The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  It would seem that Providence threw these two groups, Trappists and Icarians, together just to invite a comparison between them.

  After all, they had not a little in common. The ideal of Cistercian monasticism is a communal ideal which goes back explicitly to the life of the first Christians, who were of “one heart and one mind” and “had all things in common.” 4

  As a social and economic unit, the Trappist community bound for Kentucky was just as truly and strictly “communistic” as were the Icarians, who were heading for Texas. The monks owned all their property in common. They were, in fact, vowed to the most uncompromising poverty, forbidden to possess anything whatever as individuals, not even the most insignificant of consumer’s goods. Everything they used or consumed came to them from the abbot or through his permission as representative of the Christ, the Life and unifying Principle of the monastic community. But in the moral order the monks were bound to a far stricter and more radical communism than the Icarians had ever dreamed of. The monk’s body and his very soul belong to his community, insofar as it is a part of the living, mystical organism Who is Christ on earth—the Church. The monk cannot claim proprietorship over the smallest internal act of judgment or desire that interferes with the life of the community—which is love, the charity of Christ. He does not even claim for himself such acts as do not interfere with the organic functioning of the group; he prefers to consecrate and dedicate them to Christ living in His brethren, Christ living in the abbot, Christ in the monk’s own soul, Christ in the Tabernacle, the visible heart of the monastic community.

  The Icarians’ brand of communism was nothing but a working compromise between conflicting human appetites. Like all other materialistic communists, Cabet’s disciples simply accepted human passions and greeds as a matter of course and attempted to neutralize their evil social effects by rationing out satisfactions to each one on a basis of mathematical equality.

  But the common life of a Cistercian monk is based on far wiser assumptions, on tenets that reject such absurdities from the very start. There is no such thing as mathematical equality in a Cistercian monastery: each one does not strive to raise himself to the level of everybody else by cutting all the others down to his own level. On the contrary, the monk lives on an ideal of self-sacrifice in which he is the servant of all and gives up everything he has, becoming like Christ, his Master, obedient unto the death of the Cross for the glory of God and for the good of his community. It is, in fact, an ideal of self-immolation which the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the World Revolution, also demands in practice. But the monk sacrifices himself for eternal values and for a reward which he begins to enjoy in the midst of his very act of sacrifice; his reward consists in the supernatural, divinizing selflessness which liberates him forever from the limitations of a narrow and worldly egoism. The whole end and ideal of communism, which aims at an earthly paradise full of comforts and pleasures and temporal satisfactions, necessarily imprisons a man in the materialism which is the source of all his sorrow and unrest. This consecration to physical satisfactions must, in the end, defeat even the temporary sense of liberation, the passing exaltation, which may come in a time of special stress to one who is willing to sacrifice his whole self to the cause of world revolution. It is an exaltation which is limited to the feelings and imagination and which can never taste anything of the intense inner purity of a charity supernaturalized by Christian detachment.

  It was this peace and purity of heart which, above all, marked the essential difference between the monks and the communists who were traveling together to their respective promised lands on board the “Brunswick” in 1848. How was it that the monks lived together in such harmony and happiness and peace, while the Icarians were always at one another’s throats? There is no explanation to be found in the natural order. After all, the two groups were made up of the same kind of material. Both monks and Cabetians had been recruited from various levels of society, and in about the same proportions. In both groups there was a small percentage of professional men and a larger group of farmers and artisans. Moreover, most of the Icarians had been brought up in the atmosphere of what was still a more or less Catholic culture. The difference, then, was to be found not on this superficial level but deeper down: the monks had Christ living and working in them by faith, by charity. The monks were united by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God, which tames and dominates and sublimates man’s nature and ordains it to the highest possible ends. But the Icarians were united only by the frail bonds of an “armed neutrality” of insatiable animal appetites.

  Leaning over the rail of the “Brunswick” as she hove to and took the pilot on board in the vast estuary of the Mississippi, Father Eutropius was astonished by the sight of a strange commotion in the waters—a battle of different kinds of fish. Those that belonged to the sea were fighting with those of the river. It was a presage of the violence that was to come.

  On reaching New Orleans, the Icarians received bad news. A Cabetian colony that had preceded them to Texas that year had found that the country was not exactly the paradise flowing with milk and honey that they had been led to imagine. In fact, it was a dry and treeless waste, full of bitter hardship, in which many of their number had succumbed to sickness and thirst and hunger. And now there were not a few of them in New Orleans, begging and in rags. The reaction of the group on board ship was characteristic, but it brought with it tragedies that horrified the monks. There was a special meeting of the “assembly.” It was decided that they should divide up whatever money they had left, so as to be ready to face emergencies. This was done, but not before one of their number had made a gallant attempt to get away with the whole sum for himself. Another wrote a letter of delirious invective against Cabet and then blew out his brains. A third fell overboard and nearly drowned. He was rescued in time, however, and Father Eutropius had an interview with him afterward. The blood nearly froze in the Trappist’s veins as the man calmly related how, feeling himself on the point of drowning, he had already unclasped his knife to plunge it into his own heart, when a sailor jumped into the river and saved him.

