The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Three years passed. Gethsemani was under the charge of the prior, a rugged little Frenchman, Father Benedict Dupont. He was passionately devoted to Trappist austerity, a powerful and tireless worker, and a zealous penitent. Under his charge was a confused and somewhat embittered community of sixty-six men, two thirds of whom were lay brothers. Active voice in the administration of the house was more or less limited to the eight priests. Of these, several were toying with the idea of transferring their stability to some house that was in a more settled condition.

  It was the gloomiest period of Gethsemani’s history, and the gloom was deepened by attacks and calumnies against the monks. One of the liveliest of these was a book called The Monk of Gethsemane Abbey, printed in 1893 in Brooklyn by The Reformed Catholic Book and Tract Concern, at the corner of Johnson and Fulton streets. It was by a certain E. H. Walsh, who described himself as an “ex-Trappist” monk. He had, as a matter of fact, been a novice at Gethsemani under Dom Benedict, but there is no record of his having made vows. Consequently he was not, strictly speaking, an “ex-monk.”

  The book is a voluble piece of invective. “Popery,” “The Virgin,” and the “juggernaut of priestcraft” all come in for their meed of contumely. During the two years in which he was known as Frater Augustine, Mr. Walsh seems to have made things hum at Gethsemani. Trappist life, under Dom Benedict, was hard enough: but to a man who had delusions of persecution and was convinced that he was being imprisoned in the monastery against his will, it must have been positively hectic. Walsh was under the impression that anyone who entered the novitiate “is obliged to take vows or be imprisoned,” and he wrote, “I often sought for a chance to escape, and examined the strongly barred windows in vain for such an opportunity.” Perhaps the fourteen years which had elapsed between his eventual “escape” and the writing of his story suggested those bars on the windows, and other details. The poor soul finally died in an asylum for the insane.

  Nor were the calumnies against Gethsemani that flowed freely from the pen of the ex-principal of Gethsemani College—as he sat nursing his wounded feelings in the Louisville jail—any more pleasant or profitable for the monks. This was the man who had been put in charge of the monks’ school by the guileless Dom Edward. The smooth-spoken stranger, never reticent on the subject of his connection with one of the best families in England, engineered a scandal that almost ruined the monks altogether. When the police took a closer look at his antecedents, they discovered that there was a great deal more to be learned about him from Scotland Yard than from Burke’s Peerage. Nevertheless, he took advantage of his leisure, while he was behind prison bars, to dash off the first of what he promised would be a series of pamphlets “unmasking” the hypocrisy of the Trappists at Gethsemani. He promised some juicy bits of information, but when his actual statements of fact are sifted out from the abuse and innuendo in which they are embedded, it turns out that the only thing he really had against the monks was that they were keeping their Rule. Naturally the Rule, the silence, penance, and obedience, irritated him and he did his best to prove that anyone who could stand such an existence must be a pharisee.

  Gethsemani sometimes received more sympathetic treatment from professional writers. James Lane Allen’s The White Cowl told everyone who did not already know it that Gethsemani had almost as much of a place in the traditional Kentucky scene as Lincoln’s birthplace or Churchill Downs. But the romance of the monk who ran away with the beautiful lady was not precisely what the Trappists considered good publicity for their Rule and their life of penance. The newspapermen of the day, who found the concept of a flight from the world at least intriguing, never seemed to warm up to Gethsemani. They could see that the monks were smiling and seemed to be happy: but what could possibly make them happy, when they were so thin and their house was so cold and they never heard anything about baseball? All this remained a mystery.

  Such, then, was the condition of Gethsemani as the fiftieth year of its existence began. Under the circumstances, it was very doubtful whether the abbey would be able to endure for fifty years more. How long would it be before the dwindling community would have to leave the buildings and scatter to other monasteries and turn the place over to the sisters as an orphan asylum?

