A Lonely Island of Prayer: a visit to La Grande Chartreuse in 1890
Some calming reading for the quiet Octave week of the Nativity
I had been summoned from the cell allotted to me and had been led by the lay-brother through vast corridors— all silent as the grave, dimly lit and icily cold — into the little strangers' gallery. I had watched the brothers of the Chartreuse glide in one by one noiselessly, each carrying a little lighted lamp. This solemn service, monotonous but yet intensely earnest, went on every night, summer and winter, sometimes lasting two hours, sometimes— on certain holy days— going on for nearly three hours.
With the interlude of the Terror, AD 1793, and the few years succeeding that time of confusion and dread, had this vigil of prayer and meditation been kept up for more than eight hundred eventful years.
No, I didn’t write this myself (so all interminable run-on sentences aren’t my fault). It’s not fiction, but an account of a thoughtful unnamed visitor to the great Charterhouse, during one of its quieter interludes between the various state persecutions that hammered it in the 19th century. It was published in January, 1891 by the Tablet, the magazine of the English Catholics.
I subscribe to a service that compiles academic papers on subjects of your choice - mine are mainly, as you would imagine, monasticism, medieval history and sacred art - and today was sent this interesting document, an account of a visitor to the great founding Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, La Grande Chartreuse, in 1890. This comes from Fr. Ugo-Maria Ginex, a contemplative priest-hermit, an emeritus professor at the Burchard Institute of Medieval Studies.
I thought it would provide some calming, leisurely reading for this quiet week. The original was over 7000 words, much too long for a blog post, so I’ve edited it for length.
And here’s some nice Christmas music to listen to while you’re reading:
Welcome new subscribers and followers, to the Sacred Images Project. It’s the Monday following Christmas and I thought I’d just post a few things from the files. Coming up this week is a post summarising the things we’ve talked about and investigated over the last year, since it’s been just about exactly a year since we started this project. It’s been fascinating and enlightening to learn so much about the great artistic patrimony of Christianity, and especially to link it intimately to the history of this extraordinary epoch of humanity we call the Age of Faith. I’ve been uplifted and encouraged more than I can say by the people reading and commenting and always asking for more, so I’m happy to be looking forward to another year of adventures. So much more planned!
Meanwhile, I hope you are having a calming and happy Christmas/Epiphany holiday. Posting will be sporadic over the next week or so, but I’m getting that urge to write, and to get back to our investigation of that crucial era where the Church herself rose from what seemed an impossible low era, to blossom, through the Ottonian intervention, into the great “golden age” of the 12th century Renaissance, and the High Middle Ages. Rather eager to get back to work.
The shop
Many thanks to the people who bought things from this year’s Christmas market. As I expected the little golden Trecento angel tree ornament was very popular. I’ve just uploaded this lovely Trecento Adoration of the Magi, by Bartolo di Fredi, a Sienese master who picked up the torch of the Sienese Gothic style (Simone Martini etc) after the city had recovered from the Black Death.
I think printed on a panel with a built-in stand, it will make a beautiful addition to a prayer corner. I’ve got it added into my inventory file at the fine art printer, and will include a link to let you purchase one in the next post.
I’m planning big changes to the shop end of things this year. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, happy Christmas to you and yours from the Sacred Images Project.
At the Sacred Images Project we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. The publication is how I make my living, supported by subscriptions, so apart from plugging my shop, there is no advertising or pop-ups. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for.
You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.
For $9/month you also get the second half of the third post, plus a weekly paywalled in-depth article on our great sacred patrimony. There are also occasional extras like downloadable exclusive high resolution printable images, ebooks, mini-courses, videos and eventually podcasts.
A lonely island of prayer
It was in the early spring of 1890 that one night I sat in the cold, bare gallery at the west end of the chapel of the monks of the Grande Chartreuse Monastery. Over the rough wooden balustrade, as I knelt, I looked down on the dim-lighted chapel. The monks, in their white woollen robes, with their white hoods falling over their faces, sat or knelt, each one in his stall. Alternating between chant and prayer and reading, the solemn night service went on. I had been summoned from the cell allotted to me and had been led by the lay-brother through vast corridors - all silent as the grave, dimly lit and icily cold - into the little strangers’ gallery.
