The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  However, when all this has been said, it must be admitted that La Trappe had less in common with St. Benedict and twelfth-century Cîteaux than the reformer imagined. The circumstances of his own life and conversion and all the agitation surrounding his efforts at reform had led De Rancé, in spite of his sincerity and good will, to modify the spirit of the Cistercian life.

  Although his books were thoroughly orthodox and De Rancé’s statements are carefully documented with the fruit of the most patient study of the Fathers, yet in practice the reformer’s emphasis is usually negative. And that upsets the balance of his spirituality, making it a rather one-sided affair.

  Nothing could be more faultless than his description of the monastic state as one designed by God to enable men to serve Him “in spirit and in truth,” a state in which “the first and principal obligation of the solitary is to apply himself to God in the repose and silence of his heart to meditate upon His law without ceasing, to maintain himself in a perfect detachment from all that might distract him from God, and raise himself up by ceaseless care and application to that perfection for which God has destined him, by the faithful performance of the commandments and the counsels.” 5

  There are plenty of passages in which he talks about the love of God, yet, as one of the leaders of the modern Cistercian revival, Dom Chautard, has remarked, they too often read more like literary exercises than anything else.6 They show a certain abstract esteem for the ideals that are expressed, but they remain cold and without inspiration.

  As a result, the contemplative life, in the strict sense of the word, seems to have remained abortive at La Trappe. Once they overlooked the fact that mortification has an object beyond itself—it is designed to set the soul free from its attachments and dispose it for union with God in contemplation and purity of love—the monks tended to pile penance upon penance in a mathematical accumulation of merits. The one who fasted the most, took the most disciplines, slept the least, was thought to have the most merit. He was the best monk. And the whole atmosphere of a Trappist monastery was one of athletic activity rather than of contemplative detachment and peace.

  De Rancé himself, with his nervous, active temperament, could not stand long mental prayer. With his restless mind and insatiable imagination, he was anything but a mystic. He was a penitent, a fighter, an organizer, and a leader. His capacity to take punishment must have been tremendous. His courage was certainly heroic, and the heroism was surely supernatural. He suffered many trials and sicknesses with the uncomplaining fortitude of a saint. And his generosity was infectious. It spread through his own monastery and into many other houses of the Strict Observance and caused men to stand—and even demand—unbelievable things for the sake of their vocation. The whole life of this Trappist monk was a courtship of suffering and death. He went out of his way to look for things that would “annihilate” his natural desires and tastes and feelings; he desired nothing but to embrace all sufferings with a grim and exultant satisfaction that was the token of a supreme disdain for the world, the flesh, and the devil.

  The mentality of La Trappe was the mentality of a Lost Battalion, of a “suicide squad” of men who knew they were doomed but were determined to go out of the world in grand style, making death and destruction pay so dearly for their triumph that death had no victory left at all.

  If this cult of physical and mental endurance had the effect of sometimes making the Trappist take himself a little too seriously, it nevertheless accomplished one important result. And that was the thing De Rancé had been providentially raised up to do. It brought back one of the essential elements of monastic spirituality. It reintegrated the monastic life by reviving that asceticism without which sanctity and contemplation are impossible. The Trappist emphasis was perhaps a little eccentric and extreme, but the fundamental need for austerity in the religious life was something that had to be satisfied at all costs. The sanctity of the Church demanded it. Without the Trappists, the whole monastic Order and perhaps the Church itself, in France, would have been ill prepared to face the storm that was brewing. And one of the main reasons why the Revolution lay ahead was that the spirit of self-denial and mortification and poverty had been so completely forgotten by monks and ecclesiastics and Christians as a whole.

