A THOUSAND YEARS AT THE CUTTING EDGE

Girolamo Marchesi, St Bruno

Today is the Feast of St Bruno (ca. 1030 - 1101), the founder of the Carthusian Order, the most complete of the contemplative communities. The Carthusians are hermits living in community; the order has never been reformed because it has never needed reformation. Books they publish are signed not with an author's name or even a monastic pseudonym but "A Carthusian". Bruno may be the only saint never officially canonised because a Carthusian would never accept such an individualising honour. The original monastery, which in an expanded form still exists, is in one of the world's more beautiful places, the valley of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps:

The Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Order

When a German film director Peter Gröning, asked if he could make a documentary of their life, he was told, "No, we're not quite ready. Come back in 15 years." Fifteen years later, he asked again, and was given permission as long as he came by himself with only a handheld camera. The result was the stunning Into Great Silence, of which the New York Times film critic said, "I would not call it the best film of the year: rather, the antidote to all the others." It is a film of surpassing beauty, in both the aesthetic and the spiritual sense. 

Carthusians live completely apart from the world and do not admit visitors, which is sometimes frustrating for those in the world who are attracted by them. But one can read their writings, some of which are published by Gracewing, including the superb The Wound of Love; and there are international virtual communities of Carthusian-inspired lay people, such as the International Fellowship of St Bruno (IFSB) and, more recently and most interestingly, Quies.

There are male and female Carthusian communities; they are divided into full religious (in the male communities Fathers, usually priests), who spend their entire life in contemplation, prayer and study, and Brothers (or Sisters), who perform the community's practical maintenance but share in the liturgical and prayer life. And one of the few activities which touch the world is the making of Chartreuse liqueur, flavoured with herbs, a drink of extraordinary depth and subtlety. 

The Carthusians are those who have gone all the way. They have given up everything to live close to God. One Carthusian wrote, "How does a Carthusian die? Very simply. You go to sleep, as on any night; you wake up somewhere else." It is, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything." They are well worth getting to know.

A Carthusian praying in cell - from Into Great Silence

NEVER ALONE

In the context of the Year of the Consecrated Life, the award-winning French daily La Croix publishes, this weekend, a rare interview with the General Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, the mother-house of the Carthusian Order. As a long-time admirer of the Carthusians, I found this fascinating and inspiring, and thought I would translate it for this blog. LC refers to the La Croix interviewer, Frédéric Mounier; DL is Dom Dysmas de Lassus, the General Prior.

LC: Within the diverse choices of the consecrated life, how would you characterise the Carthusians?

DL: The way of the Carthusians is rooted in the monasticism of the Desert Fathers. We are monks, and have much in common with the Benedictines or the Cistercians. Our specificity is a greater emphasis on the solitary life. Yet we are not hermits, because the communal part of our lives is far from negligible.

LC: Your separation from the world is particularly decisive . . .

DL: That’s true, our cloisteredness is rigorous, not always easy to accept. For we do not come out of the desert, not even, except in unusual cases, for the death of our relatives. Rather than explain this, I prefer to cite Christ who withdrew for forty days into the desert to pray. When we speak of the desert, that is what we are talking about. But for two days each year we receive our families in the hostel.

LC: What makes solitude cease to be suffering?

DL: The emphasis on solitude should not be mistaken: for us it is merely an external condition and a means. The goal is not solitude but indeed its opposite, communion. Our whole life is constructed on relation. Everything in it is conceived to favour the development of a relationship with God, of communion in love with Him. If he lives his vocation completely, the Carthusian is never alone. Nevertheless, living in solitude, even with that communion with God, requires certain capacities, a type of spirit capable of bearing it. And that isn’t given to everyone.

            The austerity of the Charterhouse doesn’t consist in the fasting, the getting-up in the middle of the night, or the cold, even though those aspects are quite real. The true austerity is the solitude. The first few years, the intimacy with God is still fragile, and the desert, within and without, can sometimes make itself rudely felt. But I hear monks complain more often of not having enough solitude than of the opposite.

LC: In the silence, how does one manage not to be deafened by oneself?

DL: In the beginning, the ego obvioudly takes up a lot of space and makes a great deal of noise. Taming our internal forces takes time. But right from the start it is possible to taste a true silence and to open oneself to the presence of the loved one.  And that is what gradually pulls us toward the true silence, because that communion is of such beauty and the noise of thoughts disturbs it.

LC: You live apart from the world, but not in order to escape from it. How?