  The reunion of the three congregations into a new Order was ultimately what saved Gethsemani. If the reunion had not taken place, there would hardly have been a chance of Gethsemani’s obtaining an abbot like Dom Edmond Obrecht, who was to arrive in Kentucky in 1898 and take charge of the abbey.

  He was a perfect man for the job—so perfect, in fact, that only the strong, centralized organization of an Order like that which the Trappists had now become could afford to dispose of him and place him as it did.

  Dom Edmond had everything that Gethsemani needed. In his twenty-three years as a Cistercian, he had acquired a wide, practical experience of everything a prelate needed to know. He had begun his religious life at La Grande Trappe, and had, therefore, been formed at the very center of the life of the Order. He had served in administrative posts in two important abbeys, Acey in the Jura region of France, and Tre Fontane outside of Rome. Above all, many years at the Roman headquarters of the Trappists had given him an intimate working knowledge of the way things were done.

  Here, then, was a man who knew what the Rule and the spirituality of the Order meant. He understood chant, ceremonies, liturgy, canon law. He was a linguist, a cosmopolitan, a diplomat, a connoisseur of books and manuscripts. He combined dignity with authority and possessed a clear and powerful intelligence. He knew how to make decisions and get them carried out. He was a born abbot, a born leader, a born organizer. He was just the one to put things in order at Gethsemani.

  The impact of Dom Edmond’s powerful character upon Gethsemani was unimaginable. He burst into the big Kentucky citadel of silence and threw it wide open to the four winds. He flung himself vigorously into the task of cleaning out the mental dust and cobwebs that had been gathering in the community for two generations. He let out all the stuffy atmosphere of Dom Benedict’s system of penances and sanctions and let in the fresh air of a more sensible and vital—and more Cistercian—viewpoint. Not that Dom Edmond could not punish faults! His subjects were to find him in many ways as stern as Dom Benedict when occasion demanded. But there was something more human about him. Besides, he was a man whose large views extended far beyond the limits of a spirituality that sought only to crush and restrict human nature, as if there were nothing positive to follow mortification as its true fruit.

  The troubled and disunited community was at once fused together into a solid and vital organism under his tutelage as provisional superior. Its first act of gratitude was to elect him abbot unanimously on October 11, 1898.

  The monastery entered into a more live contact with the rest of the Church in America. Relations that had become strained under Dom Benedict were more than patched up by Dom Edmond, who knew how to make friends.

  The jubilee celebrations, held a year late, in 1899, threw open the monastery to men who had never dreamed of coming there in the old days, and news began to spread that the Trappists were not so bad after all. The monks were really human beings, and the monastery was far better than a penitentiary for censured clerics. Wisely, too, the new abbot had a little book about the monastery printed. And so, Americans at large gradually began to recognize at least the possibility that happiness and a Trappist vocation were not incompatible.

  As the years went on, Dom Edmond built up one of the finest monastic libraries in America at his Kentucky monastery. Its nucleus was the bequest of Monsignor Leonard Batz of Milwaukee, from whom the monks acquired some forty thousand volumes. They included Migne’s Greek and Latin Fathers, sets of St. Bernard, St. Thomas, Duns Scotus. Dom Edmond acquired many incunabula and even manuscripts of St. Bernard and several ancient Cistercian liturgical manuscripts, most of them antiphoners, the best of which is twelfth-century work. Add to this such great names in monastic history as the Benedictines Dom Mart
ène and Mabillon.

  But Dom Edmond did more than this to humanize Gethsemani. During his abbotship the bare, forbidding brick walls of the monastery were coated with a material which was intended to look like stone and did, indeed, mellow the outward appearance of the buildings. On the inside, a new cloister was built, the Church remodeled and redecorated and even embellished with stained-glass windows. Although these are contrary to the Cistercian tradition—in the twelfth century, abbots who put in stained glass did a considerable amount of fasting on bread and water, under penance from the General Chapter—nevertheless Gethsemani really needed something of the kind. Under Dom Benedict the only way for the monks to fight back against the ferocious Kentucky sun was to daub the windows with white paint at the beginning of each new summer season. It was an expedient that bore fruit in a singularly depressing and unsightly shabbiness.

