Spontaneously, each of us gets used to living isolated in his cell with no obstacles to his desires, no one else’s thoughts to contend with, no need to adapt opinions differing from one’s own. This results in a tendency for each individual to be enclosed in himself. At every level, we remain confined to the limits of our own little world. We are absorbed in our own ideas; everything is arraigned according to our personal tastes; we have our own system for absolutely everything: it is a sort of systematic organization of egoism in which we risk being engulfed.

This results almost automatically in our putting on a sort of mask when we are with others, so as to protect our little treasures. We become incapable of ever meeting anyone else. Our deepest self is carefully sheltered; it has not the slightest concern, nor the slightest desire, to come into the presence of the deepest self of our brother. What complications that would lead to! So there is a risk of relations remaining permanently on a very superficial level, with mutual agreement carefully to avoid annoying one another. I dare say the bond of charity is not actually violated, but how weak and superficial it can become, impaired by so many omissions and negligence.

This is a fact of experience, and obvious to all of us if we are lucid enough to look at what is happening within ourselves and around us. It is easy to draw the conclusions for our interior life. What meaning can our prayer have in such a setting? What real encounter can there be between the Word of God, the eternal Word, and someone who habitually lives shut away like this in such a well-camouflaged house?

Don’t think that I am deliberately exaggerating the severity of the temptations that will assail you in your cell: it is of utmost importance for us to realize that we have to go beyond the human satisfaction that solitude gives us in order to open ourselves up completely to the light and truth which are not to be found in ourselves, but in forgetting and abandoning the self. It is only then that we can start speaking of solitude for God. ‘The Wound of Love’ A. Carthusian

(1985) A Carthusian choir monk sits alone, reading in his cell, at St. Hugh’s Charterhouse monastery in Sussex, England. Religion News Service file photo by Colin Horsman

Such attention to God can only make the fruit of a general pacification of our whole being. ‘The uncontrolled passions that cut across the sensibility, the anxieties, the excessive joys; all that should progressively find the path of order, with the help of God, but also through all sorts of wise practices.

By working with his hands, the monk practices humility; he also brings his whole body under control so as better to attain stability of mind…It sometimes happens also that the very weight of our work acts as a sort of anchor to the ebb and flow of our thought, thus enabling our heart to remain fixed upon God without mental fatigue. (1.5.3) –A. Carthusian

The discovery of mediocrity first in others and then in oneself is a step–toward an even more disconcerting discovery. Holiness, perfection, and virtue—all these qualities which, without realizing it, we believed to be reflections of the Absolute within ourselves—begin to vanish. Everything which tends to make the ego a point of reference or an autonomous centre must disappear in order to conform with the resurrected Christ who is but pure relation to the Father. Even His humanity is now endowed with divine names. All created riches have been stripped away in order to be nothing but pure relations. –‘The Wound of Love’ A Carthusian Miscellany

I am living in a wilderness in Calabria, sufficiently distant from any center of human population. I am with my religious brethren, some of whom are very learned. They persevere in their holy life, waiting for the return of the master, ready to open the door for him as soon as he knocks. How can I speak adequately about this solitude, its agreeable location, its healthful and temperate climate? It is in a wide, pleasant plain between the mountains, with verdant meadows and pasturelands adorned with flowers. How can I describe the appearance of the gently rolling hills all around, and the secret of the shaded valleys where so many rivers flow, the brooks, and the springs? There are watered gardens and many fruit trees of various kinds.

But why am I giving so much time to these pleasantries? For a wise man there are other attractions, which are still more pleasant and useful, being divine. Nevertheless, scenes like these are often a relaxation and a diversion for fragile spirits wearied by a strict rule and attention to spiritual things. If the bow is stretched.  –St Bruno tin a letter o his friend Raoul.

…the Carthusian founder, Bruno of Cologne, resolved in 1084 to flee society in order to establish a solitary and devout monastic order.  Inflamed with “divine love” and committed to ‘ ‘capturing the eternal,” Bruno gathered around himself six companions—four monks and two laymen—to help carry out his quest for monastic perfection in the mountainous wilderness.  The men solicited the aid of Bishop Hugh of Grenoble, who, coincidentally, had just received a divine vision in which seven stars in the wilderness fell to his feet. Discerning the vision to refer to his new petitioners, Hugh granted the hopeful reformers a plot of uncultivated land in the forested Dauphiné, where they built the Grande Chartreuse, the first Carthusian charterhouse.  –Sara Ritchey ‘Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity’

Sara Ritchey on her book: While scholars have long posited a sudden “discovery of nature” to explain the twelfth-century proliferation of herbal, floral, and arboreal iterations of labor, art, and prayer, my attention to distinctions between medieval, modern, and post-modern uses of the term “nature” showed that the historically shifting contents of this category had obscured our interpretation of medieval devotional practice and of the aims of religious communities. Instead of valuing the abstract concept of nature, the book demonstrates that a range of sources including theological treatises, agricultural projects, architectural plans, and manuscript illustrations reflect that later medieval Christians began to conceptualize the doctrine of the incarnation of their God as a fundamental transformation in the substance of the world’s material so that it might be inclusive of, susceptible to, divinity. A flurry of new devotional practices and forms of religious organization transpired as a result of this emerging doctrine of the world’s re-creation. Holy Matter provides an alternative narrative through which to interpret those new practices and communities; rather than seeing late medieval devotion as inspired by the suffering and passion of an incarnate God, the book demonstrates that we must consider religious change at this time in terms of a desire for presence, access, and divine abundance.

Interesting thoughts, from a scholar and academic, yet in the last sentence, the words ‘rather than’ would illuminate better if they were substituted with ‘within’.

Urs Graf woodcut depicting the founding of the Carthusians.