The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  The night hours from about two o’clock (according to our modern reckoning) until daybreak were devoted to liturgical prayer. The hymns of the office attuned the monk’s spiritual consciousness to the darkness around him and to the peril it symbolized. The stone vaulting of the church was lost in shadows. Only one small light flickered before some altar or near the ambo, where the lectionary lay open. The monks themselves were scarcely visible in the gloom. Sometimes the abbot went around the choir with a lantern to make sure that no one had fallen asleep.

  And in that darkness the full, slow measures of the psalmody rose and fell with even cadences, each verse broken at the mediant by the long, significant pause which was typical of the Cistercian office. Between every pair of psalms the spell woven by the monotonous cadences was broken and a voice intoned the antiphon. With a momentary dash of color and flame this brief cry of melody was taken up by all those hidden voices, only to sink again into the austere monotony of the next psalm.

  On most days of the year the canonical office was followed by the singing of the office of the dead. The choir broke up toward the end of the tenth hour of night for a period of reading, only to return for another office, Lauds, in which a new note of hope anticipated the coming of their Christ, their rising sun.

  Sunrise, of course, changed the whole temper of the office and of the monk’s day.25 Now the chanting of the canonical hours went more quickly. Only three psalms were appointed for each hour. The hymn Jam lucis orto sidere hailed the risen sun, and those who were praying the office, roused from deep meditation on eternal truths, looked outward to the fields and workshops and begged God to send grace for the day’s work. And soon the monks were on their way to the woods and pastures.

  In all seasons of the year one or another of the day hours would be chanted in the fields by all those who were not working within easy reach of the church. Usually it was the midday hour of Sext (about noon), but in times of special work, such as harvesting, vintage, sheepshearing, Tierce and None might also be sung in the fields.

  The monks could tell by the sun when it was near the time for Sext. When the bell was heard ringing in the distant abbey church, the heads of the various work groups would give the signal, and their helpers would gather together and begin chanting, after the usual silent prayers, standing in two choirs among the wheat sheaves or in the rows of vines, with their grape baskets resting in the shadow of the leaves; or if working in the olive groves, they would pray beneath the silver foliage, bowing in their gray robes, their hard, brown hands on their knees.

  Those who were working within the enclosure, splitting wood or digging in the garden, pruning fruit trees or copying manuscripts, tanning hides or making cheese, would gather in choir. If they were caught in the fields at the hour of None, they had the chance to sing these words: “Because thou shalt eat the labors of thy hands, blessed art thou, and it shall be well with thee.”26

  Meanwhile, toward the middle of the morning work the cooks had presented themselves to the prior and received his permission to leave the fields or the orchards or wherever they were working and return to the monastery. There, they washed up and began to prepare dinner for the community, after having broken their own fast with a chunk of black bread and a cup of wine.

  The monks came in a few hours later and sang another hour of the office. Then, if the dinner was not yet ready, they sat down to read in the cloister. They had to be prepared for any kind of emergency in this matter, because all the monks took turns at cooking, and one could generally tell when the community would have to wait half an hour overtime for their food, or when the soup would be burned.

  Once they were in the refectory, things were not rigidly systematic. Although perfect silence had to be observed, no one was allowed to walk about the room eating, and there were a few little points of monastic etiquette to be observed. It was not unlikely that the cellarer might come and put some extra portion before you—a wedge of cheese or some eggs or fruit. You were certain to receive an extra portion if you had been bled by the surgeon or had some other weakness or ailment, or if a feast day.

  In the summertime the monks rested in the dormitory for an hour, or an hour and a half, while the sun was at its height. They would keep their own rakes and pitchforks by their bedside, for in harvest time the monks did not hand in their tools after work. If the work was heavy or far afield, the monks might take their dinner in the country and sleep out their siesta under the trees at the edge of a wheat field or under the roof of one of their granges. Sometimes they even spent two or three days away from the monastery, staying at a grange. If there was a chance of returning home the same day, they might sing Vespers in the fields, although this was very unusual. If they were obliged to stay at a grange, they found simple but clean quarters—a dormitory, refectory, and chapel. If they were there over a Sunday or feast day, they spent the day in reading, meditation, and prayer, as they would have done in the cloister. The usages insisted on the usual strict silence at the grange and restricted the use of sign language. Also, the monks were not allowed to wander off into the woods by themselves.

  In summer and winter the monks’ day ended with the setting sun, and they went to bed a little after dark had fallen However, before they retired, St. Benedict wanted all the various activities of the monastery to fold themselves back into a single unit. He wanted to gather his family together for the night. Perhaps it was again a spontaneous, unconscious reflection of the way the contemplative collects his faculties before entering into the darkness of his wordless prayer. But in any case, while the last rays of the sun still slanted down over the wooded hills and across the monastery, the monks and brothers gathered in the cloister, and one of their number read aloud to the whole family. This was called “collation,” because St. Benedict had suggested that, among other works, Cassian’s Collationes (Conferences) would be the most appropriate book for this time.27

  As the light gradually waned, they listened to the last songs of the birds under the eaves and in the forest, punctuating the pauses in the reader’s voice, while swallows flew about the garth and the belfry in the dusk. Finally, the abbot gave the signal to rise, and after a brief prayer they filed into the church, not to begin the office of Compline but only to conclude it: for that reading was a regular part of the office.28

  The day finally ended with the murmur of corporate prayer pulsing through the shadows of the dark church, until the monks, blessed by their abbot in the shadows of the transept, ascended the steps that led directly from the church to the communal dormitory.

