Beyond imagination, beyond grandeur, power, wisdom, and the light of the mind, the monk has found the key to existence in things without romance and without drama—labor, hunger, poverty, solitude, the common life. It is the silence of Christ’s Nazareth, in which God is praised without pomp, among the wood shavings.

The monk’s business is to empty himself of all that is selfish and turbulent and make way for the unapprehended Spirit of God. That is his ministry and his whole life: to be transformed into God without half realizing, himself, what is going on. Everybody who is drawn to visit the monastery and who can understand what is happening there comes away with the awareness that Christ is living in those men: “That the world may know that Thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as Thou hast also loved me.”¹

It is this thirst for emptiness, for selflessness, that peopled the deserts of Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. And the marvelous writing of St. Athanasius and Cassian spread that fire all over Europe.

When the hermit St. Anthony emerged from the ruined city in the desert that had echoed for twenty years with the bickering of the devils against him, his face astonished the men who had heard of him and had come to be his disciples. They did not see a dead man or a man twisted by madness and fanaticism and crude, half-idiot hatreds, but one whose countenance shone with the simplicity and peace of Eden and the first days of the unspoiled world. It was a face that would make expressions like “self-possession” and “self-control” look ridiculous, because here was a man who was possessed, not by himself but by the very uncreated, infinite peace in Whom all life and all being lie cradled for eternity. He was more of a person than they had ever seen, because his personality had vanished within itself to drink at the very sources of reality and life.

St. Pachomius discovered another kind of solitude. In the first great monastery of Egyptian cenobites, at Tabenna, the monk learned how to disappear—not into the desert but into a community of other monks. It is in some ways a far more effective way to disappear, and it involves, on the whole, an asceticism that is peculiarly deep and lasting in its effects.

For centuries the monastic life meant one of two things: being a hermit or being a cenobite. They were two roads to the same immediate end—the emptying and purification of one’s heart, setting it free to praise the infinite God for His sake alone.

No matter what the exaggerations of Tabenna and Nitria and Scete may have been, the great abbots of Egypt and Syria laid down the foundations of an asceticism that was full of wisdom and prudence, good sense and charity. All the sanity and moderation of St. Thomas Aquinas could find no better authority on which to rest, no safer model to follow, than the Conferences and Institutes of Cassian.²

Nevertheless, if the principles laid down by the masters were full of truth and strength, the ambition of the disciples ended up in the most fantastic ascetic rivalries—athletic frenzies of fasting and whipping that have given Egyptian monasticism a bad name.

St. Basil, who traveled up the Nile in the middle of the fourth century, was quick to sum up the weakness of the monastic life that he saw. The cenobitic system of Pachomius, he said, was too complex, too noisy, too active. Tabenna was a huge affair—a town, or rather an armed camp, of five thousand ascetics. They were divided up into platoons and regiments, under a hierarchy of military officials dependent upon the abbot, who was the general-in-chief. The vast machine worked efficiently enough, but with a kind of inhuman ponderousness. Labor was so arduous that it resembled modern sweatshop production. So great was the number of monks that all life was depersonalized. There was no intimate contact with superiors. Instead of real spiritual direction, the monks were subjected to a system of formal humiliations and public insults. It was only the extraordinary spiritual vitality of the monks themselves that kept this process from being altogether brutalizing.

It remained for St. Benedict, in the sixth century, to transform monasticism into a life that ordinary men could stand. Instead of letting men harden themselves in confirmed self-worship by striving to become heroes of physical endurance, St. Benedict shifted the whole impact of asceticism to the interior—from the flesh to the will. His monks had plenty to eat and plenty of time to sleep. He reduced the choral offices of the Egyptians by about two thirds and sent the community out to work in the fields for seven or eight hours a day. Extraordinary mortifications were forbidden or discouraged. Virtue consisted in not attracting attention rather than in doing things that were conspicuous. The sacrifices that really mattered to him were those that were exacted in secrecy from the deepest veins of selfhood. In such sacrifices, vanity could find no part; they undermined the whole foundation of egoism and self-idolatry. One of St. Benedict’s secrets was to purify the hearts of men by acts that were outwardly ordinary, simple, insignificant: the common lot of men, one’s daily work, the petty business of getting along peacefully with other people.

