A month and a half later, the news of the martyrdom of Yang Kia Ping reached Europe and America. In the chapter rooms of all the monasteries of the Order, the names were read of those who were known to be dead. The first list had twelve names on it. It was soon followed by a second with four more.4
A circular letter from the abbot of Consolation, Dom Alexis Baillon, who was in France, gave the Cistercian Order a bare outline of the story that has been told here and added only a few words of comment, impressive in their Trappist economy:
We hardly dare to recommend the deceased to your prayers, for they seem to us to have died as martyrs. But we especially recommend the living that they may have the courage to suffer and that the good God may deliver them.
No one with an enlightened faith can doubt that the sufferings and sacrifices of the Chinese Cistercians have added to the great increment of merit that has accumulated in the Order in these last fifteen years of anguish and persecution and has contributed to the intense spiritual and material vitality that is filling the whole organism of the Order and the Church. The blood of martyrs is proving to be the seed of Cistercians.
Two Cistercian monasteries in Yugoslavia fell into the hands of the Communists when the armies of Marshall Tito took over the country. One of these was the great monastery of Mariastern and the other was Our Lady of Liberation. The Communists, of course, took over both monasteries. Full details of what happened to the monks have not yet reached us. It is known that many escaped to Germany and are in Cistercian monasteries there. Some were last heard of working in the secular priesthood in Yugoslavia and others are known to have been imprisoned in concentration camps.
The monastery of El Athroun was in the midst of the fighting in Palestine in 1948 and has been, for many months, in serious danger. Although theoretically “respected” by the combatants, it has suffered damage under fire, and at least one member of the community has been killed.
The new monastery in Utah sprang up and began its flourishing growth on the very day when the crucifixion of Yang Kia Ping got under way; in the very days of December when the news from China was being read to the monks in our American houses, we also heard of still another foundation in our own country.
The bright colors and the characteristic American lightheartedness that marked the arrival of four Trappists in New Mexico present a strange but encouraging contrast to the grim scene that was then nearing its conclusion in North China.
Early in December, 1947, a big, dusty, Ford truck pulled into Santa Fe, New Mexico. It had Rhode Island license plates, and the four men in it—wearing plain suits or overalls—were looking for the archbishop. These men were Cistercians from Our Lady of the Valley in Rhode Island. They were thus the lineal descendants of Father Vincent de Paul Merle and his Nova Scotia foundation, and they were there to accomplish a work that probably added much joy to the happiness of that old veteran of La Val Sainte in heaven.
The Rhode Island monastery had made no little sensation in the Southwest by buying up a well-known dude ranch in the Pecos Valley, some twenty miles out of Santa Fe. These monks had come to prepare the way for a regular colony of Trappists. They knew nothing, yet, of what had been going on in China: but what they were about to do was a Providential commentary on those events. They were going to show anyone who might be interested the quiet and effective way Christian communism has of liquidating capitalist institutions and replacing them with something more healthy and fruitful in the moral order.
Seven thousand feet above the sea, on the banks of the Pecos River and at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo range, this isolated ranch was bounded on three sides by a government forest. A few miles beyond their gate the road came to a dead end at the government fish hatchery. And the Pecos River is considered to be the finest trout stream in the Southwest.
Among the cottonwood trees of the ranch were many cabins and tennis courts and riding stables. The ranch house itself contained a dining room that could accommodate three hundred guests. More than that, it sheltered several billiard tables and a great mahogany bar, well stocked with all those things that usually belong in a bar.
The stationery bore the legend, “Valley Ranch—The Finest Playground in America.”
But Father Vincent de Paul’s descendants had not come to New Mexico to play. They sold the cases of Scotch and rye and the boxes of cigars. They got rid of the billiard tables, the saddle horses, and all the other toys that the sportsmen had left. They dismantled the cabins and the big mahogany bar, and one of the monks, an architect, drew up the blueprints that would turn all that into a cloister and a chapel and a chapter room and a refectory and a library and dormitories.