  The year 1912 began with one of the most significant events in the history of Gethsemani Abbey. One quiet winter afternoon, just before the monks were due to go out to work, a column of black smoke was seen issuing from the roof of Gethsemani College. The alarm was sounded, and soon monks and students were fighting the fire—but with all too little success. By night, there was nothing left of Gethsemani College but a mountain of angry red embers still crowned with bitter-smelling smoke. When day dawned and showed the monks nothing but four stark fragments of brick wall standing black and grim against the winter sky, nobody mourned. Indeed, the whole thing was accepted in the monastery with grim satisfaction. The monks felt that God had done them a favor. He had purified their monastic life of something that almost amounted to a cancer. The history of the college had been nothing but a long record of troubles and even spiritual perils for the monks. At best, it had never been anything but a white elephant.

  The college had been fairly popular among the Catholics of Kentucky, and warmhearted former students at once began raising money to rebuild the old school. However, Dom Edmond wasted no time in returning the contributions as fast as they came in. There was no further need of the school and no possible excuse for the monks to keep on trying to be educators. It had been necessary in the days that followed the Civil War, but this was the twentieth century, and Kentucky was now full of good schools. The Cistercians had their hands full living their rule and following out their own arduous vocation, without shouldering duties of other religious orders.

  The last tottering fragments of wall were pushed down, the rubbish was cleared away, and a statue of St. Joseph was planted on a concrete pedestal atop the hill where the college had once stood. It is a stocky, purposeful little statue. St. Joseph seems to have taken his stand there with the Holy Child in his arms, and in his heart the single-minded intention of keeping the school from ever coming back.

  After all, St. Joseph is the patron of the interior life.

  IX

  Eight American Foundations

  ON JUNE 17, 1903, Dom Edmond Obrecht was standing on the French Line docks in New York City. Tugs were easing the liner “La Bretagne” into position for mooring, and the first hawsers were splashing in the dirty water of the North River. Among the passengers lined at the rails was a singular group of men. There were seventeen of them, with bearded faces and close cropped heads. They wore secular clothing which fitted them as ill as a disguise. There was something singular about these travelers.

  At least, that is what the newspaper reporters thought. They surrounded the Trappist abbot and asked him many questions about the immigrants. Whatever Dom Edmond may have told them has long since been forgotten, but the story got into the papers that seventeen Boer generals who had escaped from an English concentration camp in the Transvaal were being offered a refuge by the monks of Our Lady of Gethsemani. . . .

  That was a wild shot. The only thing true about it was that the bearded men did need a refuge. Far from being Boers, they were Frenchmen. Not only were they not generals, they were not even soldiers—except according to the metaphor of St. Benedict, who described the monk who followed his Rule as militans sub regula vel abbate (“campaigning under a rule and an abbot”).

  That brings us to the story of the suppression of the French abbey of Fontgombault. For that, too, in its own restrained way, had been a fight.

  In 1850 Trappist monks of Bellefontaine took over an ancient Benedictine monastery that was falling into ruins. Fontgombault, rich in associations with the past, and especially with the twelfth-century reformer, St. Bernard of Tiron, stood among the poplar trees on the banks of the river Creuse, a tributary of the Loire. The ancient buildings, including the fine old abbey church, were still standing, in spite of the fact that the neighbors had been quarrying them freely for stone with which to build their houses and dovecots and barns. It was a beautiful, peaceful site in the fertile plains of central France, with no sound to trouble the silence but the rushing of water over the milldam. Here, a century or so before, the gentle Benedictine scholar, Dom Edmond Marine, had slipped on a stone and taken an unexpected bath in the river when he visited the abbey, collecting material for the monumental Gallia Christiana.