DL: When lighthouses still had lighthouse-keepers, they too lived apart from the world, and yet they did so to serve those who passed by them without seeing them. We do what others should do but do not: listen to their hearts, there to hear the voice of him who gave them life. As a fine passage from our Statutes puts it: “Separated from all, we are united to all because it is in the name of all that we remain in the presence of the Living God.”

            We are like the keepers of a transmission relay-station on a mountain-top. Ostensibly isolated, it nevertheless sees the passage of millions of messages, and links men to one another or to satellites above them. Something would be missing from the earth if there were no men (all the contemplatives, not just us) who gave their life to that communication with Heaven, in the name of all mankind.

LC:  What do you perceive of the world?

DL: If you will allow me a smiling answer, I’ll say: first of all, ourselves. What I mean is that men are men, in whatever part of the world you find yourself – including within the cloister of a Charterhouse. So we are a perfectly typical and absolutely normal sample of the world, far from the pious images that all too often circulate about us. Human nature, the essence of the world, is 100% present among us.

            As far as events are concerned, we get La Croix and some other papers. The prior passes on to the monks the important things. Materially spekaing, there are enough magazines and news media that circulate, the texts of the Pope, of our bishop, the diocesan newsletter, etc. It’s not necessary to have news each day in order to maintain that link. Their somewhat limited number, on the contrary, helps us not to smother the most important matters in a multitude of secondary things.

            For example, we follow quite closely the drama of the Oriental Christians, the Synod on the Family, the Year of the Consecrated Life or that of Mercy, and all the rest of the life of the Church and of the world.

LC:  What would you say to a young person tempted to join you? What, to you, is the decisive criterion?

DL: If you’re tempted, come and see. Our life doesn’t demand extraordinary qualities. We have people who have completed the Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale Supérieure [two of the mosst prestigious institutions of higher learning in France – translator’s note]. And there are others who have just finished high school. There are solid persons and fragile persons. So it’s wrong to think that the Charterhouse is restricted to exceptional characters. On the other hand, it’s true that only a small number of persons are capable of sustaining a solitary life, because what is needed for that is not exceptional qualities but very specific ones. In reality, only experience can tell if one feels in harmony with the life in cell or not. While we don’t have any particular demands, neither intellectual nor human, nevertheless we cannot be an escape from the difficulties of the world.

            Many discover quite quickly that this life is not for them. But for those who have received that grace, it is an extraordinary gift. Sure, there is a price to be paid. But I truly regret nothing: we are privileged.

LC:  How does one keep going in the consecrated life?

DL: That is the difficult part today because fidelity is no longer a value in contemporary culture. Sufficient to each day is the evil thereof, because we receive grace only for today. Unshakeable confidence in the love of God, trust in our Father in heaven, attachment to the heart of Jesus, the quiet gentleness of the Holy Spirit, the protection of our heavenly Mother, but also self-knowledge, the accompaniment of a spiritual father, the ability to listen and to convert, an acute consciousness of the immensity of the gift we have received: the divine sonship. All that is what allows us to go on.

            The greatest risk, after a certain time, is that of the blunting of desire, of ceasing to rise. One settles in. One becomes an old bachelor in cell. Love is a life that needs maintaining. As in marriage, there are difficult days and marvellous days. But he who has understood, even in part, what it means to be a son of God, doesn’t fear the hardships of the way.

LC: How does a Carthusian live his desires?

DL: We renounce all desires for one only: the desire for God. The risk, which would entail catastrophe, would be to seek primarily the renunciation.

            Seeking only to destroy one’s desires doen’t entail the love of God. A Carthusian who wanted to become a champion of ascesis would have it all wrong. Among us, sprinting is pointless. We’re in a marathon. Our Statues say: But let no one rely on his own judgement: for he who neglects to open his heart to a sure guide risks, through a lack of discretion, advancing less than he should, either exhausting himself through too much running, or of falling asleep through too much dawdling.”

We know that we need years to learn to manage our sensibility. In solitude one can create a drama out of nothing. A classic saying among Carthusians says, “The novices are saints. The young monks are not saints but they don’t know it. The mature monks are not saints and they know it. And there are some old monks who are saints, but they don’t know it.”

LC: There are nuns, too . . .

DL: Currently there are 62, including seven novices, spread over five convents, two in France, and also in Italy, in Korea, and in Spain.

            Their life is the same as ours. It’s important to them. Until the last Council, their structure was different. Their Carthusian “vicar” is the chaplain of their house, but not their superior. The two congregations are spearate, each with its own government. But I am the General Prior of both congregations.

            Around 1140, after the first General Chapter of the Carthusians, the nuns of Prébayon in Provence, seeking a more solitary rule of life, asked to join the Carthusian order. This happened in 1145. There were as many as 13 convents, which is a small number compared to the 160 monasteries that existed at the beginning of the 18^th century. After the Revolution, they recommenced their life in 1816, until our own time.

