The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  By five o’clock in the evening the monks were all on the outside and the soldiers were on the inside—and the latter were by far the more embarrassed of the two groups. However, they settled down as best they could in the monastic enclosure, while the Trappists scattered to private homes. This awkward and tedious situation lasted for five weeks. By that time the soldiers were thoroughly disgusted with milking cows and loafing around the cloister, while citizen Assiot had been appropriately humbled by the general amusement of the public at his military “triumph.” Finally, the soldiers got themselves together and came forth from the monastic enclosure and marched back to their caserne to hide their faces, which by now had assumed several different shades of confusion. The monks were free to return home.

  However, this had been enough to convince the father abbot, Dom Jean-Marie Chouteau, that it was high time he investigated certain offers of land for a new foundation in Canada. In the spring of 1881 he was on the high seas, bound for New France.

  By midsummer a small colony of monks and brothers was established in the little four-room farmhouse on a thousand-acre property they had acquired from the Sulpician Fathers by the lake at Oka. The building of a temporary house for the community was begun at once, and thanks to the help of friends among the fervent French-Canadian Catholics and encouragement from the Canadian government, the work moved fast. By the end of the year the half-finished buildings were already blessed, the monastery was canonically erected, and the new superior had already given the white Cistercian habit to his first Canadian novice. Work on the permanent buildings was begun in 1889, and Notre Dame du Lac became an abbey in 1892. In that same year it made definite plans for its own first foundation.

  The Province of Quebec was indeed a propitious setting for a Trappist monastery. The new abbey was only ten years old, and already her monks were advancing confidently into the north woods to found Notre Dame de Mistassini at Lac Saint Jean.

  But 1892 was a year of jubilation among the Cistercians not alone in Canada but everywhere, for it was in that year that the most significant event in the modern history of the Order took place. It was only then that the Cistercians of the Strict Observance finally became an Order in their own right, by the reunion of the three Trappist congregations that had been carrying on in legal subjection to the Abbot General of the Common Observance, each one trying to keep its own interpretation of the Rule.

  VIII

  Reunion of the Cistercian Congregations; New Growth; Gethsemani under Dom Edmond Obrecht

  THE vitality of a religious order comes to it from the Holy Ghost. It is charity—and God Himself is charity—that brings men together and unites them in a common work for the glory of God and for their own peace and for the good of the Church. And the strength and health of an order is proved not by material prosperity, not by numerous foundations and big buildings and many members, but by its internal unity and cohesion and consistency.

  When men love one another and live together without fuss, willing to see things in the same light, to sacrifice their own limited views, to share and enjoy the same poverty and the same hardships in eagerness to give up their own interests out of love for one another—then the Spirit of God is working among them.

  But there is another spirit, a spirit that does not build up religious orders. On the contrary, it breaks them down. It is a solvent, a principle of disorganization and decay. When it takes hold on a monastery, on an order—on any group, for that matter—the group dissolves into its constituent parts. Communities break up into cliques. Individuals are divided against one another. Each one tries to force his own views on the others. In the end the strongest is the one who succeeds, and all the rest have to submit. But they only swallow their submission in a spirit of hatred and revolt.

  This spirit is called the “spirit of the world,” but its ultimate expression, its final perfection, is found only in hell. However, even on earth it sometimes achieves all too complete, all too real an embodiment in the political life of men—in the history of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Red Mexico and Russia, for instance, and in the history of the wars of our time.

  But if the spirit of the world is always at work, nevertheless the Spirit of God does not leave His children alone and helpless in the darkness of the world. God’s love, too, is always working in the Church and in religious orders: and never more powerfully than when all the agencies of destruction seem to be doing their worst.

  The nineteenth century had seen the triumph of a dozen different ideologies which denied everything that the Church believes in and stands for. Materialism had reached its self-complacent peak and was ready to send the world skidding down the steep and slippery incline that would bring it to the wars and revolutions of our own day. The Church and the religious orders had been under persecution in Europe for nearly a hundred years.

  Yet, the Church and the religious orders were growing stronger and more fruitful all the time. For the truth is that the nineteenth century was the beginning of a great Catholic revival.

  The ancient Cistercian Order, which had been reduced to fragments by the weakness of its own members in ages of too great prosperity, was to be brought together and resurrected again, purified and energized in the forge of persecution.

  The Reformed Cistercians, that is, the Trappists, rescued by Dom Augustin de Lestrange, had divided into two congregations, not so much because of their own weakness but because the regime of Dom Augustin demanded of men what the Church and the Spirit of God did not want of them. But in these separate congregations the Cistercian life, in its essenrials, was led with fervor and charity, and there was a constant desire for reunion.

