The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  It takes a man above the terrors and sorrows of modern life as well as above its passing satisfactions. It elevates his life to a superhuman level to the peace of the spiritual stratosphere where the storms of human existence become a distant echo and do not disturb the center of the soul—no matter how much they may rage in the senses and feelings.

  Fed with the hidden manna of contemplation, the monk finds that the words of Ecclesiasticus are realized in his own soul: “With the bread of life and understanding justice shall feed him, and give him the water of wholesome wisdom to drink, and justice shall be made strong in him and he shall not be moved.“9

  Those who have tasted joy in the silence of the monastery know what the twelfth-century Cistercians meant when they saw the contemplative life in Isaias’s symbol of the“ waters of Siloe that flow in silence.” 10

  Note on the Function of a Contemplative Order

  IF, IN this book, we had attempted a defense of the contemplative life, we would have been expected to explain, above all, how it is that contemplative Orders contribute a very important share to the apostolic life of the Church. However, this has been done often and well, and Catholic doctrine on the subject has been clearly crystallized in Pope Pius XI’s “Umbratilem” (Apostolic Constitution of July 8, 1924, approving the Statutes of the Carthusians):

  From the earliest times [wrote this Pontiff who was famous as the Pope of Catholic Action] this (contemplative) mode of life, most perfect and most useful and more fruitful for the whole of Christendom than anyone can conceive, took root in the Church and spread on all sides. . . . Since the whole object of this institution lay in this—that the monks, each in the privacy of his own cell, unoccupied with any exterior ministry and having nothing to do with it, should fix their thoughts exclusively on the things of heaven—wonderful was the benefit that accrued from it to Christian society. . . . In the course of time this pre-eminent institution that is called the contemplative life declined somewhat and lost vigor. The reason was that the monks . . . came by degrees to combine active life with their pondering on divine things and their contemplation. . . . It was highly important for the Church that this most holy form of life . . . should be restored to its pristine vigor, so that there should never be lacking men of prayer who, unimpeded by any other care, would be perpetually besieging the Divine Mercy and thus draw down from heaven benefits of every sort upon men, too neglectful of their salvation. . . .

  (Contemplatives) give themselves up to a sort of hidden and silent apostolate. . . . We wish that so valuable an institution should spread and increase. For if ever it was needful that there should be anchorites of this sort in the Church of God, it is especially expedient nowadays when we see so many Christians . . . giving rein to their desire for earthly riches and the pleasures of the flesh. . . . But it is easy to understand how those who assiduously fulfill the duty of prayer and penance contribute much more to the increase of the Church and the welfare of mankind than those who labor in tilling the Master’s field.

  Yet the theme that runs through this history of a contemplative Order is one that will probably shock not only men of the world but many Catholics, and, among them, priests. It is this: the vitality and success of the Trappist monasteries all over the world in our time has been due, among other things, to the fact that the monks have been able to free themselves more and more from apostolic missions, active works of teaching and preaching, which had been forced upon them by circumstances in the past. The Order has recovered its full strength in proportion as it has withdrawn from fields of endeavor into which it never had any business to go. In other words, a contemplative community will prosper to the extent that it is what it is meant to be, and shuts out the world, and withdraws from the commotion and excitement of the active life, and gives itself entirely to penance and prayer.

  The pages of this volume will have much to say about this. But before the story begins, it would be well to clarify two important points.

  In the first place, it should not be necessary to say that this thesis does not carry with it any criticism of the active life as such. To say that the active life is not the end of a contemplative Order is certainly not to imply that it has no place in the Church. On the contrary, everyone knows that Jesus Christ, sending His Apostles to “preach to all nations” and administer the Sacraments which are the chief instruments of salvation, made the spread of His Kingdom depend on the works of the active apostolate.

  But, in the second place, if the contemplative Orders do not engage in teaching and preaching, this certainly does not mean that they have no interest or take no part in the salvation of their fellow-men. On the contrary, the salvation and happiness of men is something they take very much to heart and this is, in fact, one of the ends which their life is directed to obtain, but only as a fruit of contemplation and penance.

  The Church stands suppliant before the throne of God, dressed, like the King’s daughter in the psalm, “in gilded clothing surrounded with variety.” The variety—that is, the designs and ornaments which add beauty to the comely garments of the Church—consists of all the different ways and states of life in which Christians can serve God and give Him glory. Chief among these ways are those which are followed by the different religious Orders and Congregations. The final end proposed to the religious Orders is nothing else but God Himself: which means that their function is to bring their members, in one way or another, to the vision and possession of God, Who is the summit of all reality and the perfection of infinite Truth and the unending fulness of all joy.

  The religious state is distinguished from other states of life by the means it uses to obtain this end. Religious consecrate themselves by vow to lives of perfection, and they lead these lives, for better or for worse, in communities.

