The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Therefore, the world gains a much more subtle revenge on monks when it poisons them with its own spirit and teaches them to retain command of themselves instead of abandoning themselves to God.

  Yet, because men are what they are, they always tend to go their own way and to live according to their own will, even when they think they are acting with the most disinterested purity. Even the holiest of things can become possessions when you love them for their own sake. Prayer can become a possession. So can penances. A monk may become just as attached to some little practice of devotion as a manufacturer is to his Packard: and with the same results. He will prefer the pleasure he derives from his private prayers to the good of his brothers and of the community, just as the rich man prefers his own cars and other luxuries to the welfare of the men he employs. A Trappist can be just as attached to some penance as a drunkard is to his bottle, and with the same sort of effect: for he may prefer his penance—which is the choice of his own sweet will—to some real duty, just as the drunkard would rather get drunk than go home and love his family.

  And a contemplative can become attached to his contemplation. He may think that contemplation is the only thing in the world that matters. As long as he can be by himself and nurse that warm interior sweetness of rest in the center of himself—which may well be only an illusory shadow of true contemplation—the whole world can fall to pieces and the monastery with it, for all he cares. He will sacrifice everything else for that pleasure. Obedience will become a matter of no importance. Charity will seem absurd. And the love in his heart will dry up in the withering heat of his desire for his own complacent self-satisfaction. And he will be as trammeled as a millionaire.

  There is only one reason for the monk’s existence: not farming, not chanting the psalms, not building beautiful monasteries, not wearing a certain kind of costume, not fasting, not manual labor, not reading, not meditation, not vigils in the night, but only GOD.

  And that means: love. For God is love. If we love Him we possess Him. Everything else about the monastic life is only a means to that end. When prayer and penance and all the rest cease to be means and become ends in themselves, the contemplative life stops dead and the monk begins to amble along the broad, dreary paths that are trodden by the multitudes of the world.

  Therefore, there is a limit to the value of all the methods and means the monk uses to acquire the love of God. His external activities can be carried beyond what the economist would call a “point of diminishing returns.” That holds for prayer as well as for penance, for fasting as well as for contemplation, for the liturgy as well as for manual labor: all these things are valuable only up to a certain point. Beyond that limit they do harm instead of good. What is the limit? St. Bernard long ago explained to monks that the exterior acts prescribed by monastic rules were valuable only to the extent that they favored the growth of interior charity.1 It is no good to fast beyond the point where fasting and charity come in conflict, or to pray when it interferes, with the love you owe to your brothers or to God.

  But there is one thing in life that has no limit to its value, one virtue that can be practiced without any need for moderation. And that is love: the love of God and the love of other men in God and for His sake. There is no point at which it becomes reasonable to abate your interior love for God or for other men, because that love is an end in itself: it is the thing for which we were created and the only reason why we exist. Only the exterior acts which are means to this end have to be moderated, because otherwise they would not serve as means and would not bring us to the end. But when the end itself is reached, there is no limit, no need of saying, “It is enough.” 2

  In fact, if you discover any kind of love that satiates you, it is not the end for which you were created. Any act that can cease to be a joy is not the end of your existence. If you grow tired of a love that you thought was the love of God, be persuaded that what you are tired of was never pure love, but either some act ordered to that love or else something without order altogether.

  The one love that always grows weary of its object and is never satiated with anything and is always looking for something different and new is the love of ourselves. It is the source of all boredom and all restlessness and all unquiet and all misery and all unhappiness; ultimately, it is hell.3

  There is one thing and one alone which the monk never wearies of seeking, and that is the one love of which he can never grow weary. But there will he find this love? The answer to that question is the very heart of Cistercian mysticism and the Cistercian vocation.

  For the eternal, insatiable, unlimited, and unlimitable love for which the monk lives is to be found within the monastic community itself.

  Indeed, that love is the very life of the monastery, as it is the life of the whole Church. It has brought the monks into this place before they were ever capable of realizing or understanding what it was that was drawing them here. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.4 This love holds them together and is the one life principle which vitalizes and perfects them all in one. “And the glory which thou hast given me,” said Jesus to His Father, “I have given them that they may be one as We also are one.”5 But most tremendous of all is the fact that this love, which is the life of all and the unity of all and the bond of their perfection, is God Himself. It is the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, Vinculum perfectionis. And by that Spirit of Love men are brought together to form a spiritual organism which is the Body of Christ. The monastery is that Body in miniature. “If we love one another God abideth in us and His charity is perfected in us. In this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He hath given us of His Spirit.”6

  The only problem that remains is to distinguish this love from the false love which is selfishness and which can, nevertheless, disguise itself in so many apparently holy enthusiasms. It is a problem of that most important monastic virtue, discretion. But St. Bernard, trained in the wisdom of the great St. Benedict, gave his monks a concept that was the key to the whole problem.

