Published In
Cistercian Studies Quarterly
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2014
Subjects
Carthusians -- Spiritual life -- Meditations, Carthusians -- History, Lectio divina, Monasticism, Mysticism
Abstract
At its founding and during its first three decades, the Carthusian order developed a distinctive and forceful concept of communication among the members and between the members and the extramural world. Saint Bruno’s life, contemporary twelfth-century exegesis, and the physical situation of La Grande Chartreuse established the necessary context in which this concept evolved. A review of historical background, the relevant documentary texts, and early development demonstrate the shaping of two steps in this concept. Close reading of the principal testimonies of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as of some passages in Saint Augustine, argues that Carthusian scribal work was more preliminary practice for spiritual development than it was the sacralization of codices and texts. The two-step structure, composed of contrary movements of presentation and effacement, guarded what the Carthusians regarded as spiritual activity within a changing historical environment and became a fundamental part of Latin Christian mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The conception of the Carthusian synthesis was exceptionally rich intellectually and affectively, generating a long, influential history. Furthermore, this two-step concept expresses some ways of thought that are both difficult to access in themselves today and also obscured by our post-modern sense of how texts develop and how we think critically about them. This has impoverished both the characterization of medieval and early modern texts that scholarship has traditionally made and also the transmission of their approach to reading and writing and its legacy through subsequent centuries down to our own day.
The system that Bruno and his followers developed used language against itself, extending self-consciousness into some region inaccessible except through silence. The conceptual origin of early Carthusian communication was a conservative, Augustinian response to the replacement of oral and otherwise more personal ways of influencing people toward the theological and psychic principles of Christianity by the more rationalistic and otherwise less personal discourses of scholastic philosophy and theology. Carthusian historical documents register both conflicts and a unity conserved from generation to generation so that the two-step concept itself underwent change, not chiefly in a rigidification by institutionalization but in order to maintain the charismatic element in the ever more complex discursive culture of the scholastic period.
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25033
Citation Details
Gilbert, B., “Early Carthusian Script and Silence.” Cistercian Studies Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (Fall, 2014): 367–397.
Included in
Christian Denominations and Sects Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons
Description
This is a translation of an article that appeared in Collectanea 2013.2. It is the re-elaboration of a conference given at the Abbey of Cîteaux on April 25, 2013, in the form of a session organized by the Association pour le rayonnement de la culture cistercienne so as to commemorate the ninth centenary of Saint Bernard at Cîteaux.
Originally appeared in Cistercian Studies Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3.