The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  On the whole, since he “likes the country,” he looks forward to spending the rest of his life in what he euphemistically calls “solitude.” As a matter of fact, his life was not too hampered even by the troubles of a community. There were only five monks at Candeil, and although they “got along well” together, they could easily keep out of one another’s way if things went awry.

  It is easy to see why noble and bourgeois families chose such monasteries as refuges for their less talented sons—the ones who did not stand much chance of making a way for themselves in the world.

  With the commendatory abbeys, it was quite a different story. There, all the rich revenues, far from being enjoyed by the monks, were pocketed by the commendatory abbot. Life was not only not comfortable, it was often squalid.

  No doubt there could be found traces of respectability in some of these houses. But there was not even that at La Grande Trappe, an old monastery of the White Monks in Normandy. La Trappe had been in commendam for about a hundred years. It had survived the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War and got as far as the sixteenth century without losing the essentials of religious fervor and regularity. But the commende had done what war and pestilence had failed to do.

  In the thick of a marshy wilderness you came upon a group of half-ruined buildings so dilapidated and filthy that you hesitated to enter the wide-open door into the cloister. Cattle were stabled in the regular places. The bailiff of the commendatory abbot lived in a more or less inhabitable wing of the building with his wife and children. The seven tramps who were “the monks” camped where they could under the leaky roofs. The stairways had all collapsed, and if you wanted to go upstairs, you had to climb up to a first-story window by a ladder. The flagstones of the church pavement had worked loose and strayed from their places. The walls were ready to fall down, cracked from top to bottom, and nobody dared ring the bells that still hung precariously in the tottering belfry.

  The best-preserved place in the building was the refectory, which the monks now used as a bowling alley in wet weather.

  In the designs of Providence, it was the commendatory abbot of this shambles who was to deliver the Cistercians from the threat of final and irreparable corruption and bring the Order from the edge of the grave back to life and health.

  Armand-Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé was the son of the secretary of Marie de Medicis and the godson of Cardinal Richelieu. He was a tonsured cleric at the age of nine, and when he was twelve he became abbot of three abbeys and prior of two priories, as well as canon of Notre Dame at Paris. One of the abbeys was La Grande Trappe. The leaky roofs of the ancient monastery, the tumble-down church, and the seven unkempt creatures playing at bowls in the refectory with their rustic friends were the last things in the world to concern this precocious child.

  At the age of ten he had already acquired more than a superficial knowledge of the great Greek and Latin poets, and now he was planning a critical edition of Anacreon, with scholarly footnotes, which was to appear when he was thirteen. This child was also dexterous at fencing, was a good horseman, and possessed all the other skills proper to his rank. By the time he was sixteen, he knew the Fathers of the Church so well that the archbishop gave him permission to preach in any church in the city of Paris. In 1643, being seventeen years old, he was a doctor of philosophy, and in 1647 a bachelor of theology. In the contest for the licentiate he came out first on a list which included Bossuet. Bossuet was second.

  In 1651 he was ordained priest. The year following, he was a doctor of the Sorbonne. When he was offered the mitre as Bishop of Léon, he refused it, because the diocese was too unimportant. He wanted to be Archbishop of Tours—and that was already in his family. His uncle had that throne, for the moment.

  The character of this brilliant and ambitious nobleman demands to be studied a little, because it will help us to understand the special peculiarities that gave La Trappe a physiognomy entirely its own. For when De Rancé made his vows as a Cistercian of the Strict Observance in 1664, it was with the explicit intention of reviving twelfth-century Cîteaux. He did not realize how different La Trappe would be from the Cîteaux of St. Stephen and the Clairvaux of St. Bernard, in spite of all his own efforts and good intentions. The reason for the difference is to be sought in the life and character of the reformer himself.

  At the core of De Rancé’s nature was a dramatic and insatiable appetite for the extreme. Once he became attached to an idea, he could not rest until he had pushed it to its logical limits and exhausted all its possibilities. A brilliant mind, he was nevertheless dominated not only by inexorable logic but also by his sense of dramatic fitness, his taste for romantic climaxes. There was in him, underneath the outward polish and classical calm of the grand siècle, all the impulsiveness and enthusiasm of a romanticist.

  In the world, De Rancé had lived a life similar to that led by some hero in Fielding. After he entered the monastery, he found himself in a new role: that of a father of the desert. Scene and formula had been changed completely, but his life still was a fascinating drama in which it was up to him to carry everything out to the limit. In the world, he had been avid for adventure, achievement, experience; now he was just as avid for the negation of these things. He could not rest until he had tried all the penances and fasts and mortifications and humiliations he had read about in the Vitae Patrum.

  Nevertheless, De Ranch’s retirement to La Trappe was anything but the fruit of a natural impulse. Even when he gave up his adventures and resumed his clerical dress and began to live a more retired life, he had great difficulty in overcoming his repugnance for monks. He despised monks. To him, les frocards were, at best, futile and useless little people who frittered away their existence in religious houses, never accomplishing anything that mattered. Their lives seemed dedicated to an evasion. The most serious and pious of them only moved him to disdain. The polite erudition of the Benedictines of Saint Maur was altogether too tame for him. He felt a bitter impatience with the quiet enthusiasm with which they browsed over the books they discovered in their wanderings from library to library. In all the monasteries of France he could not discover a monkish life that seemed to be anything but mildly stupid.