I had watched the brothers of the Chartreuse glide in one by one noiselessly, each carrying a little lighted lamp. This solemn service, monotonous but yet intensely earnest, went on every night, summer and winter, sometimes lasting two hours, sometimes - on certain holy days - going on for nearly three hours.
With the interlude of the Terror, AD 1793, and the few years succeeding that time of confusion and dread, had this vigil of prayer and meditation been kept up for more than eight hundred eventful years. The map of Europe had been constructed and reconstructed - living languages had become dead, had become the solitary property of a few learned and patient scholars; new tongues had grown up; new nationalities had sprung into existence; royal dynasties had risen and fallen; new peoples had occupied the old seats of almost forgotten races - since the first night of that long and monotonous chant, of that ceaseless prayer of the white-robed, white-cowled fathers of the Grande Chartreuse Monastery, which nestled at the foot of those mighty pine-clad cliffs, towering two or three thousand feet above the solemn city of silence.
Just a group of friends who wanted to pray
Bruno, the founder of this world-famous religious house, was born at Cologne in the year 1035. From childhood he was a lover of books - and solitude - a born mystic. His family was noble, and was well-placed to assist the young student in the career of his choice. At a comparatively early age he was appointed a canon of Cologne. Subsequently he became a pupil of the renowned Berengarius of Tours. On the death of Gervais, Archbishop of Rheims, Bruno was designated as his successor. This was the turning-point of his career.
The young scholar-mystic had now to elect whether he would become the great Church ruler or pursue his life of solitary contemplation, of study and of prayer. Lesueur, who died in 1655, in his well known series of pictures in the Louvre illustrating the life of St. Bruno, reminds us of the legendary cause of Bruno's choice. A famous preacher to whom Bruno loved to listen, and from whom perhaps he learned much of that mystic theology in which he delighted, died suddenly. The remains of this beloved teacher were brought in an uncovered coffin into church; in the course of the funeral service, while the psalm was being sung, the corpse partly arose, and was heard, in a voice full of intense sadness, to exclaim, “Justo judicio Dei damnatus sum” - I am condemned by God's righteous judgment. To this terrible revelation of a destiny by one whom the young scholar so deeply revered, the legend refers the deliberate choice of Bruno, his unalterable resolve to for sake the world in which lurked so many awful dangers, even for men whose life-duty consisted in ministering at the altar and in teaching holy things. Distrustful of himself, he resolved at once to abandon his preferment, to refuse his call to the high places of the Church, and to realise some at least of his longings after holiness in utter solitude.
… He and six of his dearest friends literally sold, for the benefit of the poor, all that they had, and betaking themselves into the savage solitude of the Chartreuse Valley, in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, built a little chapel and the first rude group of huts, which rapidly developed into the famous religious house known as the Grande Chartreuse… His first company of solitaries was multiplied.
In the midst of his success he received a summons, which he could not evade, to Rome, to become the adviser of the Pope, Urban II. After some time again he refused an archbishopric in Italy (that of Reggio) and at length obtained permission to found another company of solitaries in the wilds of Calabria, whose life-work was to be prayer for others, like the first brothers of the order at the Chartreuse, and there this strange mystic, at the age of seventy-one, worn out by austerities, gave up his anxious soul to his Creator…
A great idea, undergoes great persecutions
Throughout Europe the Carthusian order spread. In the beginning of the sixteenth century (AD 1521) the number of religious houses owning the stern grave rule of Bruno was 206. Unlike so many of the monastic orders the Carthusian brotherhood never seems to have been reorganised and reformed. Their proud boast was “Cartusia nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata.” This boast appears to have been fairly justified.
The historian of the reign of Henry VIII., in his eloquent and vivid description of the breaking-up of the monastic system in England, speaks of the London Charterhouse, the principal representative of the order of St. Bruno in our island, as bearing (a.d. 1535) a high reputation for holiness, “perhaps the best ordered religious house in England. The hospitality was well sustained, the charities were profuse. . . . The Carthusian monks were true to their vows, and true to their duty.”