  La Trappe made a tremendous impression on the world of that time. The perfumed noblemen who rode down from Paris in their coaches with their lap-dogs and their servants, enlivening the ride with polite slander and indelicate items of gossip and breaking their journey with long rests and carefully prepared meals, were often completely upset by the cold, silent monastery where these monks came gliding into church like shadows in their gray cowls and knelt down and bowed their shaven skulls in prayer after laboring in the fields. The nobles were escorted through the house by the guestmaster. They saw the bare refectory, with its line of earthenware water jugs and its wooden spoons. They were told how little the monks got to eat: only a few vegetables and some bread and, once in a while, some milk and cheese. They walked out into the farmyard and protected their noses against the various smells with dainty lace handkerchiefs, reflecting that the persons who had to labor in all this manure were not mere rustics by birth, men of a lower and more animal order, but beings who had once moved on the same superior level as themselves, with the same refinements, the same tastes, the same delicate sensibilities.

  Most of the Court still affected a shiver at the monstrous things that went on in this abbey, where nobody spoke and nobody raised his eyes, but there were a good number who developed a new and surprising seriousness about life and tended to come out of their aristocratic shells and take account of the world of suffering and need and sin that was around them and was partly their own creation. Many noblemen and even great ladies put themselves under the direction of the abbot of La Trappe, like Mme. de Sablière, who was enabled to forget that she was dying of cancer by visiting the sick and helping the poor—or like the Princess Palatine, whom De Rancé ordered to do manual labor.

  So, La Trappe made many saints. It reestablished in a clear light the full claims of penance in Christian spirituality. It gave great glory to God. The penances of the Trappists were astonishing; one cannot help being amazed at the stubborn generosity their sacrifices must have demanded.

  With all the influence De Rancé himself exercised in his time, it is interesting to speculate on how much wider and deeper and more beneficent that influence would have been if, like St. Bernard, he had been a contemplative.

  However, when he died in 1700, after fourteen years of crucifixion by various sicknesses, one of which seems to have been consumption, De Rancé left a group of well-established and fervent monasteries that were living the Strict Observance to the highest degree and were the edification of Christian Europe.

  At the same time he had already foretold the punishment that was being prepared for those who had failed in their social and religious obligations, and he had warned Louis XIV against the revolution that must inevitably come.

  It was to be a fierce purgation of society which La Trappe would survive, but not without a wonder!

  III

  The Dispersal; First Trappists in America

  IN NOVEMBER, 1789, the apostate Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, proposed in the National Assembly that the property of the religious orders be confiscated. The proposal was quickly adopted, and early the next year it was followed by a law that refused recognition to religious vows. The new revolutionary government had thrown open the doors of the cloister and “liberated” all the monks.

  Those monks who had never lived as monks were thoroughly satisfied with the new arrangement. It delivered them from a lot of foolish and inconvenient formalities that seriously interfered with their pleasure and comfort. As for the Trappists, it seems that they were not inclined to worry too much about the new laws. They accepted them, at first, as a kind of long-delayed act of justice aimed at the monks of other orders who had been neglecting their rules for centuries. They almost took it for gra
nted that they themselves would not be affected by the measures.

  When the young novice-master of La Grande Trappe, Father Augustin, begged his superiors to be thinking of a place of refuge beyond the French borders, they told him to be quiet and forget his anxieties. They assured him that the friends of the Order were working for them in Paris and that the new government would soon realize that the Trappists were not like other orders: that they worked hard and kept their Rule and were poor and, in general, loved their life and obligations, for the glory of God. “We will not be disturbed,” they said, with an all-too-complacent reliance on the fact that everyone had admired their beautiful farm and all the reclaimed marshlands and the rest of the fruits of a hundred years’ hard labor. They acted as if they almost expected the new government to pass a vote of thanks for the admirable labors of the Trappist monks. When government investigators came down to make an inspection of the abbey and to question the monks, the Trappist superiors were confident that their plea for official recognition of their vows and manner of life would soon be heard, especially since their petition had been backed by the local municipal governments and by popular sentiment in the whole district.

  The investigators talked to all the monks, ate in the common refectory, visited every corner of the house and farm, and came away with a very definite impression that these men were not maniacs, that they knew what they were doing and had indeed found true happiness in their amazing life.

