followers faithfully maintained his reform at La Trappe. Then the French
Revolution drove the Trappists as wanderers into various countries, and
the abbey was made a foundery for cannon. A small branch of the order
came in 1804 to the United States, and established itself for a while in
Pennsylvania, but soon turned its eyes towards the greater wilds and
solitudes of Kentucky. For this there was reason. Kentucky was early a
great pioneer of the Catholic Church in the United States. Here the
first episcopal see of the West was erected, and Bardstown held
spiritual jurisdiction, within certain parallels of latitude, over all
States and Territories between the two oceans. Here, too, were the first
Catholic missionaries of the West, except those who were to be found in
the French stations along the Wabash and the Mississippi. Indeed, the
Catholic population of Kentucky, which was principally descended from
the colonists of Lord Baltimore, had begun to enter the State as early
as 1775, the nucleus of their settlements soon becoming Nelson County,
the locality of the present abbey. Likewise it should be remembered that
the Catholic Church in the United States, especially that portion of it
in Kentucky, owes a great debt to the zeal of the exiled French clergy
of early days. That buoyancy and elasticity of the French character,
which naturally adapts it to every circumstance and emergency, was then
most demanded and most efficacious. From these exiles the infant
missions of the State were supplied with their most devoted laborers.
Hither, accordingly, the Trappists removed from Pennsylvania,
establishing themselves on Pottinger's Creek, near Rohan's Knob, several
miles from the present site. But they remained only a few years. The
climate of Kentucky was ill suited to their life of unrelaxed
asceticism; their restless superior had conceived a desire to
christianize Indian children, and so removed the languishing settlement
to Missouri. There is not space for following the solemn march of those
austere exiles through the wildernesses of the New World. From Missouri
they went to an ancient Indian burying-ground in Illinois, and there
built up a sort of village in the heart of the prairie; but the great
mortality from which they suffered, and the subsidence of the fury of
the French Revolution recalled them in 1813 to France, to reoccupy the
establishments from which they had been banished.
It was of this body that Dickens, in his _American Notes_, wrote as
follows:
Looming up in the distance, as we rode along, was another of the
ancient Indian burial-places, called Monk's Mound, in memory of a
body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded a desolate
convent there many years ago, when there were no settlements
within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the pernicious
climate; in which lamentable fatality few rational people will
suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very severe
deprivation.
This is a better place in which to state a miracle than discuss it; and
the following account of a heavenly portent, which is related to have
been vouchsafed the Trappists while sojourning in Kentucky, may be given
without comment:
In the year 1808 the moon, being then about two-thirds full,
presented a most remarkable appearance. A bright, luminous
cross, clearly defined, was seen in the heavens, with its arms
intersecting the centre of the moon. On each side two smaller
crosses were also distinctly visible, though the portions of them
most distant from the moon were more faintly marked. This strange
phenomenon continued for several hours, and was witnessed by the
Trappists on their arising, as usual, at midnight, to sing the
Divine praise.
The present monastery, which is called the Abbey of Gethsemane, owes its
origin immediately to the Abbey of La Meilleraye, of the department of
the Loire-Inférieure, France. The abbot of the latter had concluded
arrangements with the French Government to found a house in the island
of Martinique, on an estate granted by Louis Philippe; but this
monarch's rule having been overturned, the plan was abandoned in favor
of a colony in the United States. Two Fathers, with the view of
selecting a site, came to New York in the summer of 1848, and naturally
turned their eyes to the Catholic settlements in Kentucky, and to the
domain of the pioneer Trappists. In the autumn of that year,
accordingly, about forty-five "religious" left the mother-abbey of La
Meilleraye, set sail from Havre de Grace for New Orleans, went thence by
boat to Louisville, and from this point walked to Gethsemane, a
distance of some sixty miles. Although scattered among various countries
of Europe, the Trappists have but two convents in the United
States--this, the oldest, and one near Dubuque, Iowa, a colony from the
abbey in Ireland.
III
[Illustration: WITHIN THE GATES.]