  All religious Orders therefore strive to produce the highest Christian perfection in their members: but they are also dedicated to the spread of the Church. It is a common end of all religious Rules to contribute, in some way, to the salvation of souls.

  Contemplation and action necessarily have their part in every religious Rule. The two must always go together, because Christian perfection is nothing else but the perfection of charity, and that means perfect love of God and of men. This is only one love, specifically the same. It cannot be divided into two. But emphasis can nevertheless be placed on one or the other of these two objects. The religious Rules that aim most of all at the love and service of souls are termed active, while those Orders whose members concentrate more exclusively on the contemplation (which implies the love) of God are called contemplative. But the active Orders would soon find that their activity was sterile and useless if it were not nourished by an interior spirit of prayer and contemplation, while the contemplative who tries to shut out the needs and sufferings of humanity and isolate himself in a selfish paradise of interior consolations will soon end up in a desert of sterile illusion.

  The fruitfulness of all the religious Orders, and their contribution to the beauty and vitality of the whole Church does not depend on the exterior and material evidence of their energy. The best religious Order is not the one that has the most schools and colleges and orphanages and hospitals: nor is it necessarily the one with the strictest Rule, the most fasting, the severest enclosure, the longest hours of prayer. These are not the standards by which we judge the efficacy of a religious Rule. The best religious Order is the one that has the highest end and the most perfect means for arriving at that end. This, at least, is the abstract standard by which we judge the difference between Orders. But in the concrete, the Order which comes closest to keeping its own Rule perfectly and which, at any given moment, best achieves the end for which it was instituted, will be, in point of fact, the best one in the Church at that moment. And therefore one Order cannot improve itself by suddenly deciding to adopt the institutions and aims of some other Order which has an entirely different purpose in the Church. Instead of becoming better, such an Order would only decline because it would be try
ing to do a work for which it was never intended.

  Now St. Thomas says that the contemplative life is, in itself, the most perfect that can be led by men on earth. (II IIae q. 182 a. 1.) It is, in fact, the life of beatitude, in an inchoate form. When, later on, he adds that the religious Orders dedicated to preaching and teaching are the most perfect, we must remember his explanation that those Orders, although belonging to the active state, perform works which are derived from the fulness of contemplation (ex plenitudine con-templationis). (II IIae q. 188 a. 6.)

  Dominican theologians, in our own day, assert that even in their life of preaching and teaching, contemplation is not secondary, but is a primary and principal end. It is by no means to be considered as subordinate to preaching. In fact, the value of preaching and teaching will depend on the intensity of contemplation from which it proceeds, and of which it is the overflow. Such is the teaching of Father Garrigou-Lagrange and Father Joret.1 If contemplation plays a vitally important part in the preaching orders, how much more vital is it to cloistered contemplatives, who cannot offer distracting works as a legitimate excuse for a diminished interior life?

  Yet however superior the contemplative life may be in itself, if the Sisters in a hospital suddenly decided to retire for an hour of contemplative prayer just at the time when they were supposed to attend to the welfare of their patients, they might be committing more than an imperfection. In the same way, if some Trappist monks suddenly got the feeling that they could not contain the flood of light which inundated their souls, and hastened to the nearest city to start preaching about it in the streets, they would probably not be adding anything to their increment of merits. So the perfection of each religious Order is defined for it by its own peculiar statutes. In practice, and in the concrete, the most valuable Orders in the Church at any given moment are the ones that are keeping the closest to the letter and the spirit of their own Rules, even though the work they accomplish may attract no outward attention whatever.

  As a corollary: it is always a dangerous and insidious temptation for religious to abandon some essential element of their Rule in favor of something else that seems, from a human point of view, to be much more useful and valuable at the time. The greatest enemy of religious Orders is not the persecutor who closes monasteries and dispels communities and imprisons monks and nuns: it is the noonday demon who persuades them to go in for enterprises that have Nothing whatever to do with the ideals of their founders.

  Now there is nothing in the Statutes of the Cistercians—that is, the Trappists—to indicate that they ought to preach missions or run parishes or conduct schools. In moments of emergency—for instance, in war-time or in mission countries—they have had to engage in these works for a time: but even then the situation has always been regarded as unhealthy and has too often proved to have been so. An even more obvious danger is the materialism into which monks who are also professionally farmers can sometimes fall when they attach more importance to the business of running their farm than to the contemplative life which is their real end. The necessity to maintain industries in order to support their monasteries has also proved to be a considerable hardship to the Trappists. Teaching school may be a work of the active life, but at least it is a highly spiritual activity compared with the brewing of beer, the manufacture of chocolate, and the large-scale marketing of cheese. It was perhaps excessive materialism which really ruined the Cistercian Order in its golden age. The zeal for manual labor as an adjunct to the contemplative life turned into a zest for land-grabbing and business which utterly ruined the contemplative spirit and introduced avarice, and the confusion of much activity, where there should have been the calm recollection that is born of poverty of spirit.

