The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  The churches and cloisters of abbeys like Fontenay, Senanque, Noirlac, Thoronet, and Silvacane, their mellow stones glowing in a setting of quiet woods, still speak eloquently of the graceful mysticism of twelfth-century Cîteaux. It was for the abbot of Fontenay that St. Bernard wrote his tract, Degrees of Humility, with its wonderful twelfth chapter on mystical prayer. Fontenay itself represents the direct influence of St. Bernard and is the precise application of his principles on architecture.12

  In such settings as these, the purified liturgy of the Cistercians became a thing of tremendous effect. What meanings men rediscovered in the Mass, now that the essentials of the Sacrifice stood out in bold relief, liberated from a welter of confusing decorative details! Simple and eloquent ceremonies, harmonizing with the style of the sanctuary and dictated by its very austerity,13 tied the whole power of the building and the strong chant of the choir to the action that was proceeding at the altar.

  Now that the eye was no longer lost in a throng of ministers and a sea of moving vestments, mind and heart could concentrate on the one central thing that really mattered. And the monks in choir contributed their part to the “action” by the vital movement, the systole and diastole of chant, rising and falling with tremendous dignity and austere power to form a background and commentary—a musical meditation on the Mass of the time or the saint of the day.

  All contemplative life on earth implies penance as well as prayer, because in contemplation there are always two aspects: the positive one, by which we are united to God in love, and the negative one, by which we are detached and separated from everything that is not God. Without both these elements there is no real contemplation.

  The Cistercians did not conceive penance as a system of arbitrary and irritating practices by which the abbot could tease and mortify his monks. The penitential life of the White Monk did not consist in a series of athletic feats of endurance or of systematic flagellations, or even of deliberately-staged public humiliations. The Cistercians were basing their life on the Gospel: and the “austerity” of the life that was led and preached by Jesus Christ is the broad, fundamental, searching austerity of labor and poverty. The penance of the Cistercians is essentially the common penance of the whole human race: to “eat your bread in the sweat of your brow” and to “bear one another’s burdens.” There would be plenty of cold and hunger and insecurity. Night after night the monk would go to his simple bed of straw, under the stone vaulting of his unheated dormitory, to rest his aching muscles for a few hours.He would rise in the middle of the night and pray and work for a good long time before he got anything to put into his empty stomach. He would know the heat of the sun. His hands would be hard and rough from field work or building or the exercise of a craft.

  It must not be imagined that these monks simply indulged in such things out of pious fancy. Underlying the Cistercian insistence on manual labor was a powerful element of what the Communists call “social consciousness.” The poverty and labor of the early Cistercians had explicit reference to the social situation in which they lived. Besides being a return to St. Benedict and the Gospel, their way of life was also a protest against the inordinate wealth of so many of the great feudal abbeys.

  One of the strongest criticisms leveled by Cîteaux against the Cluniac regime was that it was rooted in social injustice. The Cistercians could not accept the notion of a life of contemplation in which the interior peace and leisure of the contemplative were luxuries purchased by the exploitation of serfs and the taxation of the poor. St. Benedict had prescribed that the monk was to be the poorest of the poor and live by his own labor. Orderic Vital, the twelfth-century Benedictine historian, represents St. Robert chiding the monks of Molesme in chapter for living “on the blood of other men.”14

  If the monk has abandoned the cares and distractions and burdens of life in the world, that does not mean he has renounced the society of other men or the responsibility of providing for himself by the labor of his own hands: far from it. In giving up his possessions, material ambitions, and independence, the monk dedicates his whole life, body and soul, to the service of God in his monastic community. From the moment he makes his vows he gives to God everything that he has and everything that he is or can be. But the gift is not accepted directly by God. God’s representative is the abbot of the monastery, qui Christi agere vices in monasterio creditur 15 And the monk understands, by the terms in which his vows are made, that his gift of himself to God will consist chiefly in a gift of himself to his abbot and his brothers. He will now live no longer for himself but for the monastic family to which he has been admitted. He will prove his love for God and glorify Him by the simplicity and love with which he obeys his abbot and his brothers, and dedicates his body and soul to the praises of God and to the round of labor and reading and meditation laid down in the Rule. His poverty is so complete that he cannot give or receive or lend or borrow the smallest article, a book or a pen, without permission of his superiors. Indeed, St. Benedict says that the monk no longer has full jurisdiction over the acts of his body and soul. They are no longer his. They belong to God.16

  But even the monastic family itself was to be poor. The monks owned their own land, and from it they had to earn their living. Their chief source of income was to be their own farm, their flocks, their herds, their vineyards, orchards, and forests, their quarries and fishponds. St. Alberic’s instituta explicitly forbade the exploitation of tithes or serfs or manorial mills and bakeries; the Cistercians were not to accept the care or revenues of parishes or other benefices. They were to be poor with the poverty of Christ, pauperes cum paupere Christo. But this poverty, which amounts to one of the most intimate necessities of the contemplative life, something without which contemplation cannot achieve a vital development, always has its communal aspect for a Cistercian. The White Monk’s poverty is not merely a negative self-stripping: it also has a positive function, the support of others in charity.

