Cistercian Exploration

This brief article aims chiefly at outlining the tomorrow which is already being anticipated today in our Cistercian life at Ewell Monastery. In gospel terms, today is continually the experiencing of tomorrow in a communion with Christ present with us in our discipleship. We go forward in the faith of the gospel that Christ has brought the kingdom of God into connection with life and death lived out in the reality of daily life. This is the Christian hope. It is substantial and it belongs to real life here and now. So today is always passing over into tomorrow, even if today is the essential point de départ. But we must always have an understanding of yesterday which gives us the basis of our faith in Christ and corrects our ideas of where we are and how we have arrived at the present position. So we shall be looking at yesterday in the immediate past and in the origins of Cistercian discipleship. However, let us look first a little more closely at this touchstone of today. We see ourselves as disciples of the present, exalted Christ, living out a daily awareness of the implications of that faith in the social context of our contemporaries here in England. Like them we are also concerned with the anxieties and the opportunities of working for our living. It is no longer possible to say that the contemplative monastic tradition is 'timeless' and can continue in its basic traditional form without much radical structural change. The past forty years have seen a great many changes, as we shall be noting later on. But these have been mainly changes of detail; an updating of time-table and diet; the rules of silence and the austerities of discipline. Some of these have been major changes, but in general they are an updating of community life from a 19th century, medieval revival of monastic life. Since 1950 the world has grown more towards a community of nations than ever before. The world map has recently been re-drawn, politically. Science has made immense leaps forward, putting a man on the moon and discovering micro-chip technology. Justice, peace movements and the monitoring of human rights in every nation have given a greater sense of responsibility to the individual to see their place in this process of freedom and democratisation. And yet great problems remain in the poverty of multitudes and the political strife and bad government of emerging independent nations. Greater freedom for the individual has often also meant the breakdown of age-old patterns of society, notably the family. Where are the monastic communities situated in this evolving and unstable picture of world events? In the 1950's monastic communities were at their zenith. As we shall be noting, there was a surge into the communities after the last war. The Trappists in America made nine foundations in North America in ten years. It seemed a bit like the swarms going out from Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Community life then was rooted in a nineteenth century, quasi-medieval culture often down to the details of daily living. Latin was the language of liturgy and the monks lived out their life of contemplation in an almost total silence. Now there has been a complete up-dating to the twentieth century in everything. Community life is not what it was. But neither is the population of monastic communities what it was forty years ago. So is there something lacking? At bottom, the answer is 'No'. All monks remain faithful in their discipleship because their faith is, if anything, stronger in these rather lean conditions of community life. There is no pragmatic answer to the problem of diminishing communities. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ..." Ageing, sickness, death, material anxieties are no ultimate burden for the Christian in any sphere. The friends of monastic communities are understandably concerned at the present state of affairs. But only a lively faith in the living Christ, present in these problems, can overcome and triumph. This is as much to say that we cannot forecast the outcome of our monastic discipleship in this last decade of the century. Certainly there is no blue-print which will give absolute certainty of the way forward. It is only as we allow today to pass over continually into tomorrow in an obedience to the love of Christ leading us onward that we can say we have an answer. But within that integration of unshakeable faith in Christ there are pointers - practical ways which arise out of communion with Christ. This is the way we are approaching the present 'crisis' and the rest of this paper will attempt to tease these out. Yesterday In the 1950's the austere system of the reformed Cistercians was still in place. Cistercian life as an integrated life of prayer was revived after the French Revolution and as a result spread outside France more quickly than ever before. The revival of the communities came about through the well known heroic efforts of Dom Augustin Lestrange, who died in 1823, a former novice master of La Grande Trappe. It was not until the 1890's that various reformed groups of abbeys were united into the Reformed Order of Cistercians, more commonly known as Trappists. Although this Reformed group owed much of its tradition to the reforming abbot Armand-Jean de Rancé who virtually restored the Cistercian observance after the Reformation as abbot of La Trappe until he died in 1700, there had been a mitigation of the severities practised by both these abbots and the twentieth century Trappists, represented by Thomas Merton, had a workable, if just bearable, penitential régime. It was vegetarian with hard work and penitential exercises. Based on the Rule of Benedict there was a balance between these rather active 'works' and the Offices and Liturgy and the personal prayer and reading of the monk. But there was no general conversation between members of the community apart from the officers. Communication was by a sign language. It was into this sort of community that Thomas Merton 'vanished' in the 1940's - only to reappear to the outside world as a prolific writer at the behest of the Order! The vivid