The Foundation of the Carthusians (1084)

Nothing about the Carthusian foundation can be understood in isolation from its century. The 11th century was an age of immense Church reform and of a return to the wilderness that seized the whole of Latin Christendom. Bruno did not invent flight from the world: he gave it its most accomplished form.

The Gregorian renewal and contempt for the world

In the mid-11th century, the Western Church was emerging from a long crisis. Two evils were eating away at it: simony — the trafficking of offices and sacraments — and Nicolaitism — clerical concubinage.^[7] Against these disorders, a generation of reformers, gathered around Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), waged the struggle that gave the whole age its name: the Gregorian Reform. The century's eremitical movements were its exact spiritual counterpart: where reform purified the Church from above, eremitism purified it from below, by producing men who refused every compromise with the world.^[8]

Bruno was no spectator of this struggle: he was an actor in it. As chancellor of Reims, he denounced the simoniac archbishop Manasses of Gournay and helped bring about his fall (see below). His foundation was thus, in the literal sense, a fruit of the Gregorian Reform: the act of a man who, having fought corruption in the visible Church, chose to serve it otherwise — through the prayer and penance of the wilderness.^[9]

The great eremitical wave of the West

The longing for the wilderness did not begin with Bruno. For half a century it had been stirring the West and multiplying foundations. All sought to recover the life of the Eastern Desert Fathers, but grafted onto Latin monastic soil.

Romuald and the Camaldolese

The first great name is that of Saint Romuald (c. 952–1027). Around 1012, he founded in the Apennines above Arezzo the hermitage of Camaldoli, cradle of the Camaldolese order: an eremitical graft onto the Rule of Saint Benedict, in which hermits live in separate cells.^[10][11] His disciple Saint Peter Damian (1007–1072), at the monastery of Fonte Avellana, wrote a Life of Romuald and a Rule for Hermits, and became the great theorist of the solitary life placed at the service of reform.

Vallombrosa, Grandmont, and the wandering preachers

Other foundations followed, more cenobitic or more radical. Around 1036, Saint John Gualbert (d. 1073) founded the order of Vallombrosa in Tuscany. A little later, Saint Stephen of Muret established at Grandmont one of the austerest achievements of this movement.^[12] To the same generation belong the great wandering preachers of western France, such as Robert of Arbrissel, the future founder of Fontevraud. Everywhere, the same hunger: to leave the world for God alone.

What the founders of hermitages were seeking

These men did not copy one another; each improvised his own answer to the same problem: how to live as a hermit without losing oneself? Unbroken solitude exposes a man to illusion, sloth, and despair; common life, for its part, dissolves solitude in tasks and dealings. Camaldoli, Vallombrosa, and Grandmont were so many answers to this tension. Bruno's answer would be the most stable of all — so stable as to cross nine centuries without ever breaking.^[13]

The 1084 foundation was the fruit of a long maturation. The full story belongs to the biography of Saint Bruno; only what led to the wilderness is kept here.

The master of Reims and the Manasses affair

Bruno was born around 1030 in Cologne, into a Rhenish patrician family. Around 1057, Archbishop Gervase of Reims appointed him scholaster — head of the cathedral school — and he would teach for nearly twenty years, forming the clerical elite of his age, including the future Pope Urban II.^[14] Having become chancellor of the Church of Reims, he clashed with Archbishop Manasses of Gournay, a worldly and simoniac prelate. Bruno carried the complaints; the Council of Autun (1077) suspended Manasses, and that of Lyons (February 1080) confirmed his deposition. But the archbishop took revenge: Bruno lost his benefices and had to flee Reims around 1076–1077.^[15]

This ordeal was decisive: it detached Bruno from the clerical world of honours. When, after Manasses' fall, men thought of raising Bruno himself to the see of Reims, he refused. His decision was already made: to leave the world.^[16]

The legend of Raymond Diocrès

Carthusian tradition, fixed much later, links Bruno's conversion to a famous episode: that of Raymond Diocrès, a renowned master of Paris. At his funeral, the dead man is said to have sat up on his bier, three days running, to proclaim that he was accused, judged, then condemned before God's tribunal; shattered, Bruno then fled the world.^[17]

"By the just judgment of God, I am accused… judged… condemned." — Paraphrase of the three Latin sentences attributed to the corpse of Raymond Diocrès, according to the legend^[18]

This splendid tale is told neither by contemporaries nor by Bruno himself; its earliest mention goes back to the chronicle of Saint-Bertin, around the end of the 13th century, and it is detailed in a Life of Saint Bruno published by Josse Bade in 1524; it is illustrated as early as the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, then by Eustache Le Sueur's cycle.^[19] It must therefore be received for what it is: not a chronicle, but a parable dramatizing a conversion whose real causes — disgust at the intrigues of Reims, the call of solitude — are, for their part, perfectly historical. To present it as an established fact would be as excessive as dismissing it as pure invention.