  That was why an anonymous Cistercian writer of the twelfth century could go back to the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and point to the communism of the early Christians as an exemplification of the Cistercian ideal. “The multitude of the believers had but one heart and one soul; neither did any one say that aught of the things that he possessed was his own: but all things were common unto them. Neither was there any needy among them. For as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the price of the things they had sold and laid it down before the feet of the Apostles. And distribution was made to each one according as he had need.“17

  This complete, uncompromising totality of the common life, in which absolute poverty paved the way for a pure union of charity, was considered by the early Cistercians to be the safest and most comprehensive formula for spiritual perfection. The author we are citing, the unknown writer of the Exordium Magnum, calls this Christian communism the formula perfectae poenitentiae, 18 and the expression is full of meaning. The poverty, obedience, self-renunciation, humility, and fraternal love implied by the common life of the Apostles and monks sum up all that is most efficacious in Christian penance. But more than that, his term poenitentia has a positive ring about it, in its context, which makes it mean not mere penance but sacrifice. To give up everything and devote yourself without compromise to the love of Christ in the common life is to glorify God and offer Him the worship that most pleases Him, because it most resembles His own infinite generosity and the gift of Himself to us in the Incarnate Word. It enables us to love one another as He has loved us.

  One of the most striking features of this ascetic ideal is that it is open to everybody. It is a way of perfection from which no one is excluded. No special vocation, no abnormal spiritual equipment, is required. The purity of the Gospel is open to all Christians, and the Cistercian life is the purity of the Gospel. When the founder of an independent monastic congregation, St. Stephen of Obazine, tried to have his communities affiliated to the Carthusians, whose way of life is more distinctly “special,�
�� Guigo, the prior and legislator of the Grande Chartreuse, advised him to take his application to Cîteaux. “The Cistercians,” he said, “travel the royal road and their statutes lead to all perfection.”19

  In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary men, together with some of the intellectual and spiritual élite of western Europe—men who might otherwise have been swept away on the strong tides of violence and passion that swelled in the semicivilized world of their time—settled down in Cistercian cloisters to become peaceable and industrious beings—gentle, unselfish, and meditative men whose hard work changed the face of many a wilderness and whose prayers affected the spiritual history of their world in ways that will never be known this side of the tomb.

  It would not do to paint too idealistic a picture of the monks in an order as large as that of Cîteaux was soon to become. They did not all turn into great saints. Some of them preserved many of the rough edges they had brought into the cloister from the world. Documents of the time leave us evidence that great sacrifices were demanded to get along with some of the people who were admitted to Cistercian monasteries. But such vocations were not only not excluded, they were taken for granted by the Rule.20

  A monastery is not a social club, and it would not be fitting to exclude genuine vocations because of bad manners or imperfections of character, as long as there is the sincere good will that St. Benedict demands.21 The basic idea in Cistercian asceticism is chanted by the monks at the mandatum, when they wash one another’s feet every Saturday in the cloister. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. It is Christ’s love that has brought us here together in this house. The sanctity of each one is somehow bound up, in the inscrutable designs of God, with the sanctity of the others. We did not come here for the scenery, the architecture, the fresh air, the music, the country life, or for human friendship. We were brought here to be sanctified by the Holy Ghost—first, no doubt, as individuals but also together as a community. We were brought here that God’s love might live in us: that God’s grace and the constant daily contact with one another might ground us in a deep, experimental knowledge of what we ourselves are and what all men are, that we might learn patience and unselfish, gentle obedience and be filled with the humility and mutual forbearance without which it is impossible to ascend to the higher reaches of contemplation.

  One of the early works of St. Bernard, Degrees of Humility, lays down the foundations upon which Cistercian spirituality was to be built up into a powerful but very simple edifice. The abbot of Clairvaux, fond of divisions and degrees, like most of his contemporaries, shows his monks their way to God in “three degrees of truth.” Under the guidance of divine grace, in the school of charity, in the silence of the cloister, we are to be gradually initiated into a deep and experimental knowledge of the truth—first, as it is found in ourselves, then as it is found in other men and, finally, as it is in itself.

  The beginning of the ascent is self-knowledge. This is more than an academic acquaintance with the names of the things we have done or might be capable of doing. St. Bernard’s humility, like that of St. Benedict, is a deep and searching and, on the whole, a very vital and healthy thing, because it enters into the very recesses of the spirit. It is an experimental knowledge, a deep-seated sense not of mere shame, not of mere confusion, but also, curiously enough, of love and peace at the recognition of the human weakness and insufficiency that are in us all. It is not only intellectual, this self-knowledge, it is also affective. It is something accepted by the will. What it means, in practice, is a profound quietude and self-effacement, the disposition of a man who has gone far beyond mere callow disgust with his own failures and has begun at last to pass out of himself and attach no more importance to himself. He has become without value in his own eyes, ipse sibi vilescit. And when you recognize that something has no value, you cease to bother about it.