  The closest he came to considering a monastic vocation, after his conversion first got under way in 1657, was when he thought of entering the Grande Chartreuse—not as a solitary, but as a permanent boarder in the guest house. The Carthusians were the only order that still kept up any kind of austerity; then, too, the wild scenery of the Chartreuse was something terrific. . . .

  It was going to be a real struggle for this man to surrender completely to a vocation in which he would no longer be his own master. He dismissed most of his servants and lived in retirement, for the time being, and assuaged his conscience with acts of largesse: for instance, he undertook to feed five hundred poor people for a whole winter.

  He retained control over all his property and was free to follow any adventurous fancy in the realm of piety. He could practice manual labor when he felt like it, just as he had gone hunting before. He could give away money to the poor as freely as he had once spent it on himself. If he wanted to pray, he could pray. He fasted when he felt like fasting. It was all very good in itself, but it could not satisfy De Rancé. It was becoming apparent that much more was expected of him. . . .

  It took a long time for him to make up his mind what that might be. For five years he hesitated and asked questions. He consulted many different kinds of people—from D’Andilly, the Jansenist hermit of Port Royal, to Bishop du Plessis-Praslin of St. Bertrand-en-Comminges; from Gaston, Duke of Orléans, to a poor shepherd he encountered in a storm when both took shelter under a tree. He traveled to the Pyrenees to confer with the austere Bishop of Aleth, Monsignor Pavilion, who later fell under condemnation as a Jansenist. From there he journeyed to Pamiers to consult the bishop of that place. One of these persons would tell him one thing, and the next, something else. Least appealing, but seemingly the most worthy of consider
ation, was the advice given him by Monsignor du Plessis-Praslin, who told him flatly that he ought to be a monk.

  Meanwhile, he had visited his various commendatory monasteries. He decided to give the richest of them to the Carthusians. He disposed of the others and found himself left with two: the Grandmontine priory of Boulogne in the forest of Chambord, and the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe.

  There he was, face to face with a choice which, although he did not realize it, was to turn out a very significant one in the history of monasticism. Supposing he had joined the Grandmontines and revived their ancient disciplines: perhaps they would not have gone out of existence at the Revolution, and we would have had another semi-eremitical order today. The priory of Boulogne sounds as though it must have been rather attractive. It was a small place, lost in the forest. There were few cells, not many monks. It would have been real solitude.

  But in the summer of 1662 the Abbé de Rancé left his estate at Veretz forever and headed for Normandy and La Trappe.

  He still had no intention of becoming a monk. He meant to clean up the abbey and people it with decent monks from some regular monastery of the Strict Observance, while he settled in the manse of the commendatory abbot to look after both them and himself.

  Monks were duly brought in from the Strict Observance abbey of Perseigne, and the commendatory abbot settled in his manse, but not for long. One day, just after he had walked out of one of the rooms, the ceiling came down with a crash. The abbé decided this was a providential sign that God did not want him living in that manse. It was time for him to take the regular habit and join the community as its true superior.

  Accompanied by his former valet, who desired to enter the monastery as a lay brother, the Abbé de Rancé turned his steps to Perseigne, where he was welcomed into the novitiate. He proceeded to astonish everybody by reviving many austere practices he had read about in the annals of the Order. He finally approached the day of his vows, in the early summer of 1664, with ruined health but with the dogged determination to revive the ancient Rule. Then, having pronounced his vows, he returned to La Trappe and entered upon his office as abbot.

  It was the psychological moment for such a step. The new Abbot General of the Cistercians, Claude Vaussin, was also getting ready to go into action. It was his intention to put the Strict Observance once and for all in its place. These malcontents would have to be brought into line and made to forget their nonsense about abstinence from meat and about all the other fasts and austerities they were so attached to. In other words, Providence had raised up a determined defender for the Strict Observance just when it was most needed.

  It was to be a long and wearying conflict. The struggle between the two observances has perhaps been overdramatized by historians in order to cover its essential pettiness with a show of interest. From the Trappist side the abbot of Cîteaux and his party have always looked like smooth and polished villains, while from the camp of the Common Observance the Trappist faction has generally looked like a mob of wild-eyed fanatics. But it is certainly true that the Cistercians of the Common Observance were diplomats. They knew all the ins and outs of the legal formality that must necessarily attend litigation before the various tribunals of the Holy See, and in this they enjoyed the advantage over De Rancé in a war of nerves that only intensified the abbe’s ruthlessness and confirmed him beyond recall in his devotion to an absolute extreme.

  Just at the moment when he had finally given up everything and resolved to devote his entire life to God in solitude and penance and prayer, earnestly determined to do something about the immense evils he had seen in abbeys ruined by the commende, he found that the very order he wanted to save had mobilized against him the whole weight of its power and influence in order to defend the mediocrity which he detested.

