidly delivering him from the one force that has prevented him all his life from knowing his true self.
We are what we love. If we love God, in Whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in Him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fulness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love anything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are a living caricature of what we are meant to be.
Now, this liberation of true personalities is not the work of one monastic rule alone. All the religious rules are destined to fulfil the same function in different ways. They are all designed to perfect the sanctity of the Mystical Body by forming its members into saints.
The various orders use different means to arrive at the same ultimate end. Their success depends on their fidelity to the means variously assigned to them by God. What is good for a Jesuit will not necessarily be good for a Sister of the Good Shepherd, and what is perfect for a Lazarist may be imperfect for a Carmelite. A Carthusian cannot perfect his monastic personality by living the life of a Capuchin missionary, nor were the Camaldolese hermits founded to carry out the same work as the Christian Brothers.
So it is with the Cistercian. Insofar as he becomes involved in functions which have no place in his own Rule and tries to carry out labors not assigned to him by the Church, he tends, at least per se, to diminish the efficacy of his hidden apostolate of prayer and penance and to jeopardize his chances of interior liberation and divine union. The Cistercian cannot slake his thirst at anybody else’s well: and the six centuries since the Order began to decline in the 1200’s have proved that the proverb Bibe aquam de cisterna tua (“Drink the water of thy own well”) can be applied to the White Monks as truly as to anybody else.
That is why the great Abbots General since the reunion have insisted on a return to the integrity of the Cistercian life in its letter and spirit. They have insisted at the same time on the austerity and contemplative warmth of the first Cîteaux. They have ceaselessly urged the Cistercians of our day to love the simplicity and balance and rugged energy of the life led by their founding fathers. They have never despised the great work of the Abbé de Rancé or neglected to pay their debt of gratitude for his work and that of Dom Augustin, without whom the Order would not exist today. But their gaze goes back through the centuries to the days of St. Bernard and the school of Clairvaux, when the name Cistercian was synonymous with the pure contemplative adoration of God—the adoration offered by the cenobite, whose contemplation was a kind of communism and whose chief function on earth was to unite with his brothers in the great work of liturgical praise, which was an imitation of heaven. As the late Abbot General, Dom Hermann-Joseph Smets, declared: “Our apostolate is marked out for us by our Fathers of Cîteaux: and I mean our Fathers of the old Cîteaux, of the golden age, and not those of the age that was gilded by the fascination for exterior works—those activities which have too often paved the way for our decadence. . . . It is the old spiritual wine made by our Fathers that we are called to drink, and no one, having drunk old wine, straightway hath a mind for new, for he saith: the old is better. Nemo bibens vinum vetus statim vult novum; dicit enim, vetus melius est.”17
Call it wine, if you like, or call it water. It comes to the same thing. For there is intoxication in the waters of contemplation, whose mystery fascinated and delighted the first Cistercians and whose image found its way into the names of so many of those valley monasteries that stood in forests, on the banks of clean streams, among rocks alive with springs.
These are the waters which the world does not know, because it prefers the water of bitterness and contradiction. These are the waters of peace, of which Christ said: “He that shall drink of the water that I shall give him, shall not thirst for ever. But the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.”
These are the Waters of Siloe, that flow in silence.
FRATER M. LOUIS, O.C.R.
Feast of All the Saints of
the Cistercian Order, 1948
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