The monks were bringing order to that peaceful valley. They were delivering it from the emptyhearted restlessness of people with more money in their pockets than happiness in their souls. The deep and intelligent silence of contemplatives would now swallow up the last echo of the banal conversations that had once been heard in those groves. The hammers of carpenters and the sound of peaceful work would make those trees forget the dull noise of secular amusement, and the adolescent racket of third-rate swing music would be lost in the mature measures of Gregorian chant.
The tide of that clean culture which had once touched the edge of these desert mountains, when Spanish Franciscans brought Christ to the Southwest, had turned again with a promise of monasticism and contemplative life: a life centered on God and immersed in His worship, a society of men capable of fulfilling the highest destiny for which men were created.
There are not a few people in our world and in our country who dare to find hope for the future in such signs as these. And the New Mexico foundation, dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, is the most symbolic of them all. It would be too much to expect that a whole nation might follow in the direction Valley Ranch took when it allowed itself to be transformed from a dude ranch into a Trappist monastery. Nevertheless, the trend is there, and it is something that belongs to our age. Perhaps it may, in time, come to be one of the lesser characteristics of our age, its greatest paradox and its happiest surprise, the consolation in the depths of our tragedy.
But such things as these have been dearly paid for in blood and lives. They are the fruit of martyrdoms. As such, they have only one destiny: to bear the same kind of witness to God that is borne by martyrs: to praise Him at no less cost than that of the wild, perfect, supreme love that transcends every other love, every other work, every other desire, to lose itself entirely from the eyes of men in that profound abyss which is known as adoration.
Part Two
XII
Cistercian Life in the Twelfth Century
TO UNDERSTAND the Cistercian life, you need a general idea of the way a monastery is organized. Once you have that, the rest is easy. A twelfth-century monastery of the Cistercian Order plainly and effectively tells its own story, even if all its monks are gone and half the walls are in ruins. And you can almost grasp the purpose of the monastery when you see the site where it was built, even if there is practically nothing left of the ruins.
The tradition of the White Monks was to build in lonely, wooded valleys. There were several reasons for this. But it would be just as well to say at the outset that they did not seek out such places for the sake of the scenery. That was something the twelfth century would not altogether have understood, even though St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, allowed the landscape of southern Italy a place in his contemplations.1 And it is true that St. Bernard confessed he had learned all his wisdom from the “oaks and beeches of the forest” and invited the schoolmaster of York, Henry Murdach, to come to Clairvaux and “learn something from the woods that you will not find in books.” 2 Nevertheless, the monks of the Middle Ages did not go into the wilds ‘looking for the beauties of nature. Father Vacandard3 tells us what we are to think of St. Bernard’s supposed “love of nature.” He shows us clearly enough that the founder of Clairvaux and of the Cistercian school of mysticism was far from being a twelfth-c
entury Wordsworth. Rather, the solitude and peace of the forest gave his mind freedom to contemplate God in His revelation.
But there is one error far worse than this one. It is the mistaken idea that the Cistercian fathers liked to build in marshy and unhealthy places so that the monks would always be ill. This condition would enable them to do penance and would keep death, their last end, inescapably before them, and they would long for their deliverance with undimmed ardor. This theory has a frail foundation. It is based on a sentence attributed to St. Bernard in a letter of one of his contemporaries, his next successor but one in the abbatial chair of Clairvaux. The writer, Fastrad of Gaviamez, was giving a younger abbot a piece of his mind for leading a life that savored of relaxation. His language is dramatic and rhetorical, and the sentiments he attributes to St. Bernard seem to be rather heavily colored by his own penitential cast of mind.4 A closer acquaintance with the abbot of Clairvaux would show that although he may have said these words to Fastrad, they need to be balanced against the saint’s serious and explicit teaching about discretion: mater virtutum et consummatio perfectionis (“the mother of virtues and the seal of perfection”).5
Whatever the first Cistercians may have believed about penance—and their life was certainly most austere—they never favored a spirituality that sought perfection in suicide. On the contrary, St. Bernard was one of the most determined defenders of Christian sanity against the Manichaeism revived by the Albigenses, who condemned the body and all its works as essentially evil.