The domain of the abbey comprises some seventeen hundred acres of land,
part of which is tillable, while the rest consists of a range of wooded
knobs that furnish timber to the monastery steam saw-mill. Around this
domain lie the homesteads of Kentucky farmers, who make indifferent
monks. One leaves the public road that winds across the open country and
approaches the monastery through a long, level avenue, enclosed on each
side by a hedge-row of cedars, and shaded by nearly a hundred beautiful
English elms, the offspring of a single parent stem. Traversing this
dim, sweet spot, where no sound is heard but the waving of boughs and
the softened notes of birds, one reaches the porter's lodge, a low,
brick building, on each side of which extends the high brick-wall that
separates the inner from the outer world. Passing beneath the archway of
the lodge, one discovers a graceful bit of landscape gardening--walks
fringed with cedars, beds for flowers, pathways so thickly strewn with
sawdust that the heaviest footfall is unheard, a soft turf of green,
disturbed only by the gentle shadows of the pious-looking Benedictine
trees: a fit spot for recreation and meditation. It is with a sort of
worldly start that you come upon an enclosure at one end of these
grounds wherein a populous family of white-cowled rabbits trip around in
the most noiseless fashion, and seemed ashamed of being caught living
together in family relations.
Architecturally there is little to please the æsthetic sense in the
monastery building, along the whole front of which these grounds extend.
It is a great quadrangular pile of brick, three stories high, heated by
furnaces and lighted by gas--modern appliances which heighten the
contrast with the ancient life whose needs they subserve. Within the
quadrangle is a green inner court, also beautifully laid off. On one
side are two chapels, the one appropriated to the ordinary services of
the Church, and entered from without the abbey-wall by all who desire;
the other, consecrated to the offices of the Trappist order, entered
only from within, and accessible exclusively to males. It is here that
one finds occasion to remember the Trappist's vow of poverty. The
vestments are far from rich, the decorations of the altar far from
splendid. The crucifixion-scene behind the altar consists of wooden
figures carved by one of the monks now dead, and painted with little
art. No tender light of many hues here streams through long windows rich
with holy reminiscence and artistic fancy. The church has, albeit, a
certain beauty of its own--that charm which is inseparable from fine
proportion in stone and from gracefully disposed columns growing into
the arches of the lofty roof. But the cold gray of the interior, severe
and unrelieved, bespeaks a place where the soul comes to lay itself in
simplicity before the Eternal as it would upon a naked, solitary rock of
the desert. Elsewhere in the abbey greater evidences of votive poverty
occur--in the various statues and shrines of the Virgin, in the pictures
and prints that hang in the main front corridor--in all that appertains
to the material life of the community.
Just outside the church, beneath the perpetual benediction of the cross
on its spire, is the quiet cemetery garth, where the dead are side by
side, their graves covered with myrtle and having each for its
head-stone a plain wooden crucifix bearing the religious name and
station of him who lies below--Father Honorius, Father Timotheus,
Brother Hilarius, Brother Eutropius. Who are they? And whence? And by
what familiar names were they greeted on the old play-grounds and
battle-fields of the world?
The Trappists do not, as it is commonly understood, daily dig a portion
of their own graves. When one of them dies and has been buried, a new
grave is begun beside the one just filled, as a reminder to the
survivors that one of them must surely take his place therein. So, too,
when each seeks the cemetery enclosure, in hours of holy meditation,
and, standing bareheaded among the graves, prays softly for the souls of
his departed brethren, he may come for a time to this unfinished grave,
and, kneeling, pray Heaven, if he be next, to dismiss his soul in peace.
Nor do they sleep in the dark, abject kennel, which the imagination, in
the light of mediæval history, constructs as the true monk's cell. By
the rule of St. Benedict, they sleep separate, but in the same
dormitory--a great upper room, well lighted and clean, in the body of
which a general framework several feet high is divided into partitions
that look like narrow berths.
