The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Dressed in rags, the interned priests and monks were kept from death by starvation only by buckets of slops which were thrown to them to scoop up and devour with their bare hands. Eaten up by vermin and plagued with scurvy, they died by the score. The prior of La Trappe and his companion succumbed on succeeding days in the summer of 1794. They had had ample leisure to reflect on the way the Revolutionary government appreciated Trappist labor and poverty, Trappist simplicity and love of the poor.

  Nevertheless, the Trappists who were interned on the pontoons at Rochefort or on the Islands of Ré and Oléron were much better off than those who were deported to French Guiana. The penal colony of Conenama was a burning wasteland in the dry season and a fever-ridden swamp in the time of the rains. All the year ‘round, it was infested with poisonous snakes and all kinds of vermin. Even the Indians refused to live in such a place, but the idealistic French Republic decided that it ought to be brought under cultivation by deported priests and monks.

  There was a strange, unconscious irony in such a sentence. This was the only answer an enlightened and progressive government had to give to the religious life, to that “tyranny of monasticism” which had so horrified the freedom-loving Jacobins. These monks had committed the crime of living under vows and according to rules which “crushed human nature” and “warped all the best instincts of man.” So now they were sent to die in chain gangs in a South American inferno, under the tender care of an officer who happened to be Danton’s nephew.

  Fever, plague, dysentery, scurvy, and a score of other torments killed them off like flies. Half the time, the living were too feeble to bury the dead. It did not occur to the soldiers of the Republic to do it for them. They were probably deep in ecstatic meditations on the liberty, equality, and fraternity which they were bringing to the world. But the echoes of the rhetoric of 1789 and 1790, the scandalized outcry of the committee that learned that one of the monks of La Trappe had had a nervous breakdown, had all long since been drowned in two reigns of terror, and no one seemed to recall this peculiar inconsistency. If they did, they were too worn out to appreciate the joke.

  However, there is one bright spot in the story. The prison ship on which one of the monks of La Trappe was sailing with a cargo of other condemned men to Guiana was intercepted on the high seas by H.M.S. “Indefatigable,” under the command of Sir Edward Pellew. He boarded his prize, and, recognizing the nature of his capture, he said, not without a certain unexpected delicacy: “Fathers, this is the richest booty I have ever taken.” He transferred them all to the British man-of-war and landed them at Plymouth, where they found freedom and refuge until the fall of Napoleon.

  Meanwhile, Dom Augustin had gone into action with all the energy and resourcefulness for which he was to become famous. La Val Sainte had been approved by the Holy See,2 was erected into an abbey, and had started to make foundations all over Europe. The first colony went to Spain, and monasteries were established in Brabant, Piedmont, and England. But when it became clear that the Revolution was going to overflow the borders of France and that La Val Sainte itself would be in danger, Dom Augustin looked further afield. Already, in 1794, he had planned foundations in Hungary and Russia, and in 1798, when La Val Sainte had to be evacuated, he entered on that strange and terrible odyssey in which his monks covered Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Poland and entered Russia, trying to find a safe and permanent home.

  The most obvious idea of all had occurred to Dom Augustin from the very first days at La Val Sainte: the vast acres of unexplored and friendly America were crying out to the Trappists to come and find peace in those forests and prairies. An American foundation was to have followed the one in Spain, but the colony had been intercepted by the charity of the Belgians with too good an offer to be refused, and the monks, who had started for Canada, settled at Westmalle.

  The second American-bound colony did not get much further. A rich English Catholic, Mr. Thomas Weld, of Lulworth Castle in Dorset, offered to build them a monastery on his lands and they accepted. Dedicated in 1796, it was the first monastery to be built in England since the Reformation. St. Susan’s, Lulworth, did not last many years. Official antagonism was to make it impossible for the monks to survive: but they outlived the French Revolution and the reign of Buona-parte. Finally, they returned to France to reestablish the old Cistercian abbey of Melleray, near Nantes, and it was from Melleray that Gethsemani, in Kentucky, would eventually be founded. So, in a long and roundabout way, Lulworth did end up in America after all.

  Only in 1803, when the Trappists had finished their long flight to Russia and were able to return to La Val Sainte, did a group of monks finally set sail for the United States.

  Dom Augustin came in person to Amsterdam to bless the departure of the expedition, which he had placed in the hands of Dom Urban Guillet.3

  This extraordinary man had been the last novice professed at La Trappe before the French Revolution. He had accompanied his novice-master to La Val Sainte and had followed all the austerities of the reform without a murmur, although they brought him nearly to the grave. He was a living miracle. His abbot chose him as superior of a tentative foundation in Hungary when he was half dead. Without a word he set out on foot across Europe. He took part in the Trappists’ Russian campaign, and now he was standing on the deck of a three-master ready to weigh anchor and set sail for America. He was surrounded by a colony of forty men and boys. They were setting out for a new land which none of them had ever seen and where they had few friends and no prospects. Neither did they have any money, to speak of. They did not even have a very clear idea of where they were going, except that they knew they would land at a place called Baltimore. After that, God would have to tell them what to do.