  A Trappist monastery will contribute most effectively to the life and the growth of the Mystical Body of Christ when it forms and prepares all its members for an integral life of silence, prayer, poverty, obedience, manual labor and so on, in order that they may tend to the perfection of contemplation. And the perfection of contemplation means, of course, infused or mystical prayer for those to whom God may deign to grant such a favor.

  Now this is precisely the way in which the contemplative Orders perform their apostolic function. Usually people think that the “apostolate” of the monks consists principally in saying many rosaries and offering up many hours of prayer and sweat and hunger for particular intentions recommended to them. All these things count, no doubt. In some lives they play a larger part than in others. But it is not true to say that the apostolic efficacy of a Trappist monastery is measured by the quantity of physical sacrifices or vocal prayer the monks offer up for specific intentions. This conception would be a little crude. It makes one think of the prayer-wheels of the Far East. The monks do pray, and pray with the most ardent charity for the needs of souls in general and in particular—especially of those whom they once knew in the world outside. But the real apostolic “radiation” which goes out from a contemplative monastery springs from the interior purity of the monks’ own souls and from the intensity of their contemplative union with the Christ Whose infinite Sacrifice, daily renewed, is the heart of their whole existence. The power of a contemplative monastery is not merely something you assess by counting up the number of Masses said on its altars, but by the perfection with which the community and all its members are living the one infinite and perfect Mass.

  Anything that interferes with the qualitative intensity and depth of the monk’s charity and contemplation of God also cools, by that very fact, the temperature of his apostolic radiation. And therefore when monks engage in works of a more material nature, and lessen their interior union with God, instead of becoming better apostles their apostolate is rendered far less effective.

  Now that these things have been said, the reader should be in possession of the underlying truths on which the thesis of this book is based. If the author makes any statements which seem strange or exaggerated, in this respect, let the reader remember that the book was written by one who knows that for his own Order, at any rate, one thing alone is necessary. That one thing—the contemplation of God in silence and detachment from all things—is, for a Cistercian, the supreme apostolate.

  Part One

  I

  Monasticism; St. Benedict; The Cistercians

  A MONK is a man who has given up everything in order to possess everything. He is one who has abandoned desire in order to achieve the highest fulfilment of all desire. He has renounced his liberty in order to become free. He goes to war because he has found a kind of war that is peace.

  Beyond imagination, beyond grandeur, power, wisdom, and the light of the mind, the monk has found the key to existence in things without romance and without drama—labor, hunger, poverty, solitude, the common life. It is the silence of Christ’s Nazareth, in which God is praised without pomp, among the wood shavings.

  The monk’s business is to empty himself of all that is selfish and turbulent and make way for the unapprehended Spirit of God. That is his ministry and his whole life: to be transformed into God without half realizing, himself, what is going on. Everybody who is drawn to visit the monastery and who can understand what is happening there comes away with the awareness that Christ is living in those men: “That the world may know that Thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as Thou hast also loved me.”1

  It is this thirst for emptiness, for selflessness, that peopled the deserts of Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. And the marvelous writing of St. Athanasius and Cassian spread that fire all over Europe.

  When the hermit St. Anthony emerged from the ruined city in the desert that had echoed for twenty years with the bickering of the devils against him, his face astonished the men who had heard of him and had come to be his disciples. They did not see a dead man or a man twisted by madness and fanaticism and crude, half-idiot hatreds, but one whose countenance shone with the simplicity and peace of Eden and the first days of the unspoiled world. It was a face that would make expressions like “se
lf-possession” and “self-control” look ridiculous, because here was a man who was possessed, not by himself but by the very uncreated, infinite peace in Whom all life and all being lie cradled for eternity. He was more of a person than they had ever seen, because his personality had vanished within itself to drink at the very sources of reality and life.

  St. Pachomius discovered another kind of solitude. In the first great monastery of Egyptian cenobites, at Tabenna, the monk learned how to disappear—not into the desert but into a community of other monks. It is in some ways a far more effective way to disappear, and it involves, on the whole, an asceticism that is peculiarly deep and lasting in its effects.

  For centuries the monastic life meant one of two things: being a hermit or being a cenobite. They were two roads to the same immediate end—the emptying and purification of one’s heart, setting it free to praise the infinite God for His sake alone.

  No matter what the exaggerations of Tabenna and Nitria and Scete may have been, the great abbots of Egypt and Syria laid down the foundations of an asceticism that was full of wisdom and prudence, good sense and charity. All the sanity and moderation of St. Thomas Aquinas could find no better authority on which to rest, no safer model to follow, than the Conferences and Institutes of Cassian.2

  Nevertheless, if the principles laid down by the masters were full of truth and strength, the ambition of the disciples ended up in the most fantastic ascetic rivalries—athletic frenzies of fasting and whipping that have given Egyptian monasticism a bad name.