prose of his journal, 'The Sign of Jonas', expresses the enthusiasm he felt at that time. In 1953 he wrote, "I love Gethsemani. That means burning days and nights in summer, with the sun beating down on the metal roof and the psalms pulsating exultingly through the airless choir, while, row upon row of us, a hundred and forty singers, we sway forward and bow down. And the clouds of smoke go up to God in the sanctuary, and the novices get thin and go home forever." (page 335) Ten years later he was looking back on that extraordinary period of the 1940's to 1950's when 2000 postulants knocked on the doors of Gethsemani Abbey in ten years and the community grew from 70 to 270. He felt that quite a number of these young men, many of whom left in the novitiate, had only been invited to throw in their lot with an outdated institutionalised form of the contemplative monastic life and that somehow no one had been able to rise to the situation. However that may be, everything is entirely different now with only a trickle of men coming to the monasteries in the past twenty five years and large numbers have left. Gethsemani Abbey is back to the seventies in numbers and with only two or three novices. The British Isles last year had only six novices among eight monasteries. The Anglican experience during those years was not so dramatic as that experienced by our Roman Catholic brethren but it followed a similar pattern. The revival of the religious life amongst anglicans occurred at a time when the romantic and gothic revival movements were in full swing last century. The beginning of this century saw the foundation of several communities. The Society of St John at Cowley, Oxford founded in 1866, was followed by Kelham, Mirfield and Nashdom. All very different in orientation, nevertheless they resonated with the optimism of the anglo-catholic movement of the time and much was gained from continental Roman Catholic Orders. The abortive experiment of Dom Aelred Carlyle in a semi-Cistercian foundation issued in the foundation of Nashdom while the majority of members of the Caldey community became part of Prinknash. So after the end of the war all these communities gained new members until the mid 1950's. Then the same pattern followed as we have noted - since the late 1960's three of these communities have diminished greatly in size and have moved from their large and striking establishments to something more modest. So when we began here at Ewell Monastery in 1966, the whole monastic movement was beginning to 'run down' from the watershed of the 1950's. We were supported very generously by our brethren of the Cistercian Order from whom we have always received much help and support. Although we were responding to what appeared at the time as the age-old and unchanging Cistercian life going back to Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux, we made a typical anglican adaptation of the modern Trappist usages and were accepted by our Roman Catholic brethren as anglican Cistercians. The life was typically Cistercian with an earthing of the life of prayer in a realistic work which provided for the maintenance of our life and helped keep it in balance. We remained within the enclosure in order to maintain that solitude which favours a continual communion with God in Christ. It is this participation in Christ which we are able to share with those who visit and stay in our guesthouse. Eventually we were voted to be in spiritual affiliation with the Cistercian Order which we still regard as a marvellous generous gesture to a tiny anglican exploration. But the trend of the times was against us. We were regarded by many of our anglican confrères as too austere; and in any case, it was argued, the purely contemplative monastic life for men was surely not in accord with the spirit of anglicanism which rightly regarded the pastoral side of ministry as an element which the religious communities could only put on one side at their peril. Like our Roman Catholic brothers in the Cistercian Order we could not foresee the rapid process of change which would take place in the 1970's and 1980's. There were 4400 in the Cistercian Order in 1962; 3400 in 1972 and at the end of 1990, 2900. But we all press on in that faith we outlined at the beginning of this article. It seems that the updating of the monastic life - which is by previous standards quite relaxed, although still a serious commitment - has not met the challenge of the changes in society and in the world which we mentioned earlier. But of course we do not mean that the changes that have come about in today's society simply set the agenda for every institution to follow suit. Rather, it is essential for today's changes to be seen in the perspective of previous generations and to see in what way they have been preparing the way for us as Christians to begin to take up new attitudes and new ways of looking at the timeless truths of the Gospel. With that important caveat in mind we need to look briefly at the origins and social context of the Cistercian monastic reform in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century was a time, as is well known, when Europe was waking up from its deep sleep of the previous three centuries. Between 700 and 1050 Islam on the one hand and the Slavs, Hungarians and Vikings on the other hand, held Western Christendom virtually captive. But the strength of these forces was spent by the middle of the tenth century and by 1100 Western Europe was taking the initiative and extending its borders. "For the first time in its history Western Europe became an area of surplus population and surplus productivity and it developed all the assertive and aggressive tendencies of a rapidly developing and self-confident community." ('Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages') Monastic communities were also thriving. So much so that a rash of hermit foundations appeared in Northern Italy and France where men sought the solitude of the forests away from all this expansion. It was also a time of romantic idealism within the narrow lights of their knowledge of the earlier centuries of the