  The language of their report is objective and convincing enough to sound something like an official visitation card given by religious superiors belonging to the Order itself. Having questioned all the fifty-three members of the community, the commission sized them up in these judicious terms:

  With the exception of five or six monks who seemed to us to be men of a very limited outlook, the choir religious are generally speaking men of strong and well-formed character which fasting and austerity have not weakened. Religion entirely fills their souls. In a few of them, easy to recognize in the way they express themselves, piety is carried to the highest degree of enthusiasm. Others, the greater number, are penetrated with a piety that is more affecting and more serene. These were the ones who seemed, to us, to love their state of life from the very bottom of their hearts. They have found in it a tranquility, a quietude which must, indeed, have a charm all its own.

  Those government officials were not so stupid, after all! They had proved the tree by its fruits—the interior peace of those who were really living in union with God. But they also saw that even the cranks in the community could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to be waiting for “liberation from monastic despotism.” The Trappists belonged in their monastery.

  However, the notes of the commissioners were placed in the hands of a local tribunal, whose judges framed the final official report to be forwarded to Paris. And it was at this intermediary stage that all the high-sounding platitudes about “superstition, claustral despotism and natural liberty, morbid love of isolation, criminal and antisocial solitude” all crept in.

  The judges all pounced upon a particular item in the report with the satisfaction of hungry lions on their prey. There was one monk at La Trappe who was a neurasthenic and therefore not exactly happy in the monastery. He it was who became the darling of those judges, their hero, their martyr to Trappist frenzy.

  “Ah,” they cried, “consider the woeful lot of the unfortunate Bertrand, born with a sensitive heart, made for social living and who, having rashly thrust his neck into the noose of a fatal vow, was unable to stifle the voice of nature: and, in the collision between passion and conscience, has witnessed the shipwreck of his poor mind! When an establishment leads men into such misery as this, have we not ample reason for its suppression?”

  The report went to the Assembly, which allowed the monks then living at La Trappe to remain there and die there under simple vows: but no more postulants were to be received. It was a great concession, an unusually merciful compromise—but it was the end of the Trappists in France, just the same.

  While all this had been going on, Father Augustin, the novice-master, had been pleading with greater and greater insistence for a foundation outside of France, a house of refuge for La Trappe. Instead of listening to him, his major superiors deposed him from his office and silenced him as completely as they could. Father Augustin had been too eager to indoctrinate his novices and his nineteen penitents with his own ideas. Besides, he had been carrying on a correspondence with friends in the world and even with government officials in Switzerland in order to get things under way and prepare the ground for the new foundation. He wanted to be able to go to his major superiors, with plans completed and all necessary arrangements made, and say: “Here it is: when do we start?”

  Most of Father Augustin’s letters had been intercepted, but fortunately one of them reached its destination. He received word from the Canton of Fribourg, in Switzerland, that if he came in person to present a petition signed by some of the monks who wanted to accompany him, his request would be considered.

  It was at about this time that the decision of the National Assembly, which finally condemned La Trappe to slow extinction, became known. The father Immediate of the monastery, Dom Louis Rocourt of Clairvaux, realized his mistake in listening to the calumniators of the novice-master of La Trappe and gave his permission for the journey.

  Within a few weeks everything was settled. On April 26, 1791, eighteen choir religious and eight lay brothers left La Grande Trappe. They put all their belongings in a huge covered wagon, a sort of traveling monastery, and most of them followed on foot or on muleback. They headed for Paris wearing their religious habit, in spite of the danger to their lives. In the capital they had an interview with the police, who characterized their departure as an “insult to France” and wanted to throw them in jail for even attempting such a thing. It was all marvelously logical: they did not want the monks in France, and they did not want them to leave France. In fact, they did not want them to exist at all: that was the final solution. . . .