Their house was broken up. The prior, whom Froude describes as “among many good the best,” with several of his monks, was publicly executed. The bodies of the monks were quartered, and the arm of the brave prior was hung up as a bloody sign over the archway of the Charterhouse to awe the remaining brothers into submission. Some were done to death in Newgate, and a few escaped abroad. “So fell the monks of the London Charterhouse, splintered to pieces, for so only could their resistance be overcome, by the iron sceptre and the iron hand that held it.”
The description of the suppression of St. Bruno's chief house in England nearly five centuries after the foundation of the Grande Chartreuse, by a pen by no means friendly to the spirit of the monastic orders, is a striking testimony to the enduring character of Bruno’s work. No passage perhaps in that picturesque and brilliant story of our great historian is more eloquent and moving than the words in which he describes the Carthusian monks of London, AD 1535, preparing for their violent and shameful death. “Thus with unobtrusive boldness did these poor men prepare themselves for their end, not less beautiful in their resolution, not less deserving the everlasting remembrance of mankind, than those three hundred who in the summer morning sat combing their golden hair in the passes of Thermopylæ: we will not forget their cause; there is no cause for which any man can more nobly suffer, than to witness that it is better for him to die than to speak words which he does not mean. Nor in this their hour of trial were they left without their higher comfort.”
A 19th century visit to La Grande Chartreuse
It was a dreary, melancholy evening when I first caught sight of the pointed roofs and curious towers of the great monastery. It had been raining heavily for several hours, and the lofty cliffs were veiled in masses of soft grey, feathery clouds. The damp wind whistled through the pine forests; no other sound was heard, nothing living was to be seen. The monastery, with its vast extent of high walls, with its quaint blue roofs and many towers rising up behind the walls in strange, fantastic confusion, with its gloomy background of dark pine woods, resembled a fortress, or what would be a better comparison still, one of those small walled cities so often depicted in illustrated MSS of Froissart or Monstrelet.
I knocked at the north gate, the chief entrance to the Grande Chartreuse. A white-robed lay-brother (frère convers) opened it, and received me with some kindly words of welcome. Through the great silent porch we passed into a wide inner court. Not a flower, not a plant relieved the grey melancholy monotony. Two little fountains, with their monotonous drip, drip, alone broke the intense stillness. From the broad courtyard we passed into a wide, chilly corridor, apparently of endless length, then into a hall with a welcome wood fire.
I had a letter of introduction to the general of the order, who always resides at the Grande Chartreuse. He sent me a courteous message that he would receive me early on the following morning, and that in the meanwhile I was to receive every hospitality and attention which the laws of the order permitted. An immense wood fire was lit in the guests’ refectory (pavilion d’Allemagne), and a little cell leading out of the refectory hall was allotted to me. The furniture of my cell consisted of a narrow bed with its thick woollen coverlets, a chair, and a prie-dieu. Its only ornament was a rough wooden crucifix over the prie-dieu. A little window, looking into a long and desolate courtyard in which the snow lay thick (it was early in April), lighted my chamber.
No one could have been kinder than my hosts. They brought me everything they had, eggs, and some little dried figs and withered apples, and a curious, tasteless fish - I think with more bones than any ordinary fish possesses - and soup which was at all events warm though it had no taste.
The delight of the lay-brother when he spread these tempting viands before me was curious. “You see,” he said, “we do not expect our honoured guests to fast.”
There was wine, a rough, harsh Burgundy, and some admirable green Chartreuse, very aromatic and of extra ordinary strength. But the hearty kindness and the warmth of the welcome made up for any lack in the quality of the viands. “Hospitis adventu gaudent .... Dant quod habent, hilari pectore, voce, manu.1”
After the repast I told the lay-brother I wished to be present at the night service, and then retired to my cell. It was very cold and damp in my little narrow sleeping-chamber, in spite of the great wood fire which burned cheerily in the neighbouring refectory, so I wrapped myself up in my rug, and slept fitfully for two or three hours. About a quarter of an hour before the night service they fetched me, and placed me in the strangers’ little gallery overlooking the chapel.
The chapel is a long, narrow building, very plain, and unadorned. The rood-screen divides it into two portions. The fathers occupy stalls in the eastern division, the lay-brothers stalls in the western. The strangers' gallery is in the extreme west end of the building, and commands a fair view, over the rood-screen, of the whole chapel.