  But this was not the sort of thing to trouble Dom Urban Guillet. Whether it was an extraordinary trust in God or just sheer, reckless, natural optimism—probably it was a combination of both—this Trappist had a way of walking headfirst into impossible situations without the faintest chance of extricating himself by natural means. He was continually buying things without money, on the chance that some would turn up before his creditors tried to collect. He was a man of restless and insatiable ideals, living in a near future of dreams that were always just about to be fulfilled. The Trappist odyssey across Europe and the example of his dynamic general—the fast-moving Dom Augustin, who marshaled his troops with the speed and decisiveness of a Napoleon—had had a telling effect upon Urban Guillet. It had set something in motion which only death would stop. It had started him on a long and restless journey which ended abruptly at a small town in northern France, just before he could found the one monastery connected with his name that actually stayed founded and still exists: Our Lady of Bellefontaine. For the rest, the trail of Dom Urban Guillet across Europe and America is lined with ghosts, the shadows of monasteries that might have been if Dom Urban had not moved out before they had a chance to develop.

  He was consumed with the flames of his own zeal and energy: but they were the zeal and energy, not of a contemplative, but of a missionary. Dom Urban Guillet was so far from being a pure contemplative that even priests in the active ministry thought he was altogether too carried away by activity. He had an innate ambition to be a teacher, to form and guide the young. And his superiors encouraged him in this ideal. Dom Augustin had conceived the idea of a Trappist “Third Order,” made up of secular teachers and of young boys who wore the habit of oblates and received a free education from the Trappists. This education was partly academic and partly a matter of practical manual training. The boys learned Latin and they learned a trade. The idea was that, when they were old enough, some of them might enter the Order. The others, of course, would be free to go out and look for jobs in the world.

  Groups of these boys accompanied the exiled Trappists wherever they went, and it was hoped that this would provide some vocations for the indefinite number of new foundations Dom Urban was going to make in America. There were fifteen of them on board the “Sally
” with the American pioneers. And the mind of the young superior was already crowded with visions of a wonderful Indian school in the forests of the new world.

  This love of education was rooted in Dom Urban’s own natural temperament, which was that of a scoutmaster or a schoolteacher. It so colored his conception of the Cistercian vocation that he was able to declare, “I have come to America particularly to engage in the education of youth, Indian as well as white.” And when he was applying to Congress for permission to buy four thousand acres of land in Illinois, he gave the senator who presented his petition to Congress the impression that “the one great object of the Trappist Order is the gratuitous instruction and education of children either in literature, agriculture or the mechanical arts.” 4

  Now, there is no question that Dom Augustin de Lestrange and Dom Urban Guillet were the most sincere men it would be possible to find. Nor is there any doubt whatever that Dom Augustin saved the Trappists from extinction during the French Revolution. However, their conception of the Cistercian vocation had its peculiarities, and this was one of them. The leaders of the Val Sainte reform were essentially active men rather than true contemplatives, and under the stress of an extraordinary situation they allowed their latent activism to run away with them.

  There is no reason to be surprised at this, still less to judge them guilty of any conscious fault. There was an extreme need for schools and teachers, especially in America where refugees from Catholic countries were left without priests and without schools to train their children in religion. Nevertheless, the destiny of a religious order depends on its fidelity to the aims of its founders, and in the designs of Providence the Cistercians were intended from the start to be contemplatives. Many other orders had been started to carry on the work of teaching and preaching the Gospel, and the Trappists could not hope to find lasting success or true spiritual prosperity if the Superiors suddenly decided to take over a work which God had appointed to orders far better equipped to carry it out with profit to the whole Church and without danger to the interior lives of their members.

  So, perhaps the two statements of Dom Urban that we have quoted reveal the real secret of his failure. In spite of the most phenomenal generosity, the most astonishing sufferings and sacrifices and trials—he went through enough tribulation to canonize a dozen saints—Dom Urban failed in America. His work vanished without a trace, and his memory scarcely survives in his own Order. And even there he is recalled less as a saint than as a kind of a phenomenon.

  Heroism, he certainly had—a heroism all the more pathetic in the light of its fruitlessness. He needed all of it, if only to stand up under the blows and reverses that he attracted, as a magnet attracts iron.

  The voyage of the “Sally” from Amsterdam to Baltimore was typical. During the hundred-and-twenty-six-day crossing, the overcrowded ship was swept by storms that carried away two of her three masts, while several hundred German, Danish, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss emigrants waited for death below decks. A Dutch vessel, she flew the American flag on account of the international situation. She was under the command of a Yankee skipper—one of those old New England misers whom a foolish tradition has tended to soften and somewhat glorify, as if their inhumanity had something quaint and funny about it. His passengers did not appreciate the humor of the situation when they discovered that the skipper had neglected to stock his vessel with enough provisions.

