St. Bruno's Sons
The Carthusian Order in England. By E. Margaret Thompson. Published for the Church Historical Society (S.P.C.K., The Carthusian Order in England. By E. Margaret Thompson. Published for the Church Historical Society (S.P.C.K., Tna Carthusian, with their austere ideals and unblemished record, have always been the aristocrats of the monastic life. But not many of those who wander round the rains of Mount- grace or the Certosa of Pavia, or enjoy the green and yellow products of their skill, have any clear notion of the life led by St. Bruno's sons, the object of their aspiration, or the place they filled in the mediaeval world. Miss Thompson's erudite and fascinating book at least removes our ignorance on some of these points. Though her real subject is the Charterhouses of the English province, she gives us in her first five chapters a vivid and detailed account of the foundation and development of the Order, and of its Customs and Rule. The epilogue on " the Carthusian purpose" places these facts within their correct spiritual environment, and is a noble tribute to one of the great adventures of the human soul.
St. Bruno and his first disciples set out to establish a way of life which should remove hindrances from the path of those who sought only the Beatific Vision of God. This " way " was a combination of the solitary and corporate religious ideals ; the Grande Chartreuse, and each subsequent Charter. house, being planned as a village of hermits grouped round a church and each living in his own cell an ordered life of penance, meditation and " occupied quiet " under the rule of a Prior. The plan succeeded. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Carthusian monasteries were veritable power- houses of the spirit, and played an important part in the development of mediaeval mysticism ; to them resorted those who desired guidance in the contemplative life, and it is thanks to preservation in their libraries that many works of the mystics have survived. Miss Thompson gives some useful inventories of books owned by the English Charterhouses, amongst which mystical works are prominent. Moreover, is chief manual labour undertaken was the copying and binding, and sometimes the translation, of religious works ; fir books, said Prior Guigo I, " are the everlasting food of our souls and most industriously to be made . . . for so many books that we write, it seems to us that we make so many publishers of the truth." Nor did the decadence of the religious orders affect the Charterhouses to any marked degree. Certainly by the fifteenth century we observe a tendency to comfort which St. Bruno would have surely disapproved. Miss Thompson's frontispiece, from a Flemish miniature, shows a monk mending his reed pen in a cosy bed-sitting room with curtained windows and cushioned scat, whilst the inventory of belongings taken by a Carthusian from London to Mountgrace includes, along with hair shirts and prayer books, such unex- pected items as " ii goode pylows and ii lytell pylows and a kosshyn to knele on." Yet against these outward mitigations, we can set the unspoilt survival of that heroic spirit of devotion in which the first foundations had been made—a spirit that flames up at the first touch of persecution, and is seen in all its splendour in the awful martyrdom of the three Priors of London, Axhohne and Beauvale in 1535: a story of which Miss Thompson scares us nothing. Her chronicle ends with the final suppression of Sheen in 1559. She might perhaps have said a word about the existent Charterhouses of Park- minster and Cowfold ; which have brought back to modern England the stern ideals of St. Bruno's sons.
EVELYN UNDERUILL.
Previous page