The time passed quickly as I listened to the sweet, monotonous chant, varied with reading. In the pauses of the solemn song I heard these solitaries, forgotten by the world, praying for the world. “I heard them interceding for men who at that moment of the dark night were forgetting God and truth, purity and goodness. I heard the murmur of the solemn petitions which had gone up to the throne of grace night after night for many centuries, prayers for the poor and the wretched, for the guilty and the crime-laden, for the dying and the dead, for the faint-hearted that they might hope again in God, for the light-hearted lest they might forget God.”
It seemed to me as I listened and prayed too, that to these men thus talking with the Master had come, in the silence of their cloistered lives, that whisper of the Eternal, the “vena divini susurri2, ” which taught them the secret of the language of communion with God, which even dictated the words of those earnest, passionate prayers by which these solitaries believed they could best help their brothers and sisters struggling and suffering in the world. Were they mistaken in their strong, simple faith? I think not.
At last the lay-brother begged me to go back to my cell. He said I was not accustomed to the cold, damp air of the chapel, and if I stayed longer it would be dangerous. With real reluctance I went back with him, and when I stood again before the refectory fire I felt how thoroughly chilled I was with my night’s orisons. However, I soon slept, and awoke early in the morning none the worse.
Weeping for sins
One of the strangest things in this solemn night service is the monotony, the sameness of the chant. The Carthusian liturgy, with little change, dates from the eleventh century. The singular monotony of the singing has been the subject of much inquiry. Their ancient statutes notice it, and suggest the following apologia for it: “Seeing that the life-work of a true monk is made up of weeping rather than singing, let us use our voices to win for the soul that inward joy which comes from tears, rather than for those emotional feelings which are produced by sweet and touching music. With this goal in front of us, let us eliminate from our singing and music everything which may have a tendency to produce these emotional feelings, which are frivolous - perhaps even wrong… Our music must consist of a chant - at once simple and full of devotion.”
One of their famous masters thus dwells on the subject: “The intense gravity of the solitary’s life does not allow much time to be devoted to the study of singing.” St. Jerome too is quoted by the Chartreuse apologist here as laying down a rule for the monk's life: “It is no solitary’s duty to teach, much less to sing. His life work is to weep over his own and the world's sins, and with fear and trembling to look for the Judge's awful advent.”
Many of the strangers who attend their services find no fault with this sameness and monotony; on the contrary, they find it produces a singular feeling of deep calm and intense seriousness. Petrarch, who listened to the Chartreuse service in 1353, speaks of their psalmody as being in very truth “angelic.”
I felt no weariness in the long service, and was very sorry when the lay-brother, owing to the intense cold, begged me to return to my cell. The service in question on that night was unusually long, it was one of the great Carthusian festivals. One not very far removed from our own times wrote somewhat in this fashion of his impressions of their grave and austere night worship: “In the dim, scarcely lit chapel from those white kneeling figures, each with his little lighted lamp, there rose up the strange, solemn, chanted psalm. As they sang, the attentive listener could even distinguish the powerful notes of the monk still in the vigour of life and the broken voice of the worn-out old father, fast nearing the haven where he longed to be. The Psalms have thus been sung and the earnest prayer prayed in the solemn night service for many centuries. Death has been powerless to empty those dark stalls where the white monks have prayed and prayed for nearly nine hundred years.”
Some six times has the great house been destroyed: once by an avalanche, once sacked and ruined in the religious wars of the sixteenth century, four times it has been the prey of a disastrous fire. The present monastery is a little more than two hundred years old; but it almost exactly reproduces a much older house. It contains long, bare corridors leading to ample accommodation for representatives from the Carthusian houses founded in every part of Europe, once numbering between 200 and 230, now, alas, mostly suppressed and ruined.
Their priors, yearly, with certain of the brothers of their houses, meet in solemn conclave at the Grande Chartreuse. Portions of the great house are still named after the various countries of their illustrious guests - the Pavilion d’ltalie, de Bourgogne, d'Allemagne, de Provence and d'Aquitaine, &c. There are a vast number of chambers for many guests, who in all times have been welcomed to the Grande Chartreuse. The ordinary dwellers in this city of silence consist of thirty-six fathers, twenty-five lay-brothers, and some 120 servants; many of them, save in the guest season, probably have work in the farms, liqueur distillery, and other dependencies of the house. There is a fine chapter-room, several council-chambers, and a really noble library.
