Carthusian Worlds, Carthusian Images. The Fascination of Silence and Inaccessibility, in: Studies in Spirituality 24 (2014) 143-154 By Peter Nissen

 

Carthusian Worlds, Carthusian Images. The Fascination of Silence and Inaccessibility, in: Studies in Spirituality 24 (2014) 143-154

By Peter Nissen

PETER NISSEN CARTHUSIAN WORLDS, CARTHUSIAN IMAGES The Fascination of Silence and Inaccessibility SUMMARY – The silent, hidden world of the Carthusians has become known to a broad public thanks to the 2005 film, Die grosse Stille / Into Great Silence from the German producer Philip Gröning. That world appears to fascinate people, as evidenced by earlier films and books about Carthusian life as well. But the onlooker remains an outsider. Films and books afford a fleeting glimpse of an inside world marked by inaccessi- bility. The inaccessibility in fact accounts for the outsider’s fascination. Usually it results in a biased picture: the Carthusian world is seen as paradisiac. Yet a number of recent autobiographic works by former Carthusians demolish the idyll of the ‘white paradise’. They show that the silent, enclosed world of the Carthusians is marred by acute psycho- logical tensions. These are mainly about boundaries: where does the Carthusian world begin and end, where is the boundary between the inside and the outside world, between the individual monk and the com- munity? The author proposes studying the realities of Carthusian life from the angle of three dialectical relationships: that of the Carthusian and the outside world, of the anchorite and the coenobite (hence the individual monk and the community), and of practical and inner life (the monk’s own inner and outside worlds). 1. INTO GREAT SILENCE – A VISITOR TO A WORLD WITHIN A WORLD Since the autumn of 2005 a lot of people, many of whom had probably never heard of the existence of Carthusians before, have gained access to the Carthu- sian world. This is a result of the great success of the film Die grosse Stille / Into Great Silence by the German film producer Philip Gröning (born in Düsseldorf in 1959). 1 The film shows us the life of the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian order, situated in a remote spot in the beautiful French Alps in the neighbourhood of Grenoble. As far back as 1984, 1 Information about Philip Gröning’s film, which is also available on DVD, can be found on the website www.diegrossestille.de.

144 PETER NISSEN when the Carthusian order celebrated its eight centenary, Philip Gröning asked permission to shoot film scenes in the monastery, but at that time his request was turned down: the presence of the movie maker would encroach too much on the quiet, privacy and silence of the Carthusian community. But in 1999, fifteen years later, Philip Gröning received a message from the new prior – since 1997 – of the Grande Chartreuse, the fourth Dutchman in the history of the Carthusian order, Dom Marcellin Theeuwes: ‘The time is ripe now, you may come’. 2 Over several seasons in 2002 and 2003, all on his own, Gröning fol- lowed the day-to-day life of the monks in the charterhouse with a small camera – mostly a 24P HD, partly a Super 8. And so out of 120 hours of recordings a 158-minute documentary film was made, in which there are hardly any spoken words. There are no interviews, nor a commentator’s voice. Only a few biblical verses flash on the screen every now and again, like a kind of refrain. We hear the human voice only when the monks gather in church to sing the divine office, when they meet in the chapter to welcome two novices in their midst, and – but by then the film is already far beyond halfway – during the monks’ weekly common recreation. Right at the end of the film a Carthusian monk speaks about the meaning of his life with God and the absence of fear of dying. But is he speaking to us? As viewers we know that he cannot see us, not only because he is not really standing in front of us but is talking from a projection screen, but also because he is blind. Even when this scene was shot he could not have seen Philip Gröning but was only able to experience Gröning’s presence via his other senses. The aged monk seems to be speaking primarily to himself. For the rest the film consists of silence: two and three quarters of an hour of utter silence. Almost a silent film, so to speak. Starting in November 2005, Into Great Silence (under its German title Die grosse Stille) made a successful circuit of German film houses – in December 2005 a German journal proclaimed it film of the month – and since the sum- mer of 2006 it made its way to many other countries. It received rave reviews and earned accolades and prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Rotterdam, Toronto and Venice. The German journal Die Welt called it ‘die ungewöhnlichste Film des Jahres’ (‘the most unusual film of the year’). In the Netherlands, according to sociologists one of the most secularised countries in the world, the film continued to attract full houses for many months, to everyone’s astonishment. In some film houses Into Great Silence was on the weekly programme for more than six months. Here and there it was combined with an introduction or 2 His Dutch predecessors were Jan van Roosendaal from Nijmegen (1463-1472), Willem Bibaut (1521-1535), previously prior of Geertruidenberg, and Pieter Marnef from Leiden (1540-1546), monk of the Charterhouse of Delft. P. Nissen, ‘Nederlander Dom Marcellin Theeuwes prior-generaal van kartuizers’, in: Een Twee Een 25 (1997), 297.