In any case, history records more than one occasion when St. Bernard ordered a monastery to move to a healthier site, after the original location proved harmful to the monks. One instance of this was at Belleperche, in marshy, low-lying country near Montauban, in southern France.6
The true reason the White Monks escaped to wild places and built their monasteries in mountains and forests was to get away from the world. And the reason they wanted to get away from the world was primarily to find not suffering for themselves but joy. They were looking for freedom: freedom from all the cares and burdens of worldly business and ambition. They desired this freedom not for its own sake but for the sake of union with God by contemplation.
The Cistercian manifesto that was the Exordium Parvum— probably written by St. Stephen Harding himself—tells us this clearly several times. Pope Paschal II, issuing a bull in approval of the new foundation, commended them for throwing off the burden (angustias) of worldly life and of mitigated monasticism and ordered them officially to continue in the way they had chosen, “in order that being all the more free from the disturbances and pleasures of secular life you may the more eagerly strive to please God with all the powers of your mind and soul.” Ut quanto a saecularibus tumultibus et deliciis liberiores estis, tanto amplius placere Deo totis mentis et animae virtutibus anheletis.7
The monks themselves made a point of appealing to St. Benedict’s precept a saeculi actibus se facere alienum (“to become strangers to the business of the world”) when they rejected the care and usufruct of parishes, manorial estates, tithes, and all the other intricacies of ecclesiastical feudalism.8 And then, in order to give themselves to a simpler and more interior way of prayer,9 they even rejected the excessive activity which the liturgical pomp of Cluny imposed upon the monks. The attitude of the founders of Cîteaux is summed up in one sentence by the author of the Exordium. He describes the satisfaction with which they arrived in the marshy woods that had been granted them by the Duke of Burgundy, and observed that the brush was too thick to encourage visitors. It was inhabited only by wild beasts, and the monks congratulated themselves on having found a place that was all the more perfect for their life because it was repugnant and inaccessible to seculars.10
Nevertheless, when the world tried to follow them, and the Duke of Burgundy signified his desire to come and visit the monks in state, with his whole court, Stephen Harding risked the whole future of the monastery and the Order by informing His Grace that he was not wanted unless he came alone, to pray.
It is understandable, then, that the founders of the Cistercian Order considered this matter so important that they wrote it into their original statutes11 at the very beginning of the list. It is the first recorded item in the formal legislation of the General Chapters.
To pay for their solitude the White Monks were willing to accept the most unhealthy and uncomfortable situations. But that does not mean that they resigned themselves to pine away there and die. On the contrary, they took land that their contemporaries were afraid even to approach and entirely transformed it by their labor from a wilderness into fertile farms. They drained valleys that were too moist, they irrigated land that was too dry. They cleared forests. They even performed almost unbelievable feats of engineering in order to get themselves settled in difficult mountain passes. For example, the builders of Bonneval, in the rugged uplands of south central France,12 built a terrace supported by gigantic blocks of granite in order to be able to place their monastery and its necessary gardens on the flank of a steep, wooded hill dominating a ravine.
When St. Bernard and his companions were sent out by St. Stephen Harding in the early summer of 1115 to make the third foundation from Cîteaux in three years, they crossed the plateau of Langres to the valley of the Aube and found a wooded vale which penetrated the hills to the depth of a mile or so on the left bank of the river. The place had a bad reputation. It was supposed to be frequented by robbers. Perhaps that was only a legend. But in any case, Bernard was not moved to settle there by any such considerations as were attributed to him by Fastrad in the letter we have mentioned. It was watered by pleasant streams and sheltered from the world and from the weather. Closed off on three sides by hills, it opened south and eastward to catch all the sunlight of the day. Only late in the afternoon, when the sun began to sink behind the western slopes with their ancient oaks, did shadows steal across the simple little abbey built by the pioneers. Up to that moment it had been storing up light and heat all day.