  If the false love which ruins our peace and destroys all unity among men is self-love or our own will, voluntas propria, it seems that the true love which gives peace and unites us all to one another and to God is its exact opposite. But the opposite to the private will of one is the common will of all—not the will of all men, but of God and of all men who agree with Him. For the will of God alone embraces the perfect good of all and can be said to be the true will of all things that are capable of love. It is what they would all want if they could see the true order of things.

  The problems of the monastic life are all resolved in this concept. The one thing the monk needs to live for is that common will— the will which is not peculiar to him alone, which does not seek his own momentary benefit or convenience, but which seeks the good of all in the will of God.

  What really matters in a monastery, then, is not prayer, not penance, not fasting, not vigils, still less the farm and the chickens and the tractors and the buildings, but the common will, voluntas communis. As soon as two or three Christian men are gathered together, there can be all the essentials of a monastery. The common life can begin. “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.”7

  And that, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the least effective way to try and abolish Cistercian life is to put the monks into concentration camps, where are to be found precisely the conditions under which monasticism becomes heroic!

  When one first becomes a Cistercian, one is kept occupied for several months with the business of getting used to the fasts and labors and the rest of the routine. Generally, the whole two years’ novitiate is passed under special conditions—and with special graces—which tend to keep the novice something of a hothouse plant. Nevertheless, the big trial of the novitiate and the crucial test of a vocation is obedience: and in obeying the father master, the novice learns the first elementary steps in following the “common will” at the cost of his own. Generally, he does not qui
te see whither it is all leading; but at the same time he is eager to do what is expected of him, and the trials are too obviously trials to be very surprising.

  It is after profession that the Cistercian really begins his training as a mature monk. He is simply thrown more or less on his own in the community; if it is a big community, he is like a fish in a deep, silent sea. He sees his abbot once a week or so, speaks to his confessor once or twice a week, and he might sometimes open his conscience to the father prior as well. But on the whole, he is left face to face with a huge, inscrutable, and perhaps terrifying force which surrounds him on all sides and which is the community, the common will.

  This can develop into a terrifying trial to a young monk who does not realize what it is all about. To live in a house full of a hundred, or a hundred and fifty, completely silent men who are always together yet never speak to one another: to move about in this amorphous yet vital mass which stirs into action at the sound of bells rung at precise intervals of the day and applies itself with a mysterious energy to all its communal activities . . . if you do not acquire deep faith and supernatural common sense, a couple of years in a Trappist monastery will do strange things to you!

  Men who have not been properly trained to the life in their novitiate—or have not been able to absorb the training given to the novices—either twist and warp under the pressure of what they cannot understand, and become eccentrics, cranks, seeking refuge in a skein of peculiarities. Or else they jump over the wall and run away.

  A man who is more adaptable and who has something of a foundation of interior prayer may react against the community in a subtler way: but in the end it boils down to the same thing. He will argue: “I am a solitary, living in community. The community exists for one reason, to purify my heart by making me suffer and giving me opportunities for patience. All right. I will be patient. I will show them I can take it. But as for my interior life, that is my own. I am a solitary and I will live as one, inside myself, even though I have to exist in the midst of all these other people.”

  It is not exactly a sinful solution, but it is a very imperfect one. It is the same as saying that monks live together for two reasons: one is purely negative: they are to act as hair shirts on one another. The other is more positive: community life is safer. They huddle together, so to speak, for protection against the devil. There is safety in numbers.

  But this is merely a caricature of the cenobitic life. If you live like that, the vital flow of charity, which is supposed to unite you to all the rest of the monks and all of them together to God, will be largely sterilized, and God’s work will be left almost without fruit.

  The trials that a young professed monk may have in his first years of life in community often reduce themselves to a refusal to give himself up entirely to the love of God as expressed in the voluntas communis. He may think it is sufficient to conform externally to the others without loving them and their life, in his heart, more than himself and his own life. He thinks he is being virtuous. He thinks he is trying to preserve “purity of heart” and “detachment” in order to love God better; actually, he is refusing the complete sacrifice of himself and his own will to God’s will, which flows through the community and expresses itself in the demands made on the individual not only by the Rule but by every smallest circumstance of the common life.

  This is the sort of thing that ought to be written all over Cistercian monasteries in letters of fire because, no matter how often it is preached to the monks, it can never be preached enough; it is never sufficiently understood and never thoroughly learned except by a minority.

  But the ones who learn it and really put it into practice are saints.

  Strangely enough, it is a Carthusian hermit who has written one of the deepest and most beautiful sentences ever printed about the Cistercian common life. Dom François de Sales Pollien,8 writing at the time of the reunion of the Cistercian congregations, said these words:

  In a [Trappist] monastery through which there circulate powerful currents of spiritual life, the soul of the monk, ever carried onward by the stream from which no instant, no occasion ever withdraws him, finds itself lifted up without realizing how, and transported into the regions of divine life with greater simplicity and less preoccupation with itself.