CARTHUSIAN WORLDS, CARTHUSIAN IMAGES 145 followed by a discussion. 3 Never before have the Carthusians been on every- body’s lips the way they have been the three or four years after 2005. Philip Gröning’s film shows us a lifestyle of which silence is the dominant characteristic. Carthusians, male and female, lead lives of organised, regulated silence. Nevertheless silence is not the objective of their way of life: it is a means, an instrument to serve and foster receptivity to the mystery of God. Carthusians search for God. And through their silence they want to create a situation in which they can concentrate on this search. They don’t look for silence to escape the world, and certainly not to run away from themselves, because whatever they leave behind when they enter the charterhouse, they always take themselves within. The very silence of the Carthusian world confronts these men and women with themselves: they are thrown back on themselves. They cannot walk away from themselves, nor from the world. The silence of the charterhouse can best be compared to what is called ‘the eye of the storm’ in meteorology, 4 referring to the epicentre or heart of a tropi- cal cyclone or a tornado. This centre is part of the storm and yet it is uniquely silent. Someone in the eye of the storm would watch the fury raging around him from that tranquil vantage point. The Charterhouse is much the same: it is part of the world and yet a quiet point from which to observe the world in prayer and meditation. The Carthusian world is, as it were, a still, stable centre in the midst of the turmoil of the world. That is expressed by the logo and the motto of the Carthusian order. The logo shows the globe with the cross super- imposed on it and above the cross seven stars, representing the first seven monks who settled in the valley of Chartreuse in 1084. The motto is Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, Latin for ‘The cross is steady while the world revolves’. At the same time this silent centre, this eye of the storm that is part of the tempest, is also a world on its own, a world within the world: the Carthusian world. Philip Gröning’s film admits viewers to this world for a brief moment, but it remains a virtual visit. Above all, the viewers always remain visitors, no more. They can observe the Carthusian world, as the film maker did, and as scholarly researchers do. Historians, art historians, theologians, literary scholars and others who study the Carthusians remain no more than outside observers. Participant observation, one of the key research strategies in cultural anthropol- ogy, is not feasible in the Carthusian world. They don’t have a guest house like 3 See for instance H.J.A. Hofland (Ed.), De grote stilte: Overdenkingen in filosofie, kunst en spiritualiteit, Budel-Nijmegen 2007. 4 ‘The eye of the storm’ is also a favourite metaphor of the well known Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, an admirer of the Carthusians: P. Nissen, ‘In een klooster zonder muren: Kloos- ters in de grenzeloze wereld van Cees Nooteboom’, in: K. Blom et al., De grenzeloze wereld van Cees Nooteboom, Nijmegen 2006, 91-101; and L. Földényi et al., In het oog van de storm: De wereld van Cees Nooteboom. Essays over zijn oeuvre, Amsterdam-Antwerp 2006.