“The beauty of thy house…”
The two churches or chapels are studiedly plain and unadorned. The stranger, as he passes through the seemingly interminable corridors, silent, apparently untenanted, white and cold, can scarcely repress a shudder as he contrasts his life, with its many interests, enjoyments, excitements, with the austere and silent existence of these men who have buried themselves in this remote and changeless solitude.
By far the most interesting part of the monastery is the cloister and its immediate surroundings. It is of immense length - nothing of the kind in France can be compared to it in extent - a considerable portion of it is of real beauty, and dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The cells or, more correctly speaking, the houses, of the thirty-six monks or fathers, open directly into these cloisters. Each cell is now filled, and I was informed there were many waiting for a vacant cell.
Each cell or house is complete in itself, and stands alone, a little plot of garden separating it from its neighbour. The door of each house or cell opens into the cloister. Each door, following the old practice of the solitaries of the Thebaid, is marked with a letter of the alphabet, and also with an inscription, selected usually from the Bible, the “Imitation,” or a well-known Father. The monk chooses this device on the day of his pronouncing his last solemn vows. The device may be said to sum up and to close his earthly career. I copied a few of these - “Domine dilexi decorem domus tuæ.”3 “Vanitas vanitatum.”4 “Quam angusta porta et arcta via quæ ducit ad vitam, et pauci sunt qui inveniunt earn.”5 “Domine si sine te nihil, totum in te.”6 “Qui non reliquit omnia sua non potest esse discipulus tuus.”7 “Sobrii simplices et quieti.”8 “O beata solitudo — O sola beatitudo.”9
By each door there is a small sliding shutter in which is placed the daily allowance of food and anything else they may have special need of. Should they require aught, they place a written memorandum specifying their want, in the opening by the shutter, and it is at once supplied to them. No brother-monk, no friend in the cloistered community ever passes through the close-barred door of the Chartreuse father’s house. The monk comes through it to certain of the daily services, and on Sundays and festival days to the common refectory, and once in the week to the public walk (spatiamentum), but when, after the service or the silent Sunday or festival meal, he crosses his threshold, he is absolutely alone.
I was permitted to inspect one of the houses. The monk was temporarily absent from his little home, administering, I believe, the last rites to a dying brother. I passed the door; within on the ground floor is a little gallery or exercise hall, where the solitary paces up and down during the long months of winter and of snow, when his own patch of garden ground is inaccessible. The garden, which he cultivates himself, is very small and cramped; in some cases it is exquisitely neat, in others comparatively neglected; it is really the Chartreuse father’s sole recreation.
Another room on the ground floor he uses to chop his wood in. The wood is abundantly supplied to each monk in large, rough logs. This he prepares for his fire as he pleases. Up a rough flight of stairs, or rather of steps, the real dwelling -place is reached - the home where the Chartreuse father spends so many lonely hours. It is divided generally into two chambers. The one is little more than an ante-room, with usually a very small study-room cut off from it. The second chamber contains a kind of cupboard which holds the comfortless-looking bed, with the rough blanket-rugs which form the bedding of this austere order.
By the bedside area little chair and prie-dieu and crucifix, where so many of the Church offices are said by the lonely monk, for it is only three of the services that he says in the public chapel of the monastery. His silent room is really his chapel. The recess of the window is his refectory, and is partly filled by a little table. The great refectory is only used by the monks on Sundays and on certain festival days. The study is the small room taken from the ante chamber. Again in this little corner of his quiet home the furniture is of the scantiest, simplest description - a table, a rough desk, and a few shelves against the wall filled with the books for daily use and the volumes borrowed from the noble library of the house.
Into these secluded cells within cells no servant is permitted to enter, the fathers do all that is to be done themselves - la solitude dans la solitude, as one of the Chartreuse fathers has called the little quiet house, in which no voice is ever heard, save his own, into which enters no friend or foe. …
In the cloister I passed a monk, his cowl drawn over his face. My guide (the frère convers) whispered me as we passed the father that in the world that monk was known as “Prince de B.,” mentioning one of the great names of France...
Part of the long cloister walk surrounds a garden - the garden of the dead. There in the little enclosure have been buried for centuries the monks of the famous house.