LC: How has your particular spirituality managed to continue for nine centuries?

DL: Because it doesn’t exist. We don’t have a specific spirituality, because there can be as many different spiritualities as there are Carthusians. And yet there is a profound unity between us. But the goal is the same. What is particular to the Charterhouse is not solitude as such but the particular quality of the relation to God that solitude allows.

LC: What gives you the feeling of living, of loving?

DL: I have received more love than I could have dreamed. It’s true that it’s only after twenty years of the religious life that I’m able to say that. But the reward – why be afraid of the word? – was worth while, so huge is it.

            As far as the feeling of living is concerned, for us no two days are alike. Even if seen from the outside our life is extremely regular and ostensibly unchanging, on the inside the landscape constantly changes.

LC: How does a Carthusian die?

DL: Generally, the way he has lived: very simply. It’s like the end of a day: one goes to bed at night after a tiring day in the certainty that one will wake up [next morning].  On the other side of death, one will wake up to eternal life. Dying doesn’t seem troubling or difficult to me, on the contrary. Our whole life is oriented to the great encounter.

LC:  What is your hope for the world? What would St Bruno say to it today?

DL: The hope of the world lies in ten words: He knows all, He can do all, He loves me. Those words of Marie-Antoinette de Geuser [a young French mystic who died in 1918] we can say of the world itself. If we truly believe that the Wisdom and the Power of God serve his Love for men, that will not let us understand what happens in the world, but it leaves us with the certainty that all will end well. Christ is already the victor.  

UNSENTIMENTAL AND ABSOLUTE

The feast of St Bruno is particularly interesting. This ecclesiastical administrator from Cologne who went from Rheims to the Alps and founded the Grande Chartreuse was one of those admirable people, so unlike most of us, who went all the way, but also created a structure (and what a structure!) in which later people inspired by his example could go all the way too. The idea of combining the hermitage – which had worked for the Desert Fathers but may not have left much in the way of locusts and wild honey for their successors – with the monastery, where essential tasks could be shared and in part performed by Brothers, was a brilliant one, and still works today. The Charterhouses and their inhabitants, the Carthusians, are a magnificent example of pure spirituality. They have never been reformed (unlike the Cistercians, the Franciscans, and other orders) because they have never needed reform.

‘But what do they do?’ They pray. They also read, and study, and chop firewood, but essentially they pray. Their job, their function, is to pray for the world. To most of us today this probably seems either a cop-out or arcane beyond belief; but if you take prayer seriously, then they are the cutting edge. What’s more, there is a secondary benefit to what they are and do: to be visible, if only just, to the rest of us as an inspiration. I remember, when I first read one of their books, The Wound of Love, thinking ‘I’ve been part of this faith, off and on, most of my life, but these guys make me feel the way Reinhold Messner makes a weekend limestone-climber feel. Or Roger Federer a member of the local country club.’ Even having read some medieval and Renaissance mystics, I simply wasn’t prepared for the sheer – what would one call it? the French word envergure comes to mind: wing-span, range, sweep – of these minds and souls, writing in our own time.

A Carthusian, when he takes his final vows, dies to the world. All religious do this to some extant, but the Carthusian goes further. If one of them publishes a book -- and some do, to the great joy of many of us – it is not signed ‘Joseph Winnicott’ or even ‘Brother James’, but ‘a Carthusian’. I do not know if they still maintain the tradition of having the bottom plank of their bed become the base of their coffin when they die, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t be so, and it fits perfectly into the Carthusian life.

At the same time, they seem a remarkably cheerful lot. Within the monastery, each has a little house, with a main floor where he eats, sleeps, and prays; and a basement where he stocks and prepares wood for his wood-stove and stocks other needments. Often it also has a postage-stamp garden. The monks meet for services and certain meals, and once a week go for a walk of several hours in the countryside.

In 1984, German director Philipp Gröning proposed to the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse that he make a film about them. They thought about it, then answered that they weren’t ready for that. ‘Come back in 15 years,’ they said. So, fifteen years later, he came back, and this time they said Yes. But no crew, no intrusive equipment: just Gröning with a handheld camera. So he lived there for six months in 2002 and 2003, filming quietly with no artificial lighting, then spent two years editing the film. The result, Into Great Silence, is stupendous and wholly surprising. No music, no tricks, just a record of the daily lives of these quiet, good-humoured absolutists.

In celebrating St Bruno, let us celebrate also the ones who follow his lead a thousand years later, and who still go all the way, into great silence, to inspire us and pray for us.