  Nothing could be simpler than such a life. Yet it was never monotonous—any more than the seasons are monotonous, or the development of growing things. It was an austere life, without being rigid. There was enough sane latitude to keep formalism out of it, and it was so close to the earth and so bound up with nature that it had to be rich in spontaneity. It had to be genuine. And anyone who really gave himself to the Rule and to the prayer and labor and poverty and obedience it demanded, found himself deepened and broadened and matured more than he had ever dreamed possible. Without burdening himself with systems and rigid sets of pious practices, but simply by laboring and chanting the praises of God—and by reading the Scriptures and living in harmony with his brethren—and by taking the fasting and the heat and the cold and the poverty as they came from day to day—the monk grew and became strong in spirit and found his way, without realizing it, into the pure atmosphere of sanctity.

  However, this could not be accomplished merely by the material and natural organization imposed upon the monks’ life by the Rule. There was needed a special, formal element of spirituality to draw all these material elements together and give them a higher life. And though the Cistercians would have been completely perplexed at the notion of inventing or devising a new system of spirituality or discovering a new way to God, they did, nevertheless, have a distinctive spirituality of their own. There was nothing in it of special method or new technique. It was simply St. Ben
edict and the Gospel over again: but in the Cistercian monasteries of the twelfth century, Benedictine simplicity was invested with a special vitality and purity and charm.

  The result of this was that the Cistercians, without consciously intending anything of the sort, came upon a new and peculiarly delightful region of the spiritual life that was all their own. To attempt an explanation of how that came about would be the subject for a fascinating book all by itself. But it was the fruit of a Providential combination of natural and supernatural elements: the Gospel, the Rule of St. Benedict, the ferment of the twelfth-century renaissance, the woods of France and England and Belgium and Germany, the ardent and poetic souls of a Bernard of Clairvaux, an Ailred of Rievaulx, a William of St. Thierry, a Guerric, an Adam of Perseigne, an Isaac of Stella, a Baldwin of Ford. . . . But above all, the special grace of the Spirit of God was there, forming souls in these hidden monasteries to a life of charity and deep contemplation.

  It was the Holy Ghost Who infused into these monks a special fire of inspiration which tempered with love the tremendous austerity of their reform. It was the Spirit of God, God’s own love, that sweetened their sufferings with an indefinably powerful unction and raised them above the level of penitential drudgery and routine and formalism. And it was God’s love that opened their eyes to new horizons in the interior life and replaced the gloom of the hardened ascetic with the serene, unbounded confidence of the mystic who dares to aspire to the possession of God and who, with impetuous and unconquerable desires, cries out for the embrace of His love and will not be denied.

  It was the Holy Ghost Who taught these saints the one magnificent truth that so many austere penitents had seemed to forget: that if we love God, it is because God has first loved us more, and that God has created us not so much to fear Him and honor Him and worship Him, as to love Him, since love is the perfection of all adoration and homage. God would rather have us love Him than merely fear Him, because fear keeps us far below Him, while love alone can make us His equal. The Cistercians never grew tired of asserting it over and over again. Love makes man equal to God, and God wants us to love Him in order that we may be equal to Him and share His nature and all His infinite goodness and joy. God wants us to love Him beyond measure, because then He can give Himself to us beyond measure and our joy will then know no measure, but will go on expanding inexhaustibly forever as we lose ourselves more and more in the interminable substance of Him Who is love. We are perfectly ourselves only when we have lost ourselves in this pure love of God for His own sake; and God calls us to Him in order to transform us into love. And when our whole life and being is nothing but a perfect act of love, we have become what God is, and we share His ineffable joy—the joy of pouring ourselves out and of giving ourselves without end. And the more we give ourselves to Him, the more He gives Himself to us in return. The exchange goes on forever, and the wonder of it and the exultation increase without limit, for everything that the soul has is given to God, and all that is God is given to the soul: quippe quibus omnia communia sunt, nil proprium, nil a se divisum habentes.29 And so, God’s love, flowing through the soul, returns in the soul’s love of God to its own principle, its own fount, from which it never ceases to flow back into the soul. Magna res amor, si tamen ad suum recurrat principium, si refusus suo fonti semper ex eo sumat unde jugiter fluat.30

  God loves us that we may learn to love Him for love’s sake, because He knows that pure love is the most perfect beatitude, and that is what He wants to share with us. Nam cum amat Deus, non vult aliud quam amari: quippe non ad aliud amat nisi ut ametur, sciens ipso amore beatos qui se amaverint.31

  If contemplation and the pure love of God became the explicit end of the monastic life in the mind of St. Bernard and his school, the spirituality of the Cistercians was also characterized by certain particular means to this end. And this is the triumph for which St. Bernard is best known.