At the same time, St. Benedict developed a deep and healthy and Catholic mysticism of grace which is as simple as it is broad and practical. The mortification imposed by obedience, humility, the common life, is not sought for its own sake: it is given us only to open our eyes to the deifying light³ which God is waiting to pour out upon us, and to make us ready for His action within us, so that in all things the monks may see and praise God. Their every action will be more His work than theirs and will shine with the radiance of His peace. They will taste His presence and thank Him with their praise. Operantem in se Dominum magnificant. ⁴

St. Benedict’s true contribution to European civilization is not that his monks were pioneers and builders and scholars and guardians of the classical tradition. These were only insignificant by-products of the wonderfully simple and Christian communal life that was led in the early Benedictine monasteries. The influence and the example of that life leavened, more than did anything else, the Europe that had been invaded by wave after wave of barbarian tribes. That influence and example kept alive the central warmth of peace and unity among men in a world that seemed to be wrestling with the ice of death.

Monastic perfection was not, of course, uniform and constant. From time to time, reforms were needed. Charlemagne found European monasticism in general decay, and his suggestions of reform were put into effect by a second St. Benedict—of Aniane—after the synod of Aix-la-Chapelle in A.D. 802. This reform put new life into the monasteries of the empire, but it also thrust them into the very center of the social and political arena.

The reform of St. Benedict of Aniane was not able to weather the invasions of the ninth century, but in 910 St. Berno and twelve monks founded Cluny in the woods of Burgundy, and the result was the most powerful monastic family that had so far existed in the Church.

Cluny rose up in the thick of the battle over lay investitures. It stood for a certain independence from secular influences, but the independence was to be in the political and ecclesiastical orders rather than in that of the spirit. With Cluny, the monk became, in the fullest sense, a public adorer for the whole of his society and for the entire Church.

There was something very admirable about this wedding of religion and secular life, at least in theory. But in practice the monks no longer led anything like the simple, hidden life of labor and solitude which St. Benedict had prescribed to bring them to the contemplation of God. Though Cluny had many saints in its two thousand abbeys and priories scattered all over Europe, and though it pulled the Church out of the perils of its darkest age, men began, by the end of the eleventh century, to look back with regret to the purity of the old monasticism.

The eleventh century was an age of experiments and trials and new departures in western monasticism. The great founders and reformers manifested their avidity for perfection by wandering from country to country, always in search of a wilder solitude in which to settle down. The journeys of St. Romuald, St. Stephen of Grandmont, St. Bruno, St. Bernard of Tiron, St. Robert of Arbrissel and the rest of them, plotted the map of Europe with crossing and recrossing paths that made of the land a labyrinth. The only one who stayed in one place was St. John of Vallombrosa.

All these men were in frankly open conflict with the conventional monastic and clerical life of their time. St. Bruno and St. John of Vallombrosa endangered their lives by open attacks against simony. It was common for such reformers to be invited to “reform” a monastery, only to be threatened with physical violence when the monks discovered how drastic a change of life they themselves were expected to contribute to the process.

St. Romuald wanted men to have the advantages of both the hermitage and the common life. So he hit upon the expedient of a combined community of hermits and cenobites. One first entered the monastery and led the common life. Then, after a period of trial, the monk could, if he so desired, live in an enclosed cell in the monastery or go off to a hermitage in the woods. He remained always subject to the abbot’s control and to obedience. On certain feasts all the hermits came to the monastery and joined with the others in the choral office.

Two of the other great foundations of the eleventh century pursued the same kind of purpose: to bring hermits into communities and combine the advantages of solitude and obedience. Grandmont and the Grande Chartreuse sought to give men that isolation from temporal things that makes a life of pure contemplation possible and, with the grace of God, even easy. Grandmont was a much rougher experiment than the Chartreuse, however, and the order had a stormy history before it finally ceased to exist at the French Revolution.

The Carthusians founded their order on one of the most detailed and practical documents in monastic history. After almost fifty years of experience, the solitaries who had settled in the lonely Alpine valley of the Grande Chartreuse finally drew up their Consuetudines. These usages were written by Prior Guigo, but they were probably based on the oral instructions of St. Bruno. Every line of the Carthusian rule⁵ convinces the reader that the men who framed it knew precisely what they were looking for and had a very good notion of the best means of finding it. They were able to put it all down in precise terms, even though what they were doing amounted to a revolution in monastic life. Without any of the complexity of St. Romuald’s compromise between the hermitage and the cenobium, the Chartreuse was a compact and well-ordered house, a ringed citadel of contemplation. The outworks were occupied by the lay brothers and oblates, and the central keep was a massive block of “cells,” or stone cottages, each with its own oratory, workshop, and garden. These, in their turn, clustered around the monastic church.