There is nothing beautiful or attractive in this most solemn of God’s acres; the Carthusian ever sternly repudiates beauty in his surroundings. The very landscape, in the midst of which his great house is built, is repellent in its gloomy grandeur and sombre colouring, while the monastery is severely plain, and would be deemed even ugly, were it not for the strange charm which hangs round everything connected with the Grande Chartreuse - the sweet charm with which unbroken centuries of self-denial and generous self-forgetting prayer for others invests this holiest of monastic centres.
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
In this God’s acre are little brown wood crosses, each marking the last home of a monk - crosses which rapidly disappear, and are as quickly replaced by the same holy symbol marking the sleeping place of another monk. The remains are uncoffined, and soon disappear in the dry earth of the Chartreuse Valley. From twenty to thirty stone crosses, some carved more or less elaborately, not a few dating back several centuries, mark the graves of the generals of the order. But there is no care bestowed even on these memorials of their great dead. It is the immortal soul alone that the Carthusian cares for, and in death as in life he pays little heed to the perishing body.
But a stranger naturally feels disappointed and saddened at this studied neglect of all beauty, even of all ordinary care, in this most holy ground where the ashes of the dead of centuries rest. While acknowledging their utter disregard for the remains of the poor perishing body to be a natural outcome of the austere Carthusian teaching, it must be confessed that the neglected God’s acre of the Grande Chartreuse is depressing and saddening even to the reverent admirer of these very noble, even if mistaken men.
The night service we have spoken of is the longest and most remarkable in their daily routine; it lasts never less than two hours, often on festal days three hours and over. The fathers say this is their happiest time, singing, praying, reading, in God’s holy sanctuary, in the deep hush and awful shadows of night, a time when the world forgets God, or too often sins against Him. They say these solemn hours win for the soul a joy indescribable, a peace for the soul so pro found that no price is too great to pay for it. They tell us how quickly the night hours pass when they are thus busied.
Maurice Chamney’s story
One of the last monks of the London Charterhouse (AD1535)… who, accepting King Henry VIII’s clemency, escaped the martyr’s death, which was the high guerdon of so many of his nobler companions, and in after years Maurice Chamney wrote his confession of bitter sorrow for his earlier apostasy. He speaks of his cowardice in the day of battle. He was doing a life-long penance in sorrow, tossing on the waves of the wide world, while his brother monks - the martyrs for God - were saints in heaven.
He draws a loving, lingering picture of his cloister life, to him the perfection of earthly happiness.
Here is his moving story: “It lies before us in all its superstition, its devotion, and its simplicity, the counterpart, even in minute details, of accounts of cloisters when monasticism was in the young vigour of its life, which had been written ten centuries before. . . . The prayer, the daily life . . . seemed all unaltered; a thousand years of the world’s history had rolled by and these lonely islands of prayer remained still anchored in the stream.”
Maurice Chamney’s picture of the London Charter house would have done for a picture of the Grande Chartreuse which I visited in 1890; and his estimate of such a cloister life being “a life of perfect happiness” would, as far as I can gather, be the estimate of the present generation of the fathers of the Grande Chartreuse of to-day.
The daily life
The solitude is only broken on Sundays and festal days, when the fathers of the house take their principal meal together in the refectory, but on these occasions they never speak. The silence is only broken once a week, when the daily routine is interrupted by a long walk (spatiamentum) which the fathers take together.
The cold and damp of the climate of these mountains necessitate very warm clothing. The dress of the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, quaint and simple as it seems, is only the ordinary costume of the peasants of the mountains of Dauphiny in the eleventh century, and was adopted by Bruno, the founder of the order, as the most useful and least costly. It is all made of wool and is entirely white. The white robe closely resembles the tunica talaris (reaching down to the heels) of the Roman provincial. This is fastened by a white leather belt. Over this goes a white woollen toga or cloak, slit at the sides to allow free play to the arms. The head is covered with a white woollen cowl.
The mystic writers on the great monastic orders tell us that while St. Benedict, loving especially to dwell in thought and teaching upon the death of our blessed Lord, adopted for his disciples a black habit, St. Bruno elected white for the habit of his monks, to symbolise our Lord’s resurrection, which he is said to have loved continually to meditate on and to speak of.
