Short Articles on the Carthusian Order

[Stone]

A History of the Somerset Carthusians, 1895

Taken from here.

The foundations of the Carthusian Order were laid in the year 1084. St. Bruno and six friends (one priest among them) were the first Carthusians who bound themselves to perpetual silence. The Carthusian monk was originally known as “the Poor of Christ,” and his favorite occupation was/is the copying of books and manuscripts. The first constitutions (Customs of the Grande Chartreuse) were written down 44 years after the founding of the Order.

Silence is to be broken only in the case of the sudden illness of a brother, or of fire, or of any other unexpected danger, and even then only few words are to be used. They eat neither butcher’s meat, poultry, nor game. Their diet consists of fish, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, bread, pastry, fruit, vegetables. They drink water, but never take tea, coffee, or chocolate because such things were unknown to St. Bruno.

St. Bruno and his spiritual descendants did but literally carry out the command “Watch and pray.” And these faithful watchmen were put to the test in England (under Henry VIII); not even the evil pens of Cromwell’s infamous agents of destruction could write a single bad word against their character, though many indeed were the complaints against their conscientious steadfastness. Sebastian Brant said what was as true of the English as of the foreign Charterhouses: Degener nunquam fuit ordo visus Cartusianus. (“The Carthusian Order was never seen degenerate”).

The Carthusian holiness was scarcely attainable, the stern loneliness of the Carthusian rule hardly endurable … but from king and subject the Order met with reverence. But it may be asked, what was there in the Carthusians to cause [King] Edward I, the chief feature in whose character was not religious devotion, as well as [King] Henry II, to appeal to their prayers, especially when engaging in an arduous venture?

The answer lies in the frequently quoted sentence of St. Bernard, Otiosum non est vacare Deo, sed negotium negotiorum omnium (to be occupied with God is not idleness, but the business of all businesses) for no other monks so fully carried out the sentiment therein expressed. The slightest acquaintance with mediaeval literature suffices to make manifest the extremely personal worship of those times. The Blessed Trinity was indeed a living reality to men then; the language of their devotional writings, deeply reverential as was the spirit that animated it, was as familiar as if addressed to a well-beloved friend, whom, separated from them by some ordinary circumstance, they would see again. In those days, there was an extraordinary earnestness in all that men thought and did, so that they could easily appreciate and reverence the ardent devotion of the Carthusian, who spent himself in an exclusive service to that adored and Divine Friend. The Carthusian life had nothing, humanly speaking, to show for it; but to the believer in prayer it was not waste of time, being indeed one long form of prayer.

But in many cases the adoption of St. Bruno’s habit was an act of love. It was more; it was a supreme act of love, fulfilling an ideal of self-surrender so awful that it is little wonder if the Order, though winning an acknowledgment of its holiness, could win no place in the heart of the nation. The saints while on earth may be beloved; the saints in heaven are only approached through the awe and mystery of heaven, and these monks, it would seem, were already half-way to the far-off country.

Martyrdom is a high sacrifice; but it is a question whether to give up all that makes life worth having be not a higher, for it is a sacrifice of longer agony, a living death. In common with the monks of other Rules, the Carthusian, in taking the irrevocable vows, literally left house, and brethren and sisters, and father and mother (and even, it is to be feared, wife and children occasionally), and lands for Christ’s sake. Yet he [the Carthusian] gave more than they, for to them the chance was still open to distinguish themselves as preachers, and as teachers through the medium of books, and to gain through the medium of their intellectual gifts a power in the world of letters at least; but even this privilege and solace of the ascetic life he [the Carthusian] laid down on the altar of his solitude; preaching was forbidden to the son of St. Bruno, and learning must be for him strictly a means to the spiritual perfection of himself and his brother recluses.

It was in the spirit of the Magdalene, who poured out the precious ointment on the person of her Lord instead of spending the price of it on the poor, that the Carthusians made, without regard to the possible good they might do for their fellow-men, a free-will offering of themselves for the service of God, the supremely Beloved alone. The purpose that they fulfilled was to inculcate a lesson on the world; their mode of teaching it contained exaggerations; but since man ever perceives most clearly what is presented to him in an exaggerated light, exaggeration may have been useful, especially when the tumults of much war and the perpetual din of arms in the strife of might against right so often led him to forget to listen to the voice of righteousness.

The lesson that they set forth was that God has the first claim above all human beings to the highest love, and that to give that love rightly must entail sacrifice—no new lesson indeed, but that which beyond all other Orders they realized.

“Sæculi sordes fugit et prophanat 
Et suam vitam, nihil ista curat,
Dulce nil Christo sine, nil amœnam .
Cartusiano.

Veste procedit cito nuptuali,
Obviam sponso manibus intentes,
Lampades gestans, oleo decoras,
Cartusianus.”

He flees the impurities of the secular world,
and does violence to his own life:
he takes no care for this; nothing is sweet without Christ,
nothing pleasant to the Carthusian.

In the wedding-garment the Carthusian quickly
goes forth to meet the Bridegroom,
with outstretched hands bearing
the lamps properly fed with oil.


**Women, indeed, are utterly refused to be admitted on any pretext within their bounds, knowing that, as instanced in Holy Writ, no wise man, prophet, or judge, not Samson, David, nor Solomon, not even the very first man formed by God, could resist the attraction of a wily woman.