  There were, besides, two smaller groups of monasteries that kept more or less to the Strict Observance. A small congregation had formed around the abbey of Westmalle in Belgium, and two other monasteries clung forlornly to the ancient Cistercian abbey of Casamari in Italy. Of the two big congregations, the larger was at the same time the stricter. That was the group to which Gethsemani, New Melleray, and Our Lady of the Lake belonged. It had twenty houses in all, including one in Syria and one in North Africa, and it was headed by the abbot of La Grande Trappe. The abbey of Sept-Fons presided over the second, smaller congregation, with houses as far afield as China, Palestine, South Africa, and the East Indies. The wide expansion of the two congregations is partly explained by the persecutions of 1880. It was in that year, for example, that Tamié, perched like an eagle’s nest in the high Alps of Savoy, had been temporarily closed, like Bellefontaine and, just as promptly as Bellefontaine, had gone out to make a foundation—this time in the arid hills of north China, near Pekin.1

  In 1878, before this expansion, the vigor of the Cistercian reforms expressed itself in a petition to Rome for reunion. Unfortunately, the petition ran up against a blank wall of stolid inertia. It was said that the move might be prejudicial to the interests of the “whole Cistercian Order”—that is, to the disconnected and nebulous affair that still survived under that title, which had long since lost all meaning. The second half of the excuse was even worse. It stated that the reunion of the strict congregations was an infringement of the rights of the Moderator General. The Moderator General was a Cistercian of the Common Observance who held supreme authority over all the congregations, strict or easy, and whom the Trappists did not even have a chance to elect. The abbots of the Strict Observance were not even invited to the General Chapters that put this dignitary on his throne. In any case, he did not have much opportunity to interfere in running the reformed congregations, which were governed by their own vicars general.

  All this looks complicated on paper. The fact is that it was far more intricate than we have made it seem. And, of course, it all implied wheels within wheels of organizational waste, not to mention the effort that was squandered in speculating on which one of these congregations was the real heir to twelfth-century Cîteaux.

  It was characteristic of the genius of a great and saintly pontiff to cut through all such
stupid difficulties and to clear the air with a lucid and simple solution. Where the cardinal consultors had failed, Leo XIII himself stepped in of his own accord, without any new petition from the Cistercian abbots, and issued a decree in July, 1892, which summoned all the abbots of the four strict congregations to an extraordinary General Chapter in Rome.

  A spirit of exultation and relief spread through all the Trappist monasteries when this news was announced. It was the answer to more than a few prayers. In a new Dutch foundation, Our Lady of Koeningshoeven, a young novice once known in the world as the Baron Van Rykvorsel Van Rysenberg had offered his life in sacrifice for this vitally important reunion, and the offering was accepted.

  He died September 20, 1892, when most of the abbots were setting out for Rome.

  On October 1, fifty-four superiors of Trappist monasteries, of whom thirty-two were mitered abbots, met in the French Seminary in the Via Santa Chiara, in the Eternal City. Presiding over the meetings of the Chapter was a great Jesuit, Cardinal Mazzella, representing the Cardinal Protector of the Cistercians.

  The words with which he opened the first session not only embodied the earnest desires of Leo XIII but echoed the deepest sentiments in the hearts of the earnest and austere men in that room. And when this keynote had been struck, all the discussions proceeded in tune with it; and the music was as the music of the Holy Spirit. The theme was nothing but that which had been first intoned by the founders of the Order, by that religious genius, St. Stephen Harding, and it can be summed up in one word: unity. More important than all the minor differences and viewpoints about observance and the accidental details of regularity was this one big essential of Cistercian life: unity in charity, unity in accepting one common interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict that the average man could follow, so that the weak might not be discouraged and the strong might wish to do more.

  In eleven sessions of smooth and peaceful discussion all the petty distinctions and differences of nation, opinion, or temperament which cloaked themselves in different interpretations of the Rule and of the Cistercian usages were sufficiently leveled by the Holy Ghost to permit the final fusion and union so ardently desired by the Trappists and by the Church. Only the three houses that belonged to the little congregation of Casamari refused to take any active part in the discussions and voting; they remained outside the union. For the rest, all the abbots but five voted for the fusion of the three larger congregations.

  The news of the successful conclusion of the Chapter filled the Pope’s heart with the liveliest satisfaction, and the new Order of Reformed Cistercians of Our Lady of La Trappe formally began its existence amid Te Deums and universal joy.

  Within six years, thanks to the energy of Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard and the generosity of the Baroness de la Roche Taillée, all that was left standing of the ancient mother abbey of the Order, Cîteaux, was purchased when the French government was just about to take it over, and it once more assumed its rightful place at the head of the new Order.

  True, it was a strangely chastened Cîteaux, from the architectural point of view. Gone were the splendid cloisters and the huge abbey church of the days that had been all too sumptuous and great. There remained, in incongruous contrast, a few fragments of the past: a couple of isolated buildings that dated back to the thirteenth century and a big monumental wing put up in the era of lavish spending that had foreshadowed the French Revolution. But the important thing was that at last the Rule was being kept at Cîteaux once again. The Cistercian life was being lived once more inside those walls. Cistercians were working in the level fields that had been cleared and first cultivated centuries before by the saints who had come to that wilderness from the cloister of Molesme for no other purpose than to keep the Rule of St. Benedict to the letter and live isolated from the world in poverty, simplicity, labor, and prayer.

