Excerpt from The Antiquary, Vol. 10
No monastic order has stamped its individuality on its buildings so completely as the Carthusian. In the case of the foundations of other orders, it may be difficult, not unfrequently impossible, to determine from the existing remains to which of the various monastic bodies the building belongs. In spite of marked differences of plan and arrangement, on which there will be an opportunity of speaking hereafter, it is not always possible to distinguish a Benedictine foundation from a Cistercian, or Cistercian from a Cluniac, or any of these from a house of the Austin Canons. But a Carthusian house is unmistakable. It never can be taken for anything but what it is. And the reason of this individuality of plan and arrangement lies in the individuality of the Carthusian rule. All the other chief monastic orders were by principle c?nobitic. The common life was the rule. Privacy was not in any way contemplated. The monk or canon was one of a brotherhood who slept together, who ate together, who worked together, who prayed together, and for whom the individual life was completely merged and lost in that of the community. The exact opposite of this form of religious life was that of the hermit, or solitary, occupying his single cell, apart from other human habitations, cultivating his own small patch of ground alone and unassisted, often with his separate smallchapel or oratory for his daily devotions. This solitary anchoritic life was the earliest form of monasticism; a term which originally signifying a religious life led in isolation, entirely apart from others, in process of time came to denote the c?nobitic system, where a number of religious persons retired from the world, its duties and its pursuits, and lived together under a common rule in a community.
The Carthusian system was a union of these two; the c?nobitic or common life, and the solitary life: the life of the hermit and that of the member of a religious community. St. Bruno"s ideal was a combination of the virtues of each mode of life, with an avoidance of the evils which experience had proved each was liable to. He desired, by his rule, to unite the strict austerity of the solitary with the mutual charities of the member of a brotherhood.
The severity of his rule (in the words of Archbishop Trench) exceeded that of all which had gone before, while it hardly left room for any that should come after to exceed it.
Each brother occupied a solitary dwelling, in which he lived alone, ate alone, worked alone, read and wrote and prayed alone, and slept alone, bound by an undeviating rule of the strictest austerity, and practising constant silence. "Prtecipue studium et pro-positum nostrum est silentio et solitudini cel la; vacare." (Consuetud., c. 14.) But it was the endeavour of the founder to correct the self-centred spirit and the intense religious selfishness, which was the deadly peril of the solitary, by a union in a fraternity bound together by common ties of worship, of the charities of life, and the combined pursuit of a common object. This object was, first, the eternal salvation of their souls, and then the benefit of the world by the books, to the copying of which, by the rule of their founder, they were commanded to devote the chief part of their time, each new copy of a holy book being, in the words of their Consuctudinarium, a new herald of the truth, so that the scribes became preachers with their hands.
This union of two opposite monastic systems was stereotyped in the buildings of the Carthusian order. Some of the most characteristic portions of an ordinary monastery were wanting, since there was no use for them.
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