IV
We have acquired poetical and pictorial conceptions of monks--praying
with wan faces and upturned eyes half darkened by the shadowing cowl,
the coarse serge falling away from the emaciated neck, the hands
pressing the crucifix close to the heart; and with this type has been
associated a certain idea of cloistral life--that it was an existence of
vacancy and idleness, or at best of deep meditation of the soul broken
only by express spiritual devotions. There is another kind of monk, with
the marks of which we seem traditionally familiar: the monk with the
rubicund face, sleek poll, good epigastric development, and slightly
unsteady gait, with whom, in turn, we have connected a different phase
of conventual discipline--fat capon and stubble goose, and midnight
convivial chantings growing ever more fast and furious, but finally
dying away in a heavy stertorous calm. Poetry, art, the drama, the
novel, have each portrayed human nature in orders; the saint-like monk,
the intellectual monk, the bibulous, the felonious, the fighting monk
(who loves not the hermit of Copmanhurst?), until the memory is stored
and the imagination preoccupied.
Living for a while in a Trappist monastery in modern America, one gets
a pleasant actual experience of other types no less picturesque and on
the whole much more acceptable. He finds himself, for one thing, brought
face to face with the working monk. Idleness to the Trappist is the
enemy of the soul, and one of his vows is manual labor. Whatever a
monk's previous station may have been, he must perform, according to
abbatial direction, the most menial services. None are exempt from work;
there is no place among them for the sluggard. When it is borne in mind
that the abbey is a self-dependent institution, where the healthy must
be maintained, the sick cared for, the dead buried, the necessity for
much work becomes manifest. In fact, the occupations are as various as
those of a modern factory. There is scope for intellects of all degrees
and talents of wellnigh every order. Daily life, unremittingly from year
to year, is an exact system of duties and hours. The building, covering
about an acre of ground and penetrated by corridors, must be kept
faultlessly clean. There are three kitchens--one for the guests, one for
the community, and one for the infirmary--that require each a
_coquinarius_ and separate assistants. There is a tinker's shop and a
pharmacy; a saddlery, where the broken gear used in cultivating the
monastery lands is mended; a tailor's shop, where the worn garments are
patched; a shoemaker's shop, where the coarse, heavy shoes of the monks
are made and cobbled; and a barber's shop, where the Trappist beard is
shaved twice a month and the Trappist head is monthly shorn.
Out-doors the occupations are even more varied. The community do not
till the farm. The greater part of their land is occupied by tenant
farmers, and what they reserve for their own use is cultivated by the
so-called "family brothers," who, it is due to say, have no families,
but live as celibates on the abbey domain, subject to the abbot's
authority, without being members of the order. The monks, however, do
labor in the ample gardens, orchards, and vineyard, from which they
derive their sustenance, in the steam saw-mill and grain-mill, in the
dairy and the cheese factory. Thus picturesquely engaged one may find
them in autumn: monks gathering apples and making pungent cider, which
is stored away in the vast cellar as their only beverage except water;
monks repairing the shingle roof of a stable; monks feeding the huge
swine, which they fatten for the board of their carnal guests, or the
fluttering multitude of chickens, from the eggs and young of which they
derive a slender revenue; monks grouped in the garden around a green and
purple heap of turnips, to be stored up as a winter relish of no mean
distinction.
Amid such scenes one forgets all else while enjoying the wealth and
freshness of artistic effects. What a picture is this young Belgian
cheese-maker, his sleeves rolled above the elbows of his brawny arms,
his great pinkish hands buried in the golden curds, the cap of his serge
cloak falling back and showing his closely clipped golden-brown hair,
blue eyes, and clear, delicate skin! Or this Australian ex-farmer, as he
stands by the hopper of grist or lays on his shoulder a bag of flour for
the coarse brown-bread of the monks. Or this dark old French opera
singer, who strutted his brief hour on many a European stage, but now
hobbles around, hoary in his cowl and blanched with age, to pick up a
handful of garlic. Or this athletic young Irishman, thrusting a great
iron prod into the glowing coals of the sawmill furnace. Or this slender
Switzer, your attendant in the refectory, with great keys dangling from
his leathern cincture, who stands by with folded hands and bowed head
while you are eating the pagan meal he has prepared for you.
[Illustration: A FORTNIGHTLY SHAVE.]