The number of fathers of the order in the Grande Chartreuse is limited to thirty-six, the number of cells or separate little dwellings. This number is never exceeded. The entrance into the famous company is rigidly guarded. The postulant is first received by the master of the novices, who begins his duties by washing the feet of the new comer. He then, after due examination, presents him with a great black cloak, which he always wears when not in the cell during his probation.
This lasts a month, or perhaps more, under certain circumstances. He then commences his formal noviciate. This lasts a year, sometimes longer. He is next presented to the chapter, who formally vote for the admission or rejection of the novice. If the scrutiny of votes is in his favour, he is vested in the Carthusian habit.
But he does not take his solemn life-long vows until four years after this ceremony. The final profession is a great solemnity ; it takes place during high mass. The monk who is taking his final leave of the world leaves his stall, and at the foot of the altar thrice chants, “O my God, receive me as Thou has promised, and I shall henceforth live the true life. O God, let me never be confounded.” Then he kneels down before each of the fathers, and says to each, “My father, pray for me.” Then he receives the rest of the habit which hitherto he had not worn, and takes the solemn, binding oath; he proceeds to kiss the altar, and to lay upon it the writing of his solemn profession, signed, not with his name - he has no longer any name - but with a cross, for he is dead to the world.
What’s it all for?
The raison d’être of the life of a monk of the Chartreuse without doubt is prayer.
A modern Carthusian writer speaks of the life of his order as a life of solitude, but of solitude alternating with occasional commune with his brethren; as a life of prayer, but of prayer varied with work - now of the brain, now of the hand. He speaks of it as an austere life in real earnest, but disfigured with no painful or exaggerated incidents. “God,” writes this enthusiastic and eloquent advocate of his renowned order - “God pours the dew of His blessing on an order in which the grave wise rule of our founders preserves a peace which the world cannot give.”
The Carthusian monk is a student. Before the art of printing, he was often a diligent scribe; he is still often a profound scholar; he has in no few instances been a painstaking author; he is reproached at times with the strong reproach of writing only to tear up and destroy his own compositions. Little, say his gentle critics, has ever issued from beneath that white cowl save hymns and psalms of praise to his God, and prayers for the unhappy and the suffering in the world which he has left for ever.
The especial work of the monks of the Grande Chartreuse is not the care of the sick and afflicted; but they maintain homes for the suffering poor, their revenues being sensibly augmented by the great sale of their famous liqueur, manufactured at a distillery a few miles distant from the monastery, and into the composition of which many herbs growing on the slopes of the Alps largely enter. The secret of the liqueur is rigidly kept.
But the raison d’être of the life of a monk of the Chartreuse without doubt is prayer. Such a life, where all is sacrificed for this one end, may not be our ideal of life surely. The busy man of the nineteenth century seeks more definite, more tangible results than the Carthusian father. He would aim at the blessed guerdon of the honoured philanthropist, at the laurels of the great soldier, at the applause ever given to the successful writer.
The solitary believes that only in the silence of his cell he can do his best, his truest work, for he knows that there the Friend of Friends is ever with him in his awful solitude. Never comes the question: - “Why doth He come not? Wherefore should He come, Who never from my side can go away? His is the first face seen when dawns the day. His the voice heard when birds sing or bees hum, And He is the presence felt when night is dark and dumb.”
He asks for nothing for himself; in God who fills his cell he has everything. So he prays for others living in that sad, restless world which lies outside his quiet garden of prayer men call the Chartreuse.
This is not translated in the original document. Sorry. It only says that it comes from an ancient Carthusian poem. I found it on the Internet Archive, if you want to tackle it.
The current of divine whispering.
O Lord I love the beauty of thy house.
Vanity of vanities.
How narrow the gate and close the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.
O Lord without you nothing, it all depends on you.
Those who have not relinquished all cannot be your disciple.
Sober simple and quiet.
O blessed solitude - O lonely happiness.
Surely it calls to something in each of us.
Wow, I wouldn't last one night in that cold. They really have a very rugged life, but one that must be very special if lived as described. Imagine: "Carthusian houses founded in every part of Europe, once numbering between 200 and 230, now, alas, mostly suppressed and ruined." And those prayers must have saved civilization during those early years. How much we need them now!