  When he had to leave his monastery and go to Rome and there spend day after day choking down his indignation and cooling his heels in the antechambers of cardinals who always put him off with some evasion, the convictions in the heart of the reformer became a white-hot fire of zeal for the most muscular form of penance, the most bitter and lashing humiliations, the blackest fasts, the longest vigils, the hardest labor.

  And so the stage was set. Everything was now ready for the Trappists to lock their doors upon the world and put on their hair shirts and descend into the depths of that penitential silence that was to impress the world of that time more than the loudest outcry of protest could possibly have done.

  Yet, we must not exaggerate. Life at La Trappe was not as frightful as it seemed to the men of that time. There were too many rumors. La Trappe got too much publicity. De Rancé’s own rhetoric was too forceful. There was too much talk about skulls and gravedigging and brothers passing one another in the cloister with a whispered memento mori. But all things considered, life at La Trappe was in some respects easier than it is in the Trappist monasteries of the twentieth century. True, De Rancé attempted to revive the ancient Benedictine fasts, but he had to give them up and return to a timetable that came close to the present one, as far as meals are concerned. There were then only three hours of manual labor in the day. Now there are four or five. De Rancé allowed recreation, which has long since passed out of existence.

  However, if the Rule at La Trappe was not particularly hard, the Abbé de Rancé encouraged his monks to compete with one another in extra penances and fasts and mortifications. One of the religious, who was not strong enough to work in the fields, exercised his ingenuity in manufacturing little penitential instruments of sharp wire, which the more zealous monks were allowed to wear about their person. It was considered a virtue to ruin one’s health by excessive private fasting, and the religious who did not protest when the superior offered him medicine and rest and extra nourishment when he fell ill was apt to be tacitly considered a weakling. It is said that De Rancé dismissed a novice because he reached out somewhat gingerly for a clump of stinging nettles that he had been told to pull out by the roots.

  Then there was the Abbé de Rancé’s view of the monastic vocation. He electrified seventeenth-century France with statements like this: “The cloister is a prison in which everybody is held as guilty [before God] whether he has lost his innocence or not.” 2 In the same vein, he said: 3

  Monastic congregations are bodies of men reckoned as criminals, men considered, by reason of their very state, as public penitents and who no longer have any claim on the goodness of God until they have made satisfaction to his justice by chastisements worthy of their sins.

  The monks of La Trappe were encouraged to consider themselves as outcasts, rejected by God and men, and to find solace not in contemplation of God’s love or of His mercy but only in the grim business of exercising justice upon their own bodies and souls by every kind of austerity and humiliation.

  That was why De Rancé placed such tremendous emphasis on the systematic tongue-lashings which he gave his monks in chapter and for which La Trappe soon became notorious. Monks were supposed to treasure above everything else these opportunities to accept “stinging reproaches, words of fire, public humiliation, and everything that could possibly contribute to their abasement.” 4

  The superior who did not satisfy the supposed hunger of his monks for such bitter medicine was held to be guilty before God for gravely neglecting his duty. The monks, on the other hand, soon found out that it was all an elaborate game, and the thing to do was to try and outdo the superior in their own accusations of themselves.

  Among the recruits who soon came in swarms to embrace this hard life were many who had had none too savory a reputation in the world. For instance, there was the former Grand Provost of Touraine, who, after a near criminal career in politics, came banging on the gate of La Trappe one wild night in the middle of a storm. He had journeyed thirty-five leagues on foot through wasteland and forest. His soaking garments were reduced to rags. His legs and feet were covered with blood. And the two eyes that burned in his great, haggard face spelled out the names of all the sins he wa
s running away from.

  It was just the sort of thing the abbé liked. In after years, this Brother Moses groaned so loudly over his sins that he kept his neighbors in the dormitory awake half the night. And he was one of the champions in the chapter of faults, making public confession of all the terrible things he had once done in the world.

  The Trappist reform was a tremendous success. The austerity and fervor of La Trappe were a challenge to all the ancient monastic Orders. De Rancé came out with a book that contained all his notions and ideals, De la Sainteté et des Devoirs de la Vie Monastique. The book is beautifully written, and the style, except for a few passages, is not too violent. The tone, in general, is dispassionate, persuasive, and every page burns with the deep and sincere enthusiasm of the one who wrote it. But explicitly or otherwise, it attacked every other monastic order in France.

  The result was a series of battles that armed De Rancé against everybody in religion who mattered. He got into trouble with the Jesuits by suggesting that they were too easy-going, and he aroused a mild protest from the Benedictines of Saint Maur by throwing scholarship out of the cloister. His books were burned at La Grande Chartreuse, because Dom Innocent Lemasson found they were upsetting the heads of the solitaries and disturbing them with “wild ideas.”

  But at the same time, monks from every order began to abandon their relatively easy lives and embrace the penances of La Trappe. Above all, there were the dramatic conversions of noblemen, high-ranking army officers, even princes of the royal blood, who left their palaces for De Rancé’s cloister: ingredients in a dish that was peppery enough to be savored for many decades, even in a society of sophisticated and jaded palates.