  Once again the abbot of Cîteaux was the temporal and spiritual head of a world-wide family of monasteries where the monastic life was lived in its perfection. All the essentials of the Benedictine and Cistercian life were incorporated in the usages of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who now dropped the name of La Trappe altogether from their title. The only really striking accidental change was the mitigation of the old Benedictine fast. This had been the greatest sacrifice which the stricter congregation had had to make in order to achieve the reunion. The two groups had made a friendly compromise for the sake of unity, and the hours of meals were now approximately the same as they had been in the arrangements of De Rancé. That meant, in practice, that there would be a strict enough fast to permit the average man of our day to realize that he was fasting; yet, at the same time, it would not be beyond the strength of any mature person in normal health. On the whole, the present timetable is accepted as satisfactory, and the general opinion seems to be that the old fast would be too much for the constitutions of men in our time.

  Until the end of his life Leo XIII kept the Cistercians of the Strict Observance under close and fatherly guidance. He seemed to cherish these poor and austere monks with a special love. He never missed an opportunity to encourage their spiritual growth as well as their temporal expansion.

  Whether he intended to do so or not, in actual practice the Holy Father disregarded some of the notions dearest to the heart of the Abbé de Rancé, and Leo XIII can therefore claim much of the credit for the new directions taken by the Cistercians in the twentieth century. It was he, for instance, who insisted that the Cistercians should acquire a sound theological basis for their lives of prayer and contemplation. A house of studies was organized in Rome, and picked men from Cistercian monasteries in every part of the world were to be sent there for training. Whether or not they returned home with doctorates, these men would be fitted to serve their communities as capable superiors, enlightened spiritual directors, or competent canonists. The anti-intellectualism that had been so prominent a factor in Trappist austerity was no longer to dominate the Cistercians. The change made a big difference. Without in any sense pretending to be a nursery of professional theologians or research students, the Order has nevertheless witnessed a spiritual revival that has begun to bear fruit in books on prayer and the interior life as well as in studies of monastic history.

  Only a few days after the Cistercian abbots had knelt at the feet of the Pontiff, in the Vatican, to receive his blessing on their newly united Order, another Cistercian monastery was dedicated in the plains of the Canadian West. Near the banks of the Red River, a few miles out of Winnipeg, Bellefontaine’s second Canadian foundation had risen among the vast, rolling fields of wheat. It was called Our Lady of the Prairies, and the wide, open vistas of plains and sky that confronted the monks as they went out to work in the early morning of those autumn days symbolized the new horizons that were beckoning to the whole Order of Cîteaux.

  As usual, antimonastic persecution soon would powerfully stimulate the growth of the Order. When French socialism once more moved against the Church in 1903, it would mean four more Cistercian monasteries in North America. And there would be a corresponding growth in every part of the world.

  Meanwhile, Leo XIII told the Cistercians that he ardently desired to see them make foundations in missionary territory—Africa, the Far East. He intervened directly to persuade the abbot of Westmalle to accept the invitation of the King of Belgium and make a foundation in the Belgian Congo, near Leopoldville.2

  The whole Order had already been taking that trend at the time of the reunion. After the foundation in China another monastery of men was begun in Japan, soon followed by a convent of Trappistines. Our Lady of the Lighthouse and Our Lady of the Angels are both near Hakodate. Within the next ten years the Order would spread to South America and would continue to grow in Africa and the Near East. The East Indian foundation had, meanwhile, moved to northern Australia.

  The energetic optimism of which these foundations were the expression was not literally produced by the reunion, since it was already in full swing before 1892. But the con
solidation of the Order gave it an impetus that reached its peak in the years before World War I. This material expansion was certainly a proof of spiritual vigor; but like all such works, it was not without its dangers. There was always the peril that the intense spiritual energy which the Holy Ghost was accumulating in our Cistercian reservoirs of penance and contemplation would burst the dam and pour out to flood a mission field of our own, instead of providing hidden power for all the other active workers in the Church.

  There were two great drawbacks about this growth in mission territory. First, although the houses founded in temperate zones have generally been a success, the Cistercian Rule has never been properly lived in the tropics. So many mitigations are required that the life is unrecognizable. The monks of Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, Beagle Bay in northern Australia, and the monks of Brazil rapidly lost their true Cistercian character. The climate had simply twisted their Rule out of shape. For that matter, it is easy to see how poorly the Rule of St. Benedict is adapted to the Southern Hemisphere, •where everything, as they say, is upside down. Since the seasons are reversed, Lent falls in harvest time, and the monks have to fast when they need to eat; then, in compensation, they have plenty to eat when they could easily fast.

  The second difficulty of these mission foundations could more easily have been avoided; but it is not altogether possible for Cistercians to refuse to conduct schools and orphanages in lands where helpless children are crying out for care. Not only were these works practically forced upon the monks by colonial governments, which have always appreciated Trappist contributions to agriculture and have frequently asked us to run agricultural colleges, but even Leo XIII himself demanded them in certain cases. It was he, for instance, who wanted the orphanage at El Athroun, in Palestine. He got not only an orphanage but a school and a dispensary as well.