  However, the Trappists could not simply move in and start chanting the office and working in the fields and meditating under the repaired arches of the cloister. Things were not that simple. The curse that has pursued contemplative monasteries in Europe ever since the French Revolution was on their heels, too: they had to find some special source of income. There was nothing they could do but accept the unpleasant choice that was offered them, so they found themselves in charge of a small state penitentiary! It reflected the general idea people had of the Trappists. They shouldered the task bravely, and by a merciful dispensation of Providence the persecution of 1881 took it away from them again. By that time they were able to stand on their own feet.

  The fact that they escaped expulsion in 1881 did not mean that they had no enemies. The freemasons and the petty government officials of the department maintained a constant persecution of the Trappists of Fontgombault. But since they could not do anything important against them, they used all their power to entangle them in red tape whenever the monks entered into contact with their little official world.

  In 1899 the renovated church of the abbey was due for re-consecration. The government seized the opportunity to make a nuisance of itself to the monks and promptly forbade the ceremony. The consecration was begun “privately,” and before it was half over it was interrupted by the police. Thus, at the turn of the century the monks were in open hostility with the civil administration.

  It was not a comfortable position for them to be in, because certain politicians in the Chamber of Deputies were at that moment cooking up antireligious legislation that was to beat fruit within three years in wholesale expulsions. The laws sponsored by Emile Combes and Waldeck-Rousseau brought armed men to the gates of every Charterhouse in France, from the Grande Chartreuse to Notre Dame des Prés, near Boulogne, on the shores of the Channel, and cleared France of Carthusians.

  The Cistercians had every reason to fear that it might be the same with them. In fact, it very probably would have been if one energetic and resourceful abbot of the Order had not thrown himself with unsparing self-sacrifice into the task of defending her monasteries.

  A meeting of French Cistercian abbots in Paris, on June 28, 1901, ended with the delegation of Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard to represent the Order in the coming struggle. This rugged Provençal had proved himself an administrator of no mean ability. He had helped no fewer than three important houses of the Order to get on a firm economic basis; now he had succeeded Dom Sebastian Wyart as abbot of Sept-Fons when the first General moved out to occupy the abbacy of Cîteaux, which fell to him as head of the Order.

  Dom Chautard was a quick thinker and a tireless man of action. The activities which obedience imposed upon him drew their power from deep founts of spirituality that vivified a soul closely united with God in a life of faith and prayer.

  It was this supernatural spirit, even more than his natural pers
onality and impressive character, that finally brought Dom Chautard success in his mission. Georges Clemenceau was by no means a friend of monks, and when, on the eve of the final vote that was to decide the fate of the Cistercians, this abbot was ushered into his presence, the “Tiger” did not spare him. Dom Chautard was greeted with a long tirade which told him, in substance, that the monks were useless and it was high time they were kicked out of the country.

  But when it was over, the abbot of Sept-Fons, with no less energy and conviction, told Clemenceau just what the monks were living for. It was a bold and dramatic speech—bold enough to overleap all the accidental excuses with which a less ardent man would have tried to conciliate the politician. Dom Chautard did not waste his breath in arguing that the monks were experts in “scientific agriculture.” He simply gave a bald statement of the essence of the monastic ideal which St. Benedict had boiled down to four words: nihil amori Christi proponere. Now, Clemenceau was not the kind of man who would be very well prepared to understand what it meant to love Christ beyond everything else, and he probably did not get much light out of what the impassioned Cistercian was saying about his monks’ being the “guard of honor of Christ in the Blessed Eucharist.” But he did see that Dom Chautard knew what he was talking about and sincerely believed in it and was not afraid to state his position without compromise. In a word, even the man without faith was able to be impressed by the intense faith of this Cistercian monk. The interview ended when the president shook hands with the abbot and declared, “You are my friend.”

  The entire Cistercian Order could not be saved. One or two of the houses that were most seriously menaced had to be sacrificed. But the fact that the rest remained untouched amounted to a great victory.