146 PETER NISSEN the Benedictines, Cistercians, Premonstratensians and other monastic and canonical orders, where researchers can spend some days or weeks sharing the life of the Carthusians, following their daily schedule and participating in their liturgy. Neither do the Carthusians have oblates, like the Benedictines: men and women who affiliate individually with a monastic community in order to follow its rule in their private lives at home and at work as closely as their indi- vidual circumstances and prior commitments permit. These oblates do not physically live in the monastic world, but to some extent they do live in it mentally. They share it partially, they participate in it, so they are more than just observers. But it is impossible to participate in the Carthusian world in such an institutionalised manner. Whether we are just chance viewers of Philip Gröning’s film or scholars who have devoted our whole life to Carthusian studies, when it comes to the Carthusian world we always remain outsiders. 2. CARTHUSIAN ARCADIA – THE VIEWER AS AN OUTSIDER It is this phenomenon of enforced outsider-hood that seems to enhance the fascination with the Carthusian world. It is a different world, mysterious, exotic. This is confirmed by two earlier films on the Carthusians. The first is a German documentary entitled Leben um zu Beten (‘Live to Pray’). It was made in 1984, more than a quarter of a century ago by now, on the occasion of the ninth centenary of the Carthusian order, and was broadcast by the German ‘Südwestfunk’. It shows the life in the only inhabited charterhouse left in Germany, that of Marienau. Partly it consists of an interview with the prior, partly it shows recordings of the life and liturgy in Marienau Charterhouse. These recordings were made by a priest from the neighbourhood using a simple amateur camera. The second film is of Dutch origin. I am referring to an episode on the Car- thusians in a popular series on monasteries in the television programme Kruispunt (‘Crossing Point’), broadcast on Dutch television for the first time on 8 August 2004, repeated in October 2007 (together with Philip Gröning’s film) and also available on DVD. The maker of this documentary is Leo Fijen, who became friendly with the former prior general of the Grande Chartreuse, the Dutchman Dom Marcellin Theeuwes, and made him the central character in a book on the ‘journey from your head to your heart’, based on the television series and published in 2004. 5 But notwithstanding Leo Fijen’s good relation- 5 L. Fijen, De reis van je hoofd naar je hart: Leefregels voor het bestaan van alledag, Kampen 2004, 122-151. Dom Marcellin is also an important spokesman in a more journalistic book written by his nephew J. Reijnders, Een reis in stilte: Leven als kartuizers, Kampen 2006.

CARTHUSIAN WORLDS, CARTHUSIAN IMAGES 147 ship with the prior general, he did not really penetrate the Carthusian world. He, a film maker, and we, the viewers of his documentary, remain outsiders. True, Leo Fijen was allowed to spend one night in a monk’s cell in the Grande Chartreuse and in the documentary he comments on the oppressive silence of that night: ‘If this is not the meaning of your life, you wouldn’t last even one day’ (‘Als dit niet de zin van je leven is, hou je het nog niet één dag uit’). But his camera crew had to stay outside. They recorded Leo Fijen’s conversation with the prior during a walk through the magnificent surroundings of the Grande Chartreuse, outside the cloister. The scenes of life within the Grande Chartreuse in the Dutch documentary were taken from Philip Gröning’s film, at that time still in the making. Hence Carthusian worlds are fascinating because of their inaccessibility. Film scenes afford brief insight, but we remain outsiders and for that very reason they preserve a kind of pristine, immaculate, paradisiac state, like the mediated world of the Amish. 6 ‘That which makes the Amish an icon of the American pastoral precludes the possibility of filming them. The Amish Arca- dia is always already inaccessible’, as Crystal Downing puts it. 7 In both cases, that of the Amish and that of the Carthusians, this inaccessibility is strongly encouraged by the religious institutions’ own information strategy, which is directed to establishing information boundaries. Both communities communi- cate only what they consider relevant. 8 3. HEAVENLY IMAGES This paradisiac state of the Carthusian world is also depicted in a few books written to introduce that world to the general public. 9 I cite just two examples. The first is a book from 1929 entitled Het Witte Paradijs (‘The White Paradise’) by the Dutch writer and later Benedictine monk Pieter van der Meer de Wal- cheren (1880-1970). In 1926 Pieter and a friend spent the week of Christmas 6 D. Zimmerman Umble & D.L. Weaver-Zercher (Eds), The Amish and the media, Baltimore 2008. 7 C. Downing, ‘Witnessing the Amish: Plain people on fancy film’, in: Zimmerman Umble & Weaver-Zercher, Amish and the media, 25-41, quotation 40. 8 D.A. Stout, Media and religion: Foundations of an emerging field, New York-London 2012, 79. 9 For this more or less ‘mythical’ image of the Carthusians in literary tradition, see: B. Rieder, ‘Der Mythos der Kartäuser: Beobachtungen zum Bild der Kartäuser in der öffentlichen und literarischen Vorstellung’, in: J. Ganz & M. Früh (Eds), Das Erbe der Kartäuser. Internationa- ler Kongress für Kartäuserforschung 1.-5. Dezember 1999 Kartause Ittingen, Salzburg 2000 (Analecta Cartusiana 160), 185-195.