Christian era. There was a return to the strict ideals of Benedict and to the earlier Desert Fathers. Citeaux was founded in this way and therefore belongs to a fairly normal process of spiritual renewal of the late eleventh century period. But the astonishing fact is that in 60 years this new Order had expanded as rapidly as Europe. At the time of Bernard of Clairvaux's death in 1152 there were over three hundred abbeys. While in France there were some problems with a clash of interests between the Benedictines of old foundations and the new White monks, in England, apart from the celebrated crisis of St Mary's Abbey at York and the foundation of Fountains, the Cistercians seemed to have been easily accommodated and made part of the fabric of the English countryside. Two particular characteristics of the Cistercian revolution interest us. Despite their plea that they were only returning to the rectitude of the Rule of Benedict the Cistercians responded to their social context in an inspired way. First of all their community life reflected the milieu from which many of the early monks came. They belonged to the military aristocracy such as Bernard of Fontaines belonged to. But if the discipline of the community life owed something to that background yet there was in these new communities a spirit of humanism, of spiritual friend-ship which gives their writings an unusual warmth and humanity. Professor Southern calls this "the typically puritan paradox of the Cistercians. They rose to eminence in the midst of the most crudely expansive period in medieval history and were the most articulate prophets of this expansion. 'The exposition of the whole Gospel in visible works' can never have been more deeply dyed in the spirit of the age." (page 257) Called to the outposts of Europe to make their foundations at the invitation of landowners the life was obviously hard and demanded something of the grit and discipline of the man at arms. What astonishes us is the fact that their spirituality introduces a new note of what can only be called Christ mysticism, in comparison to the rather staid pietistic notions of their contemporaries. Their desire was to follow the whole Gospel in following Christ and their adaptation of the Rule of Benedict in rejecting tithes and mass stipends and maintaining a solitude in the monastery are indications of their serious intentions. Secondly, as is well known, the novelty of introducing the grange system and the recruitment of lay brothers or conversi assured their success as economic units in a highly competitive situation. There must have been brilliant management of their resources in these early years, relying on the expertise of laymen who, although largely illiterate, had been men of the world with much experience of hard work. Of course the communities attracted men of scholarship but they remained choir monks and were the core of all the communities, being a much smaller proportion of the whole community. Laybrothers often outnumbered the choir monks by three to one. Yet the laybrothers, in the spirit of the age, vowed total obedience to the abbot and made life-long vows without ever hoping that they might be on a par with the choir monks. Professor Southern calls them second-class monks - "a kind of monastic vassalage." How could such a large labour force have been willing to serve under these onerous conditions without any rights? The answer lies in the conditions of the time when there were great movements of colonists on the frontiers of Europe and also in the undeveloped parts of the British Isles. "The Cistercians were the beneficiaries of this state of affairs. They possessed the secret of utilising and organising this surplus labour, and in addition, virtually for the first time in the history of medieval western Christendom, they offered a full assurance of salvation to illiterate men." (page 259) This brief look at the Cistercian origins, which has been deliberately selective, does not do justice to the uniqueness of the Cistercians' achievement. But it has the merit of displaying the openness of these monks to the conditions of the time in a way which the revivals of monasticism since the sixteenth century have not been able to undertake. We have been forced to take a model from the past and in the light of our needs - whether of penance for the horrors of the wars of religion in Europe, or in the case of anglicans a recovery of the elements of our catholic past - simply remodel it until it is so obviously, with hindsight, an archaeological resuscitation of another age's genius. The remarkable thing is that for so long that way of doing things has worked. But an era has ended and with it the way we tackled projects so intimate as living with Christ in a monastic discipleship. It began to come to an end forty years ago and we have only just realised it. So what about Tomorrow? As we have said, this is already being brought to birth and being experienced day by day in a living faith in Christ. So let us look at how one tiny project of exploration into Cistercian discipleship sees tomorrow on its own campus. We cannot speak for others and would not wish to appear to be doing so. Tomorrow Despite all the aberrations of monastic life that have come down to us there remains an inner reality of truth and vision, of Christ-centred hope and love in a committed life of prayer in the seclusion of the cloister. If today is a talkative age, of instant remedies and solutions, yet there is still a longing for the silent, patient listening to the voice of truth which speaks to the heart. Monks are never ready to give a reason for their stance in modern society. To do so is to invite a self-criticism which is destructive of the meaning of faith. But as Thomas Merton pointed out in a paper on ecumenism and renewal, "The monastic life (when it is true to its own charism) is pervaded with the sense of the definitive that comes from those who, in silence, refrain from the futility of articulation. Yet also what must be grasped are the provisional needs to be articulated in honest and undogmatic speech. The monastic dialectic of silence and language underlines the deeper dialectic of eschatology and incarnation."