  The monk was left with plenty of food for thought by this insight into the communist mentality.

  One brighter touch was added to the dismal picture when one of the Icarians presented himself before Father Eutropius and asked if he could be admitted to the Trappist community. The young superior was not unfriendly to this request. Unfortunately, it turned out that the disillusioned Icarian had a wife.

  Cabet eventually reorganized his Utopia at Nauvoo, Illinois, on the site vacated by the Mormons, who had left for Utah in 1847.

  At New Orleans the Trappists transferred their baggage to a big river steamer, the “Martha Washington,” and settled on board for the ten-day journey to Louisville. “Settled,” however, is only a euphemism, for this time they had no privacy. As soon as they put their straw mattresses down on the deck to go to sleep, other passengers jumped on them and refused to get off. It was another instance of Trappist austerity being luxury in comparison with early nineteenth-century traveling accommodations.

  The arrival of the second Trappist colony in Kentucky was far different from that of the first. Dom Urban Guillet and his handful of men and their bewildered oblates had staggered from their flatboats to fall half dead from exhaustion into the arms of those who had come to meet them. But now there was a community of forty-three strong, healthy men.5 Father Eutropius left the steamer when it was delayed at the falls of the Ohio a few miles outside the city, and went to announce their arrival to Bishop Flaget. The bishop overflowed with the rich, abounding joy of an Old Testament patriarch, crying, “Blessed are you who come to us in the Name of the Lord!”

  He offered them shelter in two large halls that were used as schoolrooms, and here they remained for three days while their superior was making arrangements for the last stage of their journey—the fifty miles from the city to Gethsemani.

  The journey was to end as it had begun—in a
torrent of rain. The monks, huddled together in three wagons, learned that Kentucky can be very bleak and mournful and cold in December. It was the twentieth day of the last month of the year. They peered through the icy rain at the sycamores and the ruined cornfields. Hour followed hour. They climbed hills, and drove through flooded bottom-lands in water up to their axles. They had long since been soaked to the skin. They took their dinner of bread and cheese and fruit in their swamped wagons. That was in the middle of the afternoon. By then they should have been near Bardstown. But there was still a long way to go. Darkness fell. Still no sign of a town.

  At eight o’clock one of the wagons broke down. The monks alighted and rearranged themselves. The weakest of their number moved into the two remaining wagons. The rest walked into Bardstown at eleven o’clock that night, up to their knees in mud.

  They were to spend the night at St. Joseph’s College as guests of the Jesuit fathers. They found the college building in the Stygian darkness of the rainy night. Taking with him Brother Hilarion, a Kilkenny Irishman, Father Eutropius made a tour around the walls of the building trying to find the door. Having found it, they knocked, but received no answer.

  The monks were in no mood to waste time. They gathered together and took a deep breath, and forty-three powerful voices roared the one word: “T-r-r-ra-PEEST!”

  It seemed as if every window in the building flew open on the instant. The Jesuits and their students and their neighbors and probably the whole of Bardstown, besides, were now informed that the silent monks had arrived.

  The Jesuits soon built a big fire and prepared a hot meal for the travelers, but they had no beds to offer them. The monks were content to roll their blankets around them and sleep on the floor.

  The next day—the winter solstice and the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle—they started out in the not-too-early morning, after Mass and Communion, to cover the few miles that remained.

  For most of them it was to be the end of all journeys. Within a year one of them would already be buried at Gethsemani. Most of the others would find their rest there also, one by one, in years to come. They were tired of traveling by now!

  But if they knew that their journey was ended, they could see by the poverty of the land around them that their labors were just about to begin. The pale winter sun reached its zenith, and shone feebly on the low, wooded hills dominating the brown fields of the plateau. The sight of a forest cheered them after so much relatively bare landscape. Their satisfaction grew to joy when a Negro who was driving one of the wagons told them that the forest belonged to them. That was Gethsemani, their land, their new home.

  They slowly advanced, among cedars and hickory trees, oak and maple and walnut, and an occasional sycamore with mottled branches pale as dead men’s bones. And now they were among the hills. As the track they followed reached a summit in the undulating land, they perceived that they were entering into a different kind of landscape. Ahead of them was a broad valley, bounded in the distance by another line of blue, wooded hills. The cold air was sweet with the scent of pines.

  A sharp descent brought them down to a creek which splashed over brown shelves of shale in a covert of dark cedars. Then they climbed again and came to open fields. They saw ahead of them, on a bare, even knoll, a group of log cabins standing amid cornfields. In one of the fields, the stalks stood brown and dry, the ears still clinging to them. The wind stirred sadly in the dry stalks and dry shucks. A Kentucky mule came up to the fence and semaphored his surprise at them with big brown ears. It was their home, the orphanage of Our Lady of Gethsemani, standing in what the monks now call St. Joseph’s field, facing south and west, dominating the wide, blue valley.

  It was a beautiful site, vast and silent and full of peace, and the monks let their eyes rove over the undulating woods and fields toward the distant village of New Hope. The view was almost beautiful enough to make them overlook the dilapidated cabins that they would have to live in. But in any case, their long journey was at an end and they were glad and their tired hearts thanked the Living God, Whose inscrutable will had destined them to this place from all eternity.