148 PETER NISSEN in the charterhouse of La Valsainte in the Swiss Alps. He was so impressed by the world of the Carthusians that he decided to write a lyrical booklet about it. Het Witte Paradijs was printed five times in Dutch between 1929 and 1965 and has been translated into English (1952), French (1931, 1939 and 1953), German (1930), Spanish (1943, four editions up to 1961), Portuguese (?) and Italian (1969, 1975), sometimes in more than one edition and several of them with an introduction by the famous French philosopher Jacques Maritain. 10 So you could say that it was a kind of cult book in its time. The longest chapter in the book is entitled ‘A Carthusian Speaks’ (‘Een Karthuizer Spreekt’). The speaker is the Dutch Carthusian Dom Gerard Ramakers (1896-1984), born in the village of Echt and raised in the city of Weert, who was La Valsainte’s novice master from 1923 to 1931. He is as it were a voice from within the Carthusian world speaking to us. But for the rest Pieter van der Meer’s booklet is the account of an outside observer. Its very title reveals the observer’s para- disiac image of the Carthusian world: The White Paradise. 11 A second book that introduces a general readership to the Carthusian world is by the British journalist Robin Bruce Lockhart, a Catholic convert and author of Ace of Spies, a successful book on Sidney Reilly, the greatest spy in British history and subject of a major TV series in 1983. Just as Lockhart was inter- ested in the mysterious world of spies – his father Sir Robin Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970) was a famous diplomat and a secret agent in Moscow – so he was interested in the mysterious world of the Carthusians. He was a friend of the last inhabited charterhouse left in England, St Hugh’s in Parkmin- ster, Sussex, and lived for some time in a village in the neighbourhood. In his book Halfway to Heaven: The Hidden Life of the Sublime Carthusians (published in 1985, reprinted in 2005 and translated into French and German) he describes the history and way of life of the Carthusian, with a preamble of a few chapters on the desert fathers and early monasticism. At the end of his book he also summarises some lines of Carthusian spirituality. Lockhart has an extremely exalted image of the Carthusians. He calls them ‘sublime’ and the title of his book speaks volumes: according to him they are already halfway to heaven. ‘Were all mankind, by some divine miracle, able to detach itself from the world in the Carthusian way, it would surely be paradise regained’, Lockhart writes. 12 10 P. Nissen, ‘Nederlandstalige kartuizerauteurs uit de 19 de en 20 ste eeuw’, in: F. Hendrickx (Ed.), De kartuizers en hun klooster te Zelem, Diest 1984, 146-156, esp. 146-147. 11 The 1952 English edition was published by McKay, New York. According to A. Gruys, Cartusiana: Un instrument heuristique, Paris 1976, I, 6 there must have been an (earlier?) English edition, published in London. 12 R.B. Lockhart, Halfway to heaven: The hidden life of the sublime Carthusians, London 1985, 117. Reprinted by Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2005 (Cistercian Studies Series 186).