  There were men of all kinds coming to Clairvaux and to the hundreds of monasteries of White Monks that sprang up all over Europe: men like the ones who alarmed William of St. Thierry by bringing the works of Abelard and William of Conches into the novitiate at Signy, and others like the unlettered knights who asked to be admitted to Clairvaux after an overnight visit. There were mature monks from Cluniac monasteries and young men, like Bernard’s brother Nivard, who had little spiritual formation. There were intellectuals and soldiers, theologians and farmers, clerks and merchants and courtiers and serfs. But meditation and the ways of the interior life were laid open to them all by a method that transcended every method and obviated all difficulties and all intricacies from the very start.

  There was nothing involved about it. You came to the monastery to learn, or rather to relearn, the love whose seeds were implanted in your very nature. And the best way to do this was to open the eyes of faith and gaze upon the perfect embodiment of God’s love for men: Christ on the Cross.

  Christ was the center of the Rule of St. Benedict. Christ had drawn St. Pachomius into the desert. Christ was with St. Anthony in the Thebaid.32 The love of Christ is the center of all Christian mysticism. Obviously it must be so, for that is what the word Christian means. Nevertheless, it is true to say that St. Bernard transformed and, in some sense, transfigured Christian spirituality by filling it with that lyrical love of Christ and His Virgin Mother which pervades the whole Middle Ages. It is true that St. Bernard and his Cistercians rediscovered that love of the Savior which had put such fire into the Gospel of St. John and the Epistles of St. Paul. They realized how close Christ is to us, not only as God but as Man, and they were able to grasp the full meaning of the truth that “no one comes to the Father but by Him.”33 They understood that God wanted to draw all men to Himself through His Incarnate Word, through Jesus, the Son of Mary. Nemo potest venire ad me nisi Pater qui misit me traxerit eum.34 They knew that all blessedness, eternal life, was to be found in the knowledge of “the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.”35 And they saw that in Christ alone was the gate to all true spirituality, to all true mysticism. “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.”36 Qui videt me videt et Patrem.37

  That was why St. Bernard based all his teaching on that one foundation, the love of Christ. He saw that Christ was the key to everything that mattered in the universe: for all created things, by their goodness and order and beauty, awake in our hearts the love for the God Who made them and make us obscurely desire the possession of Him. But that joy would be forever impossible unless Christ were sent to take us back to God and to teach us the way to love God by showing us how God really loved us. Above all, it is only through the merits of Christ’s death on the Cross that we can obtain the grace to rise above our own selfishness to the pure and selfless love of God for His own sake, which is the very essence of mysticism for the Cistercians. And so, St. Bernard exclaims:

  Great must be my love for Him through Whom I have existence, life and wisdom. If I am ungrateful to Him, then I am unworthy of Him. Worthy indeed of death is the man who will not live for Thee, Lord Jesus, and he is, in fact, already dead. And the man who has no sense of Who Thou art, is senseless. And the one who desires to live for anything else but Thee is living for nothing and is, himself, nothing. For after all, what is man, if he has no knowledge of Thee?38

  St. Bernard was impatient of the dialectical wrangling that kept the great logicians and humanists of his day so busy with technicalities and abstractions that they forgot to live. The abbot of Clairvaux—who was himself one of the great intellectuals of the twelfth century—knew that the true perfection of the intellect did not lie there: these interminable analyses of the words and terms and the outer surface of revelation were only a blind alley; if the professors thought they could arrive at the full possession of truth by their debates, they ran the risk of getting nowhere.

  God has not revealed Himself to us in Scripture and tradition in order that we may spend our lives haggling about the prepositions
and conjunctions in the different manuscripts through which the deposit of faith came down to us. The Letter of Scripture must be studied and understood: but the content of revelation will not be exhausted when we have argued out all its terms and propositions to suit our own reason. To expect any such satisfaction would be hopeless from the start.

  And so, St. Bernard taught his monks to read Scripture and the Fathers with an altogether different spirit. Searching the sacred text with the eyes of faith rather than with those of scholarship, they filled their minds and memories with the mysteries in the life of Jesus and with the prophecies and types of Christ in the Old Testament. Then, in the silence of deep and humble meditation they sought to penetrate the surface and slake their thirst at the springs of living water which only God could lay open to them.

  God, in His turn, seeing the soul’s desire to know Him, and seeing its recognition of its helplessness to penetrate the mysteries which transcend its natural powers, rewards its love and faith by the gift of understanding. The light infused into the mind by the Holy Spirit, together with love that inflames the will, opens up deep and penetrating insights into the mysteries of God, until suddenly the soul becomes aware that God has made Himself present to the eyes of the mind in a manner that baffles all description and can only be understood by those who have tasted the experience.