True, not all of Bernard’s daughter houses enjoyed the same advantages. When his cousin, Godfrey de la Roche, founded Fontenay, he had to drain the swampy valley and collect its waters into many ponds before building his charming abbey—which was, according to the meaning written into its name, to “swim upon fountains.”13 These valley monasteries developed within the Cistercian Order a beautiful spiritual symbolism by their names alone, eloquent and harmonious names full of poetry and simple mysticism, in which the image of “waters” and “fountains” and “springs” plays a very important part. It was before St. Theresa of Avila wrote her famous allegory of contemplative prayer and the various aguas by which the soul is irrigated. This concept is more than traditional: Christ Himself gave His Church that figure of grace and the interior life in His own preaching, as His Spirit had also revealed it before to the prophets. He spoke to the Samaritan woman of the “water that would become a fountain springing up [in the believing soul] to life everlasting”14 and repeated the figure later, when preaching to the crowds at the feast of Tabernacles. His Evangelist explicitly tells us what He meant: “Now this He said of the Spirit which they should receive, who believed in Him.”15
Steeped in the language and imagery of Scripture, the Cistercians were acutely alive to the spiritual and poetic possibilities of their surroundings, which they condensed into names like Fountains, Clairvaux (“Clear Valley,” or “Valley of Light”), Trois Fontaines (“Three Fountains”), Vauluisant (“Shining Valley”), Aiguebelle (Aqua Bella, “Beautiful Water”), Senanque (Sana Aqua, “Clean Water”), Clairmarais (“Clear Marsh”), Bonaigue (Bona Aqua, “Good Water”), Fontfroide (“Cold-Spring”), Mellifont (“Fount of Honey”)—not to mention other such names as La Benisson Dieu (“God’s Blessing”), La Grace Dieu (“God’s Grace”), Beaulieu, Bonlieu, Bonport, Cherlieu, Rosières, Clairfontaine, and hundreds more, all of them ingenuous yet full of meaning, bearing witness to a deep spiritual ideal.
Surely, there is nothing in these name
s to indicate any deliberate intention of dying of malaria. . . .
When the monks had found their homes, they not only settled there, for better or for worse, but they sank their roots into the ground and fell in love with their woods. Indeed, this love of one’s monastery and its surroundings is something integral to the Cistercian life. It forms the object of a special vow: stability. When the monks of Melleray inscribed over their door In nidulo meo moriar (“Let me die in my little nest”), they were expressing something that has been in the heart of every true Cistercian since St. Alberic, whom St. Stephen praised as being a “lover of the brethren and the monastery, the place,” amator fratrum et loci.
It is difficult not to succumb, at least temporarily, to the charm of the typical Cistercian valley. Look at the poem Tintern inspired and what the eighteenth-century English water-colorists got out of Fountains and Bylands and Rievaulx and Jervaulx and Furness and the rest! Or look at Senanque, in the deep Provençal valley, near Petrarch’s Vaucluse, where boxbushes and dwarf oak cling to the hillsides among the pale outcrops of rock burnt white and ocher by the gorgeous sun. You will find the same attraction about the monasteries in Kentucky, Utah, New Mexico.
It all adds up to one thing: peace, silence, solitude. The world and its noise are out of sight and far away. Forest and field, sun and wind and sky, earth and water, all speak the same silent language, reminding the monk that he is here to develop like the things that grow all around him: he is planted in the garden of the Lord, plantatus in domo Domini, and his existence has now one meaning only: to reach out for the light of truth and the waters of grace, to sink his roots into God and raise his branches into God’s good air and breathe heaven and absorb its wonderful rays.
The Waters of Siloe Page 30