CARTHUSIAN WORLDS, CARTHUSIAN IMAGES 149 In the German translation, published two years later (in 1987), the title of the book is significantly more modest: Botschaft des Schweigens: Das verborgene Leben der Kartäuser (Message of silence: The hidden life of the Carthusians). The Carthusians are no longer ‘sublime’, neither are they ‘halfway to heaven’. This modesty is undoubtedly due to the translators, who were Carthusians themselves: the book was translated by a few monks at the German charter- house of Marienau. Nevertheless they left the passage I have just quoted on ‘paradise regained’ unchanged. 13 Books like the ones by Pieter van der Meer de Walcheren and Robin Bruce Lockhart portray a paradisiac, heavenly image of the Carthusian world. In so doing they contributed greatly to the emergence of a kind of Carthusian roman- ticism. But reality is not always that paradisiac. That is made clear by some other books that introduce a broader readership to the Carthusian world in a different way, namely through the biographic or autobiographic stories of men who were Carthusians for some time but left the order. These books do not portray the Carthusian world from the perspective of an infatuated admirer from the outside, but from that of a (former) inhabitant of the world itself. And we know from experience that such a perspective usually yields a much more realistic picture of the inside of the Carthusian world. Still relatively subtle and disguised, this happens in the book by the German theologian Willibald Bösen, now professor emeritus of biblical theology at the University of Bielefeld. In 1987 he published a thrice reprinted book on the Carthusians entitled Auf einsamer Strasse zu Gott (‘On the Lonely Road to God’). 14 The second part of this book offers some rather matter-of-fact infor- mation on the history, way of life, architecture and daily schedule of the Car- thusians. But the larger first part of the book affords a more personal glimpse into the Carthusian world by means of interviews with several Carthusians monks and correspondence with a Carthusian. Bösen also inserted excerpts from the diary of a theology student, over twenty years old, who spent nine months and seven days as a novice in the Swiss charterhouse of La Valsainte. Its fifty pages make it the longest chapter in Bösen’s book and it might very well be that this novice, who had to leave the charterhouse for reasons of health, was himself the author of the book, hence the later professor Bösen. At all events, the diary gives the reader a modest insight into the conflict that can take place 13 R.B. Lockhart, Botschaft des Schweigens: Das verborgene Leben der Kartäuser, Würzburg 1987, 163: ‘Würde die ganze Menschheit durch ein göttliches Wunder dazu befähigt, sich wie die Kartäuser von der Welt zu lösen, wäre zweifellos das Paradies wieder da’. The title of the French translation is also more modest: La vie cachée des Chartreux, Paris 1985. 14 W. Bösen, Auf einsamer Straße zu Gott: Das Geheimnis der Kartäuser, Freiburg 1987; second edition 1990; third edition 1991; ‘Sonderauflage’ Buxheim, 1995.

150 PETER NISSEN in the Carthusian world, although the friction apparently had little to do with the young monk himself: he was more concerned about the health of his mother and sister. Indeed, letters reached him from an aunt, from the family doctor and even from the mayor of his village, calling him to leave the charter- house: ‘Come back home, because your mother and your sister need you’. 15 In the diary’s presentation of the facts the cause of the tensions experienced by the young Carthusian monk lies not within the Carthusian world but outside it. The outside world caused unrest and destabilised the inner world of the charterhouse. 4. CONFLICTING CHARACTERS IN THE CARTHUSIAN PARADISE Two other recent biographical stories of Carthusians depict a different situa- tion. The first is autobiographical: Sounds of Silence: A Monk’s Journey (2005) by Father Benedict Kossmann. Behind this writer’s name – a pseudonym, ‘out of continuing respect for Carthusian anonymity’ – lurks an American who was a Carthusian monk for twenty years, first in the Spanish charterhouse of Jerez and later in the first foundation of the Carthusian order outside of Europe, the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration in Arlington in the state of Vermont, USA, under construction since 1951 and completed in 1970. The book tells the story of the happy life of a monk, feeling at ease in the charterhouse and taking on more and more responsibilities, such as the offices of novice master and chanter. This last position eventually brought him into conflict with the community. It started with a simple choir incident on a Sunday morning dur- ing the blessing of holy water, but according to the prior this incident exposed deeper emotional tensions within the community. The prior ‘was ever obsessed with identifying and eliminating emotional problems in his community’, 16 and so it was now: the monk was sent to New York city for a series of psychological tests and never returned to the charterhouse. He was released from his monastic vows and the priesthood and lives with his wife in Florida. Father Benedict’s story shows us another side of the Carthusian world. Instead of a paradise half- way to heaven inhabited by angels, it is a world of ordinary people with emo- tional problems, conflicting characters and the concomitant tensions. This is even more evident in a book that reduces the idyll of the white para- dise to a story of human ideals and failures, of struggles and tensions. I am referring to An Infinity of Hours (2006) by Nancy Klein Maguire, now also 15 Bösen, Auf einsamer Strasse, 78. 16 B. Kossmann, Sounds of silence: A monk’s journey, Bloomington, IN 2005, 250.

Carthusian Worlds, Carthusian Images

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