  That is very true. The monasteries through which these streams of intense life flow are the ones in which the monks have renounced themselves most completely and have abandoned themselves with the most generous and unquestioning faith to the common will, or, if you prefer, to God’s will expressed by the Rule and the desires of their superiors and the needs of their brethren.

  In practice, this involves the deepest, most searching sacrifices. It is relatively easy to renounce a world whose pleasures are boring and whose ambitions are a waste of time and effort. It is not too hard to give up licit satisfactions when the sacrifice soon finds more than ample compensation in the delights of interior freedom and the taste of supernatural things. But when we have to renounce our plans and aspirations for the highest and most spiritual goods and devote ourselves, under obedience or out of charity, to some trivial and distracting series of far less perfect tasks, then the sacrifice can be supremely difficult. It is all the more so when it turns out that our spirit of faith, being far less pure than we imagined, is not strong enough to enable us to see God’s will in duties that do not flatter our self-esteem.

  For a cenobite, sanctity resolves itself into the practice of the most ruthless communism ever devised. A Cistercian monk who lives his vocation to the limit retains absolutely nothing he can call his own, not even his judgment or will or the most intimate depths of his soul. He gives up things a Marxist has never even heard of, things which no amount of human violence or political strategy could ever take away.

  As long as the monk retains private ownership of any corner of his own being, he is that far short of the freedom and purity of love found only in union with the common will. As long as there is any refuge where he can curl up by himself and hug some private good that nobody else is allowed to share, there remains in his heart a cranny in which the dirt of selfishness accumulates. Before he realizes it, he is blinded and stifled by the refuse his subconscious egotism collects. He can no longer see by the light of true faith or breathe the clean air of divine charity, wherein all spiritual health is found.

  St. Bernard saw that the love of God could never tolerate these private crannies. Searching the depths of undeliberate attachment to spiritual consolations, the abbot of Clairvaux wanted to sweep out the last traces of proprietorship from the hearts of his monks and set them free by spiritual poverty, which possesses the kingdom of heaven.

  Wherever there is proprietorship [he said], there is singularity. Where there is singularity there is a private corner, and in any such corner there is bound to be dirt and rust.9

  A problem immediately arises. What about the interior solitude essential to contemplation? All tradition agrees that without at least interior solitude a man cannot reach deep interior union with God. But interior solitude seems to imply a complete interior withdrawal from the community. One lives in the monastery as if alone. Indeed, mystical writers advise the contemplative to live as if there were nobody in the universe but himself and God. Taken literally, such advice would turn monastic life into a hell on earth. Yet, correctly interpreted, it contains a truth on which contemplation depends. But would any such conception have been admitted by twelfth-century Cistercians? William of St. Thierry said the charity that was the soul of a monastic community simply excluded all solitude. Love did not permit a cenobite to be alone. Nullum inter se patiuntur esse solitarium ne dicat ei Salomon, Vae soli!10

  What does this mean? Did the cenobites of the twelfth century frown and shake their heads whenever one of their number tried to go off and pray by himself? When some monk found a quiet place where he could meditate without being bothered by others, did the rest of the community come after him, wearing expressions of pain and concern, and explain t
o him, somewhat stiffly, that he was not showing the right spirit, that he ought to stay with the brethren, even though they were a distraction?

  The doctrine of the common life taught by St. Bernard and his school did not aim merely at making the monks “good mixers.” At Clairvaux the common life was viewed as a preparation for contemplative union with God. And the early Cistercians agreed with all contemplatives in admitting that contemplation was impossible without interior solitude. Consequently, there could not possibly have been any opposition, in their minds, between their notion of the voluntas communis and the interior solitude of the true contemplative.

  St. Bernard, always ready to discourage monks who wanted to become hermits (he was one of the greatest champions of the cenobitic life), taught that solitude had an extremely important place even in the life of a contemplative cenobite. Nil tibi et turbis, he exclaims; nihil cum multitudine caeterorum. On the whole it is rather startling to find this theologian of the common will telling his contemplatives to have nothing to do with the crowd, nothing to do with the common run of other men. O sancta anima, sola esto! “O holy soul, remain alone! Keep thyself for Him alone Whom alone thou hast chosen for thyself from among all others. Fly from public view, fly even from thy own household, from thy intimates and friends. . . . “ He admits he wants this solitude to be interior above all, but he does not deny that physical solitude is also desirable, even for a Cistercian, if the opportunity should present itself, and especially when he wants to pray. Et corpore interdum non otiose te separas cum opportune potes, praesertim in tempore orationis.11