From various countries of the Old World men find their way into the
Abbey of Gethsemane, but among them are no Americans. Repeatedly the
latter have joined the order, and have failed to persevere up to the
final consecration of the white cowl. The fairest warning is given to
the postulant. He is made to understand the entire extent of the
obligation he has assumed; and only after passing through a novitiate,
prolonged at the discretion of the abbot, is he admitted to the vows
that must be kept unbroken till death.
V
From the striking material aspects of their daily life, one is soon
recalled to a sense of their subordination to spiritual aims and
pledges; for upon them, like a spell of enchantment, lies the sacred
silence. The honey has been taken from the bees with solemnity; the
grapes have been gathered without song and mirth. The vow of life-long
silence taken by the Trappist must of course not be construed literally;
but there are only two occasions during which it is completely set
aside--when confessing his sins and when singing the offices of the
Church. At all other times his tongue becomes, as far as possible, a
superfluous member; he speaks only by permission of his superior, and
always simply and to the point. The monk at work with another exchanges
with him only the few low, necessary words, and those that provoke no
laughter. Of the three so-called monastic graces, _Simplicitas_,
_Benignitas_, _Hilaritas_, the last is not his. Even for necessary
speech he is taught to substitute a language of signs, as fully
systematized as the speech of the deaf and dumb. Should he, while at
work, wound his fellow-workman, sorrow may be expressed by striking his
breast. A desire to confess is shown by lifting one hand to the mouth
and striking the breast with the other. The maker of cheese crosses two
fingers at the middle point to let you know that it is made half of milk
and half of cream. The guest-master, whose business it is to act as your
guide through the abbey and the grounds, is warily mindful of his
special functions and requests you to address none but him. Only the
abbot is free to speak when and as his judgment may approve. It is
silence, says the Trappist, that shuts out new ideas, worldly topics,
controversy. It is silence that enables the soul to contemplate with
singleness and mortification the infinite perfections of the Eternal.
In the abbey it is this pervasive hush that falls like a leaden pall
upon the stranger who has rushed in from the talking universe. Are these
priests modern survivals of the rapt solitaries of India? The days pass,
and the world, which seemed in hailing distance to you at first, has
receded to dim remoteness. You stand at the window of your room looking
out, and hear in the autumn trees only the flute-like note of some
migratory bird, passing slowly on towards the south. You listen within,
and hear but a key turning in distant locks and the slow-retreating
footsteps of some dusky figure returning to its lonely self-communings.
The utmost precaution is taken to avoid noise; in the dormitory not even
your guide will speak to you, but explains by gesture and signs. During
the short siesta the Trappists allow themselves, if one of them, not
wishing to sleep, gets permission to read in his so-called cell, he must
turn the pages of his book inaudibly. In the refectory, while the meal
is eaten and the appointed reader in the tribune goes through a service,
if one through carelessness makes a noise by so much as dropping a fork
or a spoon, he leaves his seat and prostrates himself on the floor until
bidden by the superior to arise. The same penance is undergone in the
church by any one who should distract attention with the clasp of his
book.
A hard life, to purely human seeming, does the Trappist make for the
body. He thinks nothing of it. It is his evil tenement of flesh, whose
humors are an impediment to sanctification, whose propensities are to be
kept down by the practice of austerities. To it in part his monastic
vows are addressed--perpetual and utter poverty, chastity, manual labor,
silence, seclusion, penance, obedience. The perfections and glories of
his monastic state culminate in the complete abnegation and destruction
of animal nature, and in the correspondence of his earthly life with the
holiness of divine instruction. The war of the Jesuit is with the world;
the war of the Trappist is with himself. From his narrow bed, on which
are simply a coarse thin mattress, pillow, sheet, and coverlet, he rises
at 2 o'clock, on certain days at 1, on others yet at 12. He has not
undressed, but has slept in his daily garb, with the cincture around his
waist.