  It is in this atmosphere of humility that the way to contemplation begins. It is only through this deep and pacifying sense of his own unimportance that the monk can be set free for the blissfully happy occupation of attending to God, Who alone is all reality and in Whom all values are sublimated, transcending every concept to which the mind has access.

  The atmosphere of genuine humility is termed by St. Bernard the spiritus lenitatis (“spirit of kindness, gentleness”).22 Perhaps no one who has not lived in a monastery can quite savor the rich implications in those two words. No one who has not tried to follow St. Bernard and St. Benedict and enter into their peace can quite grasp the spiritual beauty and moral harmony that are contained in that idea. Yet, visitors to Trappist monasteries who have been struck by the sight of some old, hard-handed, white-bearded lay brother absorbed in his job, completely unconscious of himself and radiating the innocence and prayerful gentleness of a good child, because he is obviously in communion with God even while he works, will recognize something of what St. Bernard is talking about. The spiritus lenitatis is a tenderness born of the experience of suffering, and it expands and reaches out to embrace all other men, filling our hearts with a delicate and Christian considerateness for their sufferings. When you have a broken leg, you are careful of your movements; if you have any natural sympathy, you will be just as careful of other people when you see them in the same kind of trouble. In the same way, Cistercian humility makes you very circumspect in your actions when you know your will to be weak and wounded and your intellect to be often blinded by selfishness and passion. Once you have experienced the pain of your own infirmity (and to feel the pain is the first step on the way to a cure), you soon learn compassion and a corresponding tenderness toward other people.

  Now, in the common life, all the men God has brought to the monastery to be sanctified by His Spirit are thrown together with their various spiritual infirmities, their impatience, their inconsiderateness, their petty vanity, their bad tempers perhaps, and their pride and all the failings of which they are so largely unconscious. St. Bernard sees in all this a tremendous occasion for spiritual growth.

  The abbot of Clairvaux seized upon this most characteristic Cistercian doctrine and gave it a crucial position in his mystical theology. The problem of mysticism is to endow the mind and will of man with a supernatural experience of God as He is in Himself and, ultimately, to transform a human soul into God by a union of love. This is something that no human agency can perform or merit or even conceive by itself. This work can be done only by the direct intervention of God. Nevertheless, we can dispose ourselves for mystical union, with the help of ordinary grace and the practice of the virtues. We have just seen that, for St. Bernard, the two principal steps in this active preparation were humility and charity, or meekness and compassion. They both are “experiences” of the truth: the truth about ourselves and the truth about others. But since contemplation is an “experience” of God by connaturality, by union of love, St. Bernard sees that a connatural appreciation of the sufferings and sentiments of other men is an excellent preparation for the mystical knowledge of God in the obscure “sympathy” of infused love. After all, contemplation is an intimate knowledge of God that flows from a loving union with His will. And God Himself has told us that the ordinary way to that union of wills with Him is union of wills with other men for His sake. “Let us love one another, for charity is of God. And everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is charity. . . . He that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not? . . . If we love one another God abideth in us, and His charity is perfected in us.”23

  St. Bernard gives another reason why this charitable compassion is a perfect preparation for mystical prayer.

  It is, he says, because the Holy Ghost takes a more transcendent part in the acts of such a soul and intervenes more directly in the work of preparation. He shows us how, in the vicissitudes and trials of community life, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Unity, is at work in the souls of the monks, visiting and purifying each will with
fire and sweetness, to make it merciful, dignanter visitans, suaviter purgans, ardenter efficiens misericordem facit. The final result, in the soul that submits to this action of God, is that the will softens and is made smooth and pliant and tractable, like well-greased leather. It can be “stretched,” says the saint, even to the extent of loving its enemies. Then it is ready for the higher experience, the supernatural union in which it will pass out of itself entirely and be absorbed in the pure love of God.24

  We can see that, for St. Bernard and his contemporaries, the true fulfilment of the Cistercian life was something more than the literal observance of the Rule of St. Benedict, more, even, than the practice of perfect fraternal charity in a common life like that of the first Christians. Both of these were only means to a more perfect end: mystical contemplation and union of the soul with God. This must be well understood by anyone who hopes to grasp the full meaning of the Cistercian vocation, whether in the twelfth century or in the twentieth. The Cistercian Order is essentially contemplative, and it is contemplative in the purest and strictest sense of the word.

  St. Bernard saw that, in actual fact, there would always be many in the monastery who would be penitents or active laborers rather than pure contemplatives. They would find their peace in a humbler degree of prayer, but perhaps (as the modern Spiritual Directory of the Order tells us)25 they still might reach a higher degree of perfection than someone who was a mystic. However, if the monastery, like the house where Christ was received in Bethany, was a mixed family of penitents and active laborers and pure contemplatives, it was the contemplatives, sitting like Mary Magdalen at Christ’s feet, who were the real glory of that house. Felix domus et beata semper congregatio est ubi de Maria Martha conqueritur. 26