  Fortunately, Dom Augustin and his colonists managed to get away, and in a few days they were across the border and struggling to adapt the Cistercian life to the ruined premises of the old Charterhouse of La Val Sainte, from which the Carthusians had been expelled some years before by the Senate of Fribourg.1

  Life at La Val Sainte was not easy. The Cistercians who were to live with Dom Augustin de Lestrange so faithfully for twenty years to come, tasted hardships and privations greater than have ever been known in our Order. The life of the monks of La Val Sainte was going to be inhumanly hard. It is almost unbelievable that they were able to follow the regime they did and still go wandering in monastic caravans from country to country all over Europe, flying before the face of the Revolutionary armies. The Cistercian life of the twelfth century was nothing, compared with the privations and difficulties and hardships that were suffered by Dom Augustin and his men.

  As soon as they settled at La Val Sainte they inaugurated a new reform. It was a democratic affair that grew out of general discussions of the whole community assembled in chapter. They took the Rule of St. Benedict and discussed it, point by point, from cover to cover, and when they had finished they found themselves with a Strict Observance that was stricter than the original Cîteaux and made St. Benedict look like doting indulgence.

  The most important changes affected the sleep, nourishment, and labor of the monks. They renounced even the straw mattress allowed by St. Benedict and slept on boards. The time of sleep was cut down to five and a half hours on big feasts, six and a half on ordinary days. They returned to the strict Benedictine fast and restricted the extra portions which the Rule allowed when there was especially heavy work. Fish and eggs, even butter, were banished from the refectory, and cheese became a rare luxury. As for manual labor, they were not able to return officially to the hours of St. Benedict, because of the choral offices and conventual Masses which had been added to the obligations of the
Cistercian monk: but they arrived at a solution that gave the choir monks slightly more work than the Trappists have in our day: six hours in summer and some four and a half in winter.

  In actual fact, however, life at La Val Sainte was so difficult, the ground so poor, and the needs of the monks so great that they were working fourteen hours a day, every day, pausing only to say the office in the woods, barns, or fields.

  With all this, they found time to add some vocal prayers and devotions to their regular quota of prayer and to intensify their observance of silence and obedience beyond anything that had ever been practiced in the Order. As for poverty, they did not have to look far to find it: they had nothing, and it is hard to understand how they survived the fierce winters of a Swiss mountain valley, with threadbare cowls and robes, blankets of moss, and a single smoky iron stove.

  Nevertheless, their physical lot was far happier than that of those who remained at La Grande Trappe.

  A French decree of March 23, 1793, imposed on all priests and religious the obligation of swearing allegiance to the constitutional government under pain of deportation. Since the government was frankly atheistic, and since it was constantly threatening to wipe out the last traces of the Catholic religion in France, this oath was one that could not make a very strong appeal to a truly Christian conscience. It meant the final dispersal of the monks of the Strict Observance. The ones who had remained behind at La Trappe scattered and made for the frontiers. Most of them headed for Switzerland, to join Dom Augustin if they could. Some found refuge in the Papal States. A few remained in France, and two of the lay brothers even took up arms with the Vendéens. They were captured and executed. The prior of La Trappe, Father Francis Xavier Brunei, and another priest, Father Anthony Joseph Dujonquoi, were arrested in 1793, before they could reach the Swiss border. Like many other Trappists from different parts of France, they were put into one of the numerous chain gangs converging upon Rochefort, where they were interned in the pontoons. These pontoons were ancient hulks moored in the harbor. There were three of them, the “Bonhomme Richard,” “Les Deux Associés,” and the “Washington.” The two last named were under the command of a pair of bloodthirsty degenerates of the kind that not even the pen of a Victor Hugo could exaggerate. The two priests from La Trappe and a lay brother from Sept-Fons are certainly known to have been interned on “Les Deux Associés.” We can judge what the conditions must have been, from the remark of a physician who happened to see the prisoners packed together in the dark and airless hold, so tight they could hardly move and could not even lie at full length on the floor. He said: “If you kenneled four hundred dogs in that place overnight, you would find them, the next morning, either dead or mad.”