  MONASTERY AT TAMIÉ, FRANCE

  MONASTERY AT AIGUEBELLE, FRANCE

  MONASTERY AT SENANQUE, FRANCE

  Saurageot

  2TH CENTURY CLOISTER, FONTENAY, FRANCE

  Terrell Dickey

  19TH CENTURY BASILICA, GETHSEMANI, KENTUCKY

  Terrell Dickey

  CHOIR MONKS AT OFFICE, GETHSEMANI

  READING AT MEALS: REFECTORY, AIGUEBELLE

  CHOPPING WOOD (above) - POWER SAW, GEORGIA (below left)

  Manning

  Manning

  HAYLOFT CHOIR, GEORGIA (above right) - CHOIR MONKS, ORVAL (below)

  MASS

  GOD

  FEVER

  COFFEE Trappist Sign Language

  DAY

  EAT

  Photos by Manning

  LIBRARY, ORVAL

  SCULLERY, AIGUEBELLE

  Manning

  HAYLOFT SCRIPTORIUM. GEORGIA

  BULLDOZER, GETHSEMANI

  GARDENER, AIGUEBELLE

  GOING TO WORK, AIGUEBELLE

  Manning

  MONK’S DINNER, U.S.A.

  MONK’S DINNER, FRANCE

  Manning

  CORNCRIB KITCHEN, GEORGIA

  GATHERING GRAPES, AIGUEBELLI

  MONKS AT A SHRINE OF OUR LADY

  OLD WORLD SCRIPTORIUM

  Manning

  NEW WORLD SCRIPTORIUM

  Manning

  BUILDING A TEMPORARY MONASTERY

  ACOLYTE SERVING MASS

  Terrell Dickey

  LOW MASS, GETHSEMANI

  Terrell Dickey

  GUEST HOUSE SEEN FROM ENTRANCE TO MONASTERY, GETHSEMANI

  NEW MONASTERY: OUR LADY OF THE HOLY TRINITY, UTAH

  VII

  Gethsemani in the Nineteenth Century; OtherAmerican Foundations

  FATHER EUTROPIUS PROUST and his forty-two Trappists had no sooner reached the primitive farm which they were to take over from the Sisters of Loretto than they had their first taste of Kentucky weather. After the rain that had soaked them the day before, the temperature now took a sudden plunge, and their first evening in the log cabins of Gethsemani left them shivering with the intense cold. In the last few days that remained before Christmas they could do practically nothing but cut firewood in the forest and gather in the corn that still remained to be husked. For the rest, they were content to sit in a cabin and shell corn while one of their number read to them aloud.

  The sisters and their orphans stayed to help the Trappists celebrate their first Christmas in America and then moved to a better place, leaving the monks all their farm animals and implements. Unfortunately, the monks’ own baggage remained in storage two months in Louisville. Deprived of their big range, with its ovens, they could not bake any bread, and a Frenchman without bread is even more miserable than a Frenchman without red wine. It was not the least of their sacrifices to live for two months on pancakes and hot biscuits.

  They tore down the worst of the cabins and used some of the wood to build an addition to the sisters’ little chapel, which was far too small to contain the crowds that would come to hear the monks sing High Mass on the big feast days.

  They improvised a chapter room and refectory and dormitory, and in the spring of the new year one of the brothers built a bakehouse that was the admiration of Nelson County. The biggest difficulty the monks had to face was clearing their land for cultivation. The existing fields had been newly claimed from the forest, and they had to go over them time after time to root out the briars and blackberries and dogtooth. Buck-berries and ironweed sprang up all around them, and in the summer time, if they turned their backs on the corn to look after their potato patch, it seemed that the cornstalks would become a tangle of morning-glories overnight.

  Then there was the Kentucky summer! The monks went out to work in woolen robes and scapulars under the furious sun. Their on
ly protection against sunstroke was to pull the black woolen hoods of their scapulars over their heads, and then they nearly smothered in the heat. Meanwhile, their boiling flesh broke out from head to foot in a burning red rash that gnawed at them with an insistence unknown to the hair shirts of the Thebaid.

  Life in Kentucky was not altogether easy, they found. Since Gethsemani had been colonized by Melleray, which belonged to the stricter of the two Trappist congregations, the monks were keeping the ancient usages of Cîteaux and thus observing the Rule of St. Benedict in every particular. It was hard, but not altogether impossible: and they could always remind themselves that their predecessors, under Dom Urban Guillet, had had a far harder time of it.

  However, all their neighbors and even the bishop himself tried to persuade the monks to take things easier. Almost everyone seemed to think that they would all die if they persisted in trying to live without meat. The monks did not let themselves be worried by such superstitions. But Father Eutropius did think that the foundation could scarcely survive without some small mitigations. The principal one was lighter clothing in summer. The monks were also allowed to go out to work in straw hats, to protect them from the blazing sun. The General Chapter of 1849, convening at La Grande Trappe, heard of the hardships of the Trappist pioneers at Gethsemani and accorded them all the mitigations that had been granted the previous year to the new North African monastery of Staouëli, near Algiers.