The trial at Sèche-Fontaine with Robert of Molesme

Around 1083, Bruno first sought an experience of religious life. With a few companions, he placed himself under Saint Robert of Molesme — the future founder of Cîteaux — who led a small community of hermits at Sèche-Fontaine, near Molesme.^[20] The trial was brief. The formula did not satisfy Bruno's thirst for solitude: he needed a harsher, more withdrawn wilderness. He turned to a man whose holiness already shone across the Alps: the Bishop of Grenoble, Hugh.

Everything converged in June 1084. Bruno's meeting with the Bishop of Grenoble, the discovery of the site, and the hermits' settlement took only a few days, and that date remains the birth certificate of Chartreuse.^[21]

Saint Hugh of Grenoble and the dream of the seven stars

Tradition tells that, shortly before Bruno's arrival, Hugh of Châteauneuf, Bishop of Grenoble, saw in a dream God building a dwelling for His glory in a deserted place of his diocese, and seven stars showing him the way. The next morning, seven travellers — Bruno and his six companions — presented themselves to him. The bishop recognized a sign in this and embraced their plan at once.^[22][23]

"Seven stars, in a dream, showed Bishop Hugh the place where God wished to be served; when morning came, seven pilgrims knocked at his door." — Tradition reported by the Carthusian sources^[24]

The Carthusian sources themselves honestly note that this story, handed down by the earliest Lives of Saint Hugh, cannot be verified historically.^[25] It nonetheless expresses a solid reality: it was indeed Hugh of Grenoble who settled Bruno in his wilderness, surrounded him with protection, and remained until his death the young foundation's great friend and defender.

The Chartreuse wilderness: a place to disappear

The chosen place matches the vocation: a wild, enclosed valley of the Prealps, ringed with forests and rocks, in the Chartreuse massif, four leagues north of Grenoble.^[26] The altitude is harsh there, winter long, snow deep and dangerous — the 1132 avalanche would show it cruelly. This is no picturesque setting: it is a wilderness in the spiritual sense, a place where one can lose oneself to the world in order to find oneself in God. Hugh granted the hermits this remote territory, where no road led and no noise reached.

Bruno and the six companions

They were seven. Their names have come down to us: besides Bruno, four clerics — Landuin (the theologian, who would be the first prior), Stephen of Bourg and Stephen of Die, both canons of Saint-Ruf, and the priest Hugh, called "the Chaplain" — and two lay brothers, Andrew and Guerin, charged with manual work.^[27] This little band of seven men, mixing scholars and labouring brothers, was the seed of the entire order.

The primitive hermitage

The settlement was one of extreme poverty. The monks raised a few wooden huts opening onto a gallery, and a small oratory.^[28] They lived by the work of their hands, by silence, and by prayer. There was no great monastery, no liturgical splendour, no written rule: only men, a forest, and God. From this almost invisible embryo would come the mother house of a whole order — the Grande Chartreuse.

Bruno's originality was not to have written a rule — he wrote none — but to have found a balance no one had stabilized before him.

Hermits in community

The Carthusian lives as a hermit: each in his cell, a small individual house where he prays, reads, works, eats, and sleeps alone. Yet he is no absolute solitary: he joins his brothers for certain offices in church and for chapter. It is the synthesis of the Eastern wilderness and Western cenobitism: solitude without isolation, community without dispersal.^[29][30] The material layout expresses exactly this theology: the cells are set around a great cloister, after the manner of the ancient Eastern laurae.