This dress consists, if he be a brother, of the roughest dark-brown
serge-like stuff, the over-garment of which is a long robe; if a Father,
of a similar material, but white in color, the over-garment being the
cowl, beneath which is the black scapular. He changes it only once in
two weeks. The frequent use of the bath, as tending to luxuriousness, is
forbidden him, especially if he be young. His diet is vegetables, fruit,
honey, cider, cheese, and brown-bread. Only when sick or infirm may he
take even fish or eggs. His table-service is pewter, plain earthenware,
a heavy wooden spoon and fork of his own making, and the bottom of a
broken bottle for a salt-cellar. If he wears the white cowl, he eats but
one such frugal repast a day during part of the year; if the brown robe,
and therefore required to do more work, he has besides this meal an
early morning luncheon called "mixt." He renounces all claim to his own
person, all right over his own powers. "I am as wax," he exclaims;
"mould me as you will." By the law of his patron saint, if commanded to
do things too hard, or even impossible, he must still undertake them.
For the least violations of the rules of his order; for committing a
mistake while reciting a psalm, responsory, antiphon, or lesson; for
giving out one note instead of another, or saying _dominus_ instead of
_domino_; for breaking or losing anything, or committing any fault while
engaged in any kind of work in kitchen, pantry, bakery, garden, trade,
or business--he must humble himself and make public satisfaction
forthwith. Nay, more: each by his vows is forced to become his brother's
keeper, and to proclaim him publicly in the community chapter for the
slightest overt transgression. For charity's sake, however, he may not
judge motives nor make vague general charges.
The Trappist does not walk beyond the enclosures except by permission.
He must repress ineffably tender yearnings that visit and vex the human
heart in this life. The death of the nearest kindred is not announced to
him. Forgotten by the world, by him it is forgotten. Yet not wholly.
When he lays the lashes of the scourge on his flesh--it may be on his
carious bones--he does it not for his own sins alone, but for the sins
of the whole world; and in his searching, self-imposed humiliations,
there is a silent, broad out-reaching of sympathetic effort in behalf of
all his kind. Sorrow may not depict itself freely on his face. If a
suffering invalid, he must manifest no interest in the progress of his
malady, feel no concern regarding the result. In his last hour, he sees
ashes strewn upon the floor in the form of a cross, a thin scattering of
straw made over them, and his body extended thereon to die; and from
this hard bed of death he knows it will be borne on a bier by his
brethren and laid in the grave without coffin or shroud.
VI
But who can judge such a life save him who has lived it? Who can say
what undreamt-of spiritual compensations may not come even in this
present time as a reward for bodily austerities? What fine realities may
not body themselves forth to the eye of the soul, strained of grossness,
steadied from worldly agitation, and taught to gaze year after year into
the awfulness and mystery of its own being and deep destiny?
"Monasticism," says Mr. Froude, "we believe to have been the realization
of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity; and the saint
in the desert was the apotheosis of the spiritual man." However this may
be, here at Gethsemane you see one of the severest expressions of its
faith that the soul has ever given, either in ancient or in modern
times; and you cease to think of these men as members of a religious
order, in the study of them as exponents of a common humanity struggling
with the problem of its relation to the Infinite. One would wish to lay
hold upon the latent elements of power and truth and beauty in their
system which enables them to say with quiet cheerfulness, "We are
happy, perfectly happy."
Excepting this ceaseless war between flesh and spirit, the abbey seems a
peaceful place. Its relations with the outside world have always been
kindly. During the Civil War it was undisturbed by the forces of each
army. Food and shelter it has never denied even to the poorest, and it
asks no compensation, accepting such as the stranger may give. The savor
of good deeds extends beyond its walls, and near by is a free school
under its control, where for more than a quarter of a century boys of
all creeds have been educated.
There comes some late autumnal afternoon when you are to leave the
place. With a strange feeling of farewell, you grasp the hands of those
whom you have been given the privilege of knowing, and step slowly out
past the meek sacristan, past the noiseless garden, past the porter's
lodge and the misplaced rabbits, past the dim avenue of elms, past the
great iron gate-way, and, walking along the sequestered road until you
have reached the summit of a wooded knoll half a mile away, turn and
look back. Half a mile! The distance is infinite. The last rays of the
sun seem hardly able to reach the pale cross on the spire which anon
fades into the sky; and the monastery bell, that sends its mellow tones
across the shadowy landscape, is rung from an immemorial past.
[Illustration: THE GARDEN.]