At the Chartreuse, emphasis was on the monk’s private adoration of God in the solitude and silence of his own cell. Here, he not only slept and worked and read and meditated, but also recited all the day hours except Vespers. On feast days, however, the solitaries chanted the whole office in choir, ate together in the refectory, and assembled in chapter. From the very beginning the Carthusians have jealously guarded against too many feasts in order to keep to the purity of the solitary life. They have succeeded better than most orders in keeping to the ideal of their fathers and have been willing to pay the price to do so.

All the other great monastic reforms of the eleventh century explicitly looked back to St. Benedict. Just as certainly as the Camaldolese and the Carthusians wanted to be hermits, St. John Gualbert desired the perfection of cenobitic life. His way was bound to be simpler than theirs: he had only to go back to the letter of St. Benedict’s Rule, and there is no denying that this was a matter in which St. Benedict had said the last word.

As far as the good of monasticism as a whole was concerned, St. John Gualbert did precisely what needed to be done. It was all very well for the Camaldolese to experiment in a specialized, restricted vocation: that, too, was something the Church needed. But after all, the life of the solitary, even when it was modified by cenobitic elements, still was a matter of limited appeal. Was there, then, no possibility of monastic life in its purity and simplicity, a life that everyone could live, one that was contemplative, isolated from the world, and centered entirely upon God, yet not beyond the strength of ordinary men? That was the question that most needed to be answered, and the most satisfactory answer was given by Cîteaux.

The ferment of monastic reform that had brought so many new communities into existence in the eleventh century culminated, in 1098, with the foundation of a monastery whose filiations would soon develop into one of the greatest contemplative orders in the Church. Cîteaux is supposed to have taken its name from the reeds—cistels, in Burgundian patois—which abounded in the marshy woodland where its twenty-two founders came to settle on Palm Sunday, 1098. The land was not far from Dijon, and it belonged to the Duke of Burgundy. He made no difficulties about ceding it to the austere colonists: it was practically useless to anybody in the world except penitent monks, and he happened to share the general respect for their abbot, Robert of Molesme.

This Benedictine, who was now close to his nineties, had acquired an enviable reputation, in the course of his long career, as an abbot and director of souls. At different times in his life he had been the center of minor conflicts between communities of monks that contended with one another for possession of him as their superior. And these contentions were not yet at an end. His old abbey, Molesme, would soon appeal to Rome to recover him from Cîteaux. Perhaps they hoped that this would finish the new reform at one blow. Fortunately it did not. For although Robert was ordered to go back to Molesme, the other pioneers had more than enough energy and determination to carry on without him. They began laying down the foundations of what was to prove a mighty and well-regulated monastic order, and they lost no time in having it approved by the Holy See.

They knew they would need protection. Cîteaux began its existence in stormy days. The founders of the new monastery had walked out of Molesme, publicly lamenting the fact that they had vowed to keep the Rule of St. Benedict yet found it impossible to do so in a Benedictine monastery. For some time past they had been complaining of the discrepancies between the Rule, as it was chanted in chapter every morning, and the complex network of monastic usages which had corrupted the primitive simplicity and austerity of that Rule in past centuries. The strong conventional element in the monastery—made up of converted knights and noblemen who were as belligerent as they were shortsighted in spiritual things—had so strongly resented this criticism of the accepted order that they had beaten their prior, Alberic, and thrown him into the monastery jail. This was the man who would take over the direction of the new monastery when St. Robert returned to Molesme. St. Alberic drew up the fundamental instituta which were the basis of the Cistercian reform.⁶

In these few points St. Alberic sketched out a program of simplification that seemed wildly revolutionary to the men of his time. His “austerity” raised such an outcry that people paid no attention to the modest claim of the Cistercians that they were attempting nothing new. But the Cistercians were quite right. There was nothing whatever new about Cîteaux. The monks simply wanted to return to the Rule of St. Benedict in all its simplicity. Far from being innovators, they were making it their chief concern to clean house and rid the Order of the many innovations that cramped the monastic life and made contemplation difficult or even impossible.

The first thing that shamed them was t...