This is the life described, as early as 1114–1115, by the most precious witness of the origins: Guibert of Nogent, in his autobiography De vita sua. He reports that a community of thirteen monks — the prior and twelve brothers — lived at Chartreuse, each in his own cell around the cloister, working, sleeping, and taking his meals there; they did not live together like other monks, receiving from the procurator only on Sundays the bread and vegetables which they cooked themselves, while a water channel brought water to each cell.^[31] This outside testimony, written by a contemporary who was no Carthusian, confirms that the way of life was already fixed in its essentials a generation after the foundation.

Neither Cluny nor Cîteaux

To measure Bruno's newness, he must be set against the two great monastic models of his age. The table below compares the three families.

Cluny embodied liturgical cenobitism in all its splendour; Cîteaux, founded in 1098 — fourteen years after Chartreuse — would seek a return to the "letter" of the Rule of Saint Benedict through work and stripped-down poverty.^[32] The Carthusians, for their part, reformed no existing order: they invented a third way, in which cellular solitude comes first and common life is reduced to the essential. This difference of nature explains a fact unique in Church history: because the Carthusians never aimed at power, they never had to reform.

The foundation could have died with its founder. It nearly scattered when Bruno left it; that it survived owes to the soundness of what he had laid down and to the faithfulness of those who stayed.

Departure for Rome and Calabria

Bruno's rest was brief: six years. In 1090, his former pupil Odo of Châtillon, now Pope Urban II, recalled him to Rome for the Church's counsel, in the thick of the struggle against the antipope and the emperor.^[33] Bruno obeyed reluctantly. Before leaving, he appointed Landuin to succeed him at the head of Chartreuse.

Refusing every dignity at Rome — including the archbishopric of Reggio, which tradition says was offered to him — Bruno obtained from the pope leave to return to solitude, but in Italy. In 1090, he founded in Calabria the hermitage of Santa Maria della Torre, where he died on 6 October 1101.^[34][35] His life belongs to his own article; what matters here is that the founder died far from his first foundation, without having endowed it with any written law.

Landuin, first guardian of the heritage

Bruno's departure left the young community without its soul. It wavered. It is Landuin's merit, as first prior, to have kept the founder's intuition alive through the critical years that followed. Without him, the Chartreuse experiment might have remained a flash in the pan, one of those countless 11th-century eremitical foundations that died out with their initiators. The Grande Chartreuse, instead, held firm — firm enough for a man of genius, a generation later, to give it its juridical frame.

If 1084 is the birth certificate of Chartreuse, it is in 1127 that the order of Carthusians was truly born — the day Bruno's way of life ceased to be an oral tradition and became a written law.^[36]

Guigo I, fifth prior

Guigo I, born around 1082, entered Chartreuse and became its fifth prior in 1109, at twenty-seven years of age.^[37] He would govern the mother house for over twenty-five years, until his death in 1136. A man of government and a spiritual man, he is the true organizer of the nascent order: under him, Chartreuse spread daughter houses, acquired a law, and became a family of houses.

The Consuetudines Cartusiae (1127)

At the request of Bishop Hugh of Grenoble and of the priors of the young daughter houses, Guigo wrote the Customs of Chartreuse (Consuetudines Cartusiae), which he completed in 1127.^[38][39] The foundations adopting the Chartreuse life demanded a precise framework: Guigo set down in writing what had until then been handed on by example.

The text has neither the form of a rule nor of a constitution: it simply describes the concrete usages of Carthusian life.^[40] Yet this description became, in fact, the order's fundamental legislative text. The Customs would be glossed, completed, then recast as Statutes over the centuries — but always from this nucleus. The detail of that legislative evolution belongs to the article on the order.

What the Customs fixed

Guigo's Customs codified everything that makes the Carthusian: the ordering of the cell and of the day, the place of the night offices and of Mass, silence and fasting, manual work — including the copying of manuscripts, by which the Carthusians wished to "preach with their hands" — the role of the lay brothers, and the government of the house by the prior.^[41][42] The great critical edition of reference today is that of Sources Chrétiennes (no. 313), established and translated by a Carthusian.^[43]

Guigo was not only a legislator: he was also a spiritual master, author of the Meditations that rank among the jewels of monastic literature. But his historic masterpiece remains this sober customary: without it, Bruno's intuition would never have taken root.