  Someone who witnessed the arrival of the “Sally” in Chesapeake Bay said that the passengers, half mad with hunger, were running about from deck to deck—like birds hopping about their perches in an aviary—saluting the land with half-savage cries. A whole ox was sent on board and torn to pieces by the mob. Tradition allows Trappists to eat meat on shipboard: and the monks nibbled with dignified restraint at what they could get.

  The Sulpician fathers in Baltimore took the Trappists under their protection, and presently a place was found where the monks might settle, at least temporarily. Pigeon Hill, fifty miles from Baltimore and near Hanover, Pennsylvania,5 was a large farm which a friend of the Sulpicians had placed at their disposal. The Trappists settled in a big, roomy house, which the Sulpicians stocked with provisions, and they found the woods full of berries and chestnuts.

  Pennsylvania was the obvious place to settle: but Dom Urban could not be quite at ease there. The Dutch boys of the Third Order, now that they had taken advantage of their free ticket to America, were much more inclined to go and look for jobs and money in Baltimore than to stay on a farm with the monks. Dom Urban thought that to remain near the city would arouse too many temptations. Even the boys who stayed on the farm were more of a nuisance than a help. But in any case, it was the Third Order, above all, that made the Trappists think of leaving Pigeon Hill and Pennsylvania.

  When a traveler came in from Kentucky and told Dom Urban what life was like in what was then the “Far West,” the flames of missionary zeal burned high in the heart of the Trappist superior.

  Taking with him a veteran of La Trappe, Brother Placid, and an interpreter, Dom Urban mounted his horse and started on the western trail to take a look at Kentucky.

  IV

  Foundations in Kentucky and Illinois

  LOUISVILLE was only a village of log cabins among the frog ponds and willows in 1805. It was not even the most important village in an area where villages were apt to be called cities. Lexington was the center of all the social and intellectual life of Kentucky—which did, indeed, have an intellectual life, even in pioneer days. But Dom Urban came down the Ohio on a flatboat to Louisville and rode inland among the thickets of dogwood and redbud, climbing the rolling plateau where great herds of buffalo still grazed in the sage grass. He was heading for Bardstown and Holy Cross, which were the center of a numerous and relatively compact Catholic colony. Formed in the earliest days of the settlement, this colony was now grouped around one young priest, who had been sent out from Baltimore to take over a parish of indefinite limits, about as large as his native France.

  It is to Father Badin more than to anyone that Kentucky owes its fervent and persistent Catholic element. This émigré, the first priest ordained in the United States, had already built Holy Cross Church at the foot of Rohan’s Knob, within sight of the present abbey of Gethsemani. During the next few years many other churches and schools were to spring up in Nelson and Washington counties. Academies like those of the Sisters of Nazareth and the Sisters of Loretto became fashionable among the families of pioneers who had come to Kentucky fully conscious of being ladies and gentlemen, and had formed a local aristocracy. Since those days the Catholics have never been seriously persecuted in Kentucky.

  The atmosphere of Kentucky in 1805 was that of a frontier country. The little stockaded clusters of cabins that nestled among the creeks and cornfields and wooded “knobs,” still bore the marks of savage Indian fighting. It was only ten years since the Treaty of Greenville had put an end to those furious wars. Kentucky was teeming with enthusiastic life. It had already found its feet as a State, and the chief lineaments of the Kentucky character were already clearly formed. Dom Urban Guillet, who was a sociable man, must have fallen in well with his new neighbors the first day he arrived.

  Vigorous, pleasure-loving, enthusiastic, friendly, impetuous, the Kentucky pioneer was a wild but amiable creature. Yet, it is hard to make blanket statements about him, because he was full of curious contrasts and contradictions. He was apt to be tough: yet the aristocrats down in the Blue Grass country had gentility and refinement, even though they were still living in log houses. Science and culture were by no means universal, but Lexington was already calling itself the Athens of Kentucky, which shows that some people had heard of Athens, Greece. As early as 1799 a Kentucky doctor was going about, vaccinating his fellow pioneers. This was pretty good going: Jenner had started in London only three years before. On the whole, however, Kentuckians were fonder of bourbon than they were of books and knew more about hunting than about philosophy. Then, as now, they were g
ood talkers and often very witty ones as well. An English traveler at the time claimed that the Kentuckians were “the only Americans who could understand a joke.”

  Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the rich and vital resources of the Kentucky temperament had more or less gone native on the frontier. A single-minded zest for living had involved Kentucky in a cult of horses, dancing, hunting, and whiskey which almost amounted to an obsession. Yet, even here, one detects a certain pathetic charm. The story is told that, during the earthquake which destroyed Louisville in 1811, the men came running out of the taverns convinced that Judgment Day had come. Yet, far from grieving over their sins, they cried, “What a pity that so beautiful a world should be thus destroyed!”