('Contemplation in a World of Action' pp 196-7) So the Cistercian exploration which we have undertaken needs to affirm both the reality of the core of that discipleship - seclusion and silence, worship and prayer and reading in the context of a balanced, working monastic day - and also the dialogue with our own social context here in Britain which will enable us to become not simply relevant to our contemporaries but answering to their needs and ours. Community and life commitment are two points which are questioned by our contemporaries. Life commitment in any sphere today is for many people not something that they can sincerely enter into. The rapid changes in society and the breakdown of marriage are not the best background for coming to terms with such a permanent commitment. But this is not to say that life vows are unimportant. The life commitment of a person to God in this way of Cistercian discipleship is an entering into a grace covenant which enables the individual to grow and to become a transformed person in Christ - more, rather than less human. However, for a person who is not ready for such a step the vows can become an imprisonment rather than a liberation, restricting rather than enabling growth. Vows are also traditionally the mode of mutual acceptance of the community and the individual. They are the normal way of entrance into full participation in a community with all the rights and responsibilities that implies. If the life promises enable the individual to grow into his personal stature in Christ, the community of vowed persons should be the icon of Christian community in terms of the gospel of grace and true freedom in a society of persons where the relationships are wholly positive and transforming and are seen to be so by society around them. But willy nilly, we may have made this vowed community into a way of life which shields the community of persons from real life in Christ, both spiritually and 'organically' so to speak. So the monastic community is tempted to be a sort of ghetto, conservatively fenced off from the changes which the Spirit initiates among us from time to time. The very opposition to the revival of the monastic life in the past century will have helped to cultivate a spirit of deep conservatism even if the updating of living conditions and relationships within the communities has been achieved most recently. There is also a very important insight in our modern society which the communities have until recently been slow to accept - and that is the human fact that individuals change as they develop and grow. While the communities have accepted the fact that release from life profession is something to be accepted as right for those who sincerely believe that they ought not to remain in the status of monastic life, we have not perhaps looked at this positive aspect of individual growth. It is possible that commitment in monastic life may well be realistically provisional for some people - perhaps for a majority of people today. We said at the beginning that Tomorrow is already being anticipated today, both in theological understanding of the gospel and in our daily practice of the life of discipleship. During the past ten years this inclusive approach to the family life has been already in embryo. We are a family, trusting one another in the whole Gospel to be with Christ who is going with us whether we are in the monastery or in our own milieu. What is new is the emphasis we shall be placing on the actual enlarging of the family in the monastery because this is the way we see our response to the needs of our time. It is probable that the monastic communities will not survive as they are at present constituted. But the signs are fairly clear that the participation of the wider body of Christians in a monastic and contemplative family is a true response to Christ for tomorrow's world. And that means it has already begun today! As far as we are concerned the openness of the first Cistercians is a great encouragement and inspiration. We are called by Christ to be in a frontier situation living out the whole gospel in a life of prayer with those whom he calls to share in it. Epilogue Obviously this review is greatly simplified for the purposes of reaching as many of our friends as possible. One can fill in the details of the history from the books listed in the bibliography. The spirit of the early Cistercians is most tangible in the writings of the Cistercian authors of the first fifty years. Thomas Merton has also written about the way forward for monastic communities - it is instructive to follow his own development which coincided with the most drastic changes in the Cistercian Order of any century. We shall be very grateful for the continued prayer and support of all those people who in the past twenty five years have been so generous in their understanding and patience at our slow moving and sometimes erratic progress toward a prayerful and mature life as a Cistercian family. Our hope is that more people will hear of the opportunity for participation at all levels in our community life. We believe that our work here is not finished but that it is in a sense only beginning. Bibliography Louis J.Lekai The Cistercians: Ideals & Reality Kent State University Press, 1977 R.W. Southern Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages Pelican history of the church, volume 2, 1970 David Knowles The Monastic Order in England Cambridge University Press, 1963 Thomas Merton Contemplation in a World of Action, Unwin, 1980 The Sign of Jonas Hollis & Carter, 1953 Dom André Louf The Cistercian Alternative Gill & Macmillan, 1983 Basil Pennington The Cistercian Spirit Cistercian Publications, 1970 Paul Diemer Love without Measure : Selections from St Bernard Dartman, Longman & Todd, 1990 Bruno S. James The Letters of St Bernard, Burns Oates, 1953 Translations from the Cistercian fathers - Bernard, William of St Thierry, Guerric of Igny, Aelred of Rievaulx and others - are available from Cistercian Publications. Click cloister to return to the top of the page.