The mountain that sheltered the monks nearly destroyed them. On 30 January 1132, after forty-eight years of existence, an avalanche devastated the first Chartreuse site, sweeping away the buildings and part of the community: six monks were killed, and a seventh, found alive twelve days later under the snow, died the same day.^[44] The catastrophe was terrible for so small a house.

Guigo I, then prior, took the decision that saved the future: not to rebuild on the same spot, but to move the house lower down the valley, to the site the Grande Chartreuse still occupies today, better sheltered from snow slides.^[45] That move, dictated by tragedy, gave the mother house its definitive site. The foundation had nearly perished; it emerged rooted for centuries.

As long as Chartreuse remained a single house, it was only an experiment. It was the spread of its daughters, then their federation, that gave birth to an order in the full sense.

The first daughters

From Guigo's priorate onward, other wildernesses opened on the Chartreuse model. The first daughter was the charterhouse of Portes, in the Ain, founded around 1115. Saint-Sulpice and Meyriat followed, then Les Écouges, Durbon, and Sylve-Bénite — and, later, Mont-Dieu in the Ardennes.^[46] Each new house adopted the usages of Chartreuse — soon fixed in writing in Guigo's Customs, precisely to answer this need for unity.

The first General Chapter (1140) and Saint Anthelm

These houses were at first independent of one another. The decisive step toward an order was taken in 1140 — the order's date; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia for its part gives 1142 —, under Saint Anthelm of Chignin, seventh prior of the Grande Chartreuse: the meeting of the first General Chapter.^[47] This periodic assembly of the priors, chaired by the prior of the Grande Chartreuse, established the liturgical and disciplinary unity of the houses and federated them into a single body. Anthelm, who would later become Bishop of Belley, is rightly regarded as the true organizer of the order after Guigo: he turned a network of kindred foundations into a structured institution. It was the same institutional movement that, at the same period, gave Cîteaux its Charter of Charity.

The first nuns

Chartreuse's radiance reached women too. Around 1145, a community of nuns settled at Prébayon, in Provence, asked to be attached to the order. The Carthusians sent John of Spain, prior of Montrieux, to hand on the Customs to them and form them in the Carthusian spirit.^[48] Thus was born the order's women's branch, which still exists; its own history is treated in the article on the order.

Two mottos for a single fidelity

From this foundation, tradition has drawn two formulas that sum it up. The first is the order's motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis — "the Cross stands firm while the world turns."^[49]

"Cartusia numquam reformata quia numquam deformata." "The Charterhouse never reformed because never deformed." — Ancient saying of the order^[50]

This second, later formula tells of the miracle of continuity that began that June day in 1084. Nine centuries after the act of the seven hermits, that unbroken fidelity remains the fairest fruit of their foundation.

"What good, what divine joy the solitude and silence of the wilderness hold in store for those who love them! There the eye, by the clarity of its gaze, wounds the Bridegroom with love." — Saint Bruno, Letter to Raoul le Verd^[51]

Bruno, who thought only of disappearing into God, had unknowingly opened a path on which others would walk to this day. His Chartreuse wilderness became the source of a silent river: the Carthusian Order.

• Primary sources: Saint Bruno's two Letters (to Raoul le Verd; to his Carthusian sons) and the writings of the first priors, edited and translated in Lettres des premiers chartreux, Sources Chrétiennes nos. 88 and 274 (Éd. du Cerf); the Customs of Chartreuse (Consuetudines Cartusiae) of Guigo I, Sources Chrétiennes no. 313; Guibert of Nogent, De vita sua (Autobiography), book I, for the earliest outside description of primitive Chartreuse.
• Reference studies: André Ravier, Saint Bruno, le Chartreux; Bernard Bligny, Saint Bruno, le premier chartreux (Rennes, Ouest-France, 1984), a leading historian of medieval Chartreuse.
• Notices: Catholic Encyclopedia, artt. "Charterhouse" and "The Carthusian Order" (New Advent); the Carthusians' official site (chartreux.org), "History" pages.
• Related Ignispedia articles: the biography of Saint Bruno the Carthusian; the Carthusian Order (the rule, the monk's life, spirituality, nine centuries of history); Saint Hugh of Grenoble, who gave the wilderness; Pope Urban II, Bruno's former pupil; the Cistercian Order, the century's other great monastic offspring; the Desert Fathers, distant models of Carthusian solitude.