A reflection for Tuesday within the Nineteenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Brunonis Confessoris, III classis (6 October)
Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam XIX post Octavam Pentecostes · I. Octobris
I. The Day in the Church’s Year
Two days ago, on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, the Church read the parable of the king’s wedding feast and the guest cast out because he had no wedding garment (Matt. 22:1-14). Today, on the feast of a man who spent his last twenty years in silence, she reads the sequel: the servants left behind while the Lord is at the wedding, waiting in the dark for Him to come home. Et vos similes hominibus exspectantibus dominum suum, quando revertatur a nuptiis — “and you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding” (Luke 12:36). The Sunday showed the banquet; the Tuesday shows the night watch that precedes it.
The month itself sets the scene. October opens the Office upon the Books of the Machabees, those chronicles of men who would not eat what the king commanded, and tomorrow the Church keeps the feast of the Most Holy Rosary. Between the Machabean refusal and the Rosary’s patient repetition stands Bruno of Cologne: a man who refused the world’s best offer and then spent two decades praying in a cell.
The Mass is Os justi from the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop. Its Introit sets the key: “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart” (Ps. 36:30-31). For the founder of the Carthusians, a man whose sons would be known for the stillness of their mouths, the Church chose to begin by praising what the mouth of the just man does when it is silent: it meditates.
II. The Epistle: He That Could Have Transgressed (Ecclus. 31:8-11)
“Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish: and that hath not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money nor in treasures. Who is he, and we will praise him? for he hath done wonderful things in his life. Who hath been tried thereby, and made perfect, he shall have glory everlasting. He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed: and could do evil things, and hath not done them: Therefore are his goods established in the Lord, and all the church of the saints shall declare his alms.”
The Son of Sirach asks a question that sounds almost incredulous: Quis est hic, et laudabimus eum? “Who is he, and we will praise him?” The sage has watched gold do its work on men long enough to know how rarely it leaves them clean. When he finds a man who has handled it without being handled by it, he says this man “hath done wonderful things” — mirabilia, the word Scripture usually reserves for the works of God.
The Fathers are united on the principle beneath the text: it is not possession that condemns but the direction of the heart. Clement of Alexandria, in the treatise Quis dives salvetur (“Who is the rich man that shall be saved?”), argues that the Lord’s command to the rich young man does not require throwing wealth into the sea but uprooting from the soul the passion for it; riches are an instrument, good in the hand of one who knows how to use them and ruinous in the hand of one who does not. St. Basil the Great, preaching to the rich of Caesarea, makes the same point from the other side: the bread you hoard belongs to the hungry, and the steward who thinks himself an owner has already transgressed. St. Augustine, in his sermons on the rich, distinguishes the man who has riches from the man whom riches have — the first can be saved; the second is already a possession.
Now note the strangest and most searching line of the passage: qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus — “he that could have transgressed, and hath not.” The text does not praise a man who was never tempted because he never had the means. It praises the man who had the means, saw the door, and did not go through it. Virtue here is measured precisely by opportunity refused.
Bruno was that man. Born at Cologne around 1030, he became master of the cathedral school of Reims, one of the most celebrated teachers in Christendom, then chancellor of the archdiocese. He had learning, income, reputation, and, when the simoniacal Archbishop Manasses was finally deposed, the realistic prospect of the see of Reims itself. He had already paid a price for opposing Manasses — his goods seized, his office lost for a time — and he had the vindication in hand. He could have transgressed, in the subtle way that good men transgress: by taking the honour he had earned. He did not. He walked away from Reims and, by 1084, was in the high wilderness of the Chartreuse with six companions. Later his own former pupil, now Pope Urban II, called him to Rome and offered him the archbishopric of Reggio. He refused that too.
Ideo stabilita sunt bona illius in Domino — “therefore are his goods established in the Lord.” What Bruno gave up was not destroyed. It was transferred to a safer account.
III. The Gospel: The Lord Returning from the Wedding (Luke 12:35-40)
“Let your loins be girt, and lamps burning in your hands. And you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you, that he will gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and passing will minister unto them…”
St. Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel to the people of Rome (Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 13), and his exposition has governed the Latin reading ever since. The girded loins, he says, signify chastity, the restraint of the flesh; the burning lamps signify good works, which give light to others. The two must go together: to restrain oneself from evil is not enough unless one also labours to do good, and good works are worthless if the one who performs them is still enslaved by the flesh. Self-denial without charity is a dark house; charity without self-denial is a lamp set on a rotting floor.
Gregory then reads the watches of the night — the second and the third — as the ages of a man’s life: boyhood, youth, old age. And here his pastoral mercy appears. Whoever failed to keep watch in the first watch must not despair, he says, but keep the second; whoever has let the second pass must still not lose the third. The Lord’s coming finds some at the dawn of life and some at its evening, and it is never too late to trim the lamp — though it is always dangerous to presume one will have time to do so.
What is the knock? Gregory answers with sobering precision: the Lord knocks when He announces the nearness of death by sickness, and we open to Him at once when we receive Him with love. The servant who dreads the knock opens slowly, because he does not want to see the One who comes as Judge. The servant who has watched opens immediately, because he has been waiting for a Friend.
St. Augustine adds the principle that keeps this Gospel from becoming mere apocalyptic speculation. Writing to Hesychius about the end of the world (Ep. 199), he observes that in whatever state each man’s last day finds him, in that state the last day of the world will find him. The question of when the world ends is God’s; the question of how one’s own end will find one is ours, and it is urgent. The thief who comes “at what hour you think not” is death itself, and Venerable Bede, following Gregory, identifies the house as the soul and the thief as the devil, who digs through the walls of a soul that its owner has left unguarded.
And then the most astonishing sentence in the passage: praecinget se, et faciet illos discumbere, et transiens ministrabit illis — “he will gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and passing will minister unto them.” The Master becomes the servant. Gregory reads transiens, “passing,” as the Lord’s passage from judgment to the kingdom: having judged, He passes over to reward, and feeds His watchful servants with the vision of His own light. St. Ambrose, in his exposition of Luke, likewise sees here the inversion of every earthly order: the one who waits on God is waited on by God.
IV. Synthesis: The Going Out and the Coming Home
St. Thomas teaches that all things come forth from God and return to Him — exitus and reditus — and that the rational creature makes the return by knowledge and love (cf. Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s two readings divide that movement between them with remarkable economy.
The Epistle concerns the exitus: the goods that have gone forth from God into the hands of men. Gold, learning, honour, office — they come from Him, and the question the Son of Sirach asks is whether a man will let them become the end of his journey or keep them as provisions for it. The rich man “without blemish” is the one who holds created goods as things received and does not make them his home.
The Gospel concerns the reditus: the Lord’s return, and with it the return of the soul to Him. The servants do not go out to find their Master; they wait in His house, faithful to the arrangement He left, until He comes home. Watching is the posture of the soul in the time between the gift and the reckoning.
The two readings meet in a single claim: detachment is the condition of vigilance. A man whose heart has gone after gold cannot watch for his Lord, because his eyes are elsewhere. The Lord Himself had said it in the verse immediately preceding today’s Gospel: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:34). Only the heart that has not invested itself in what passes is free to stay awake for what is coming.
Bruno lived both readings in sequence. The first half of his life was spent among the goods of the Epistle — and he was found without blemish in them, refusing the one great prize that would have compromised him. The second half was spent in the posture of the Gospel. The Carthusian life he founded is, in its whole structure, an institution of the night watch: the monks rise in the dark for Matins, the cell is a lamp kept burning, the solitude is a waiting. In his letter to his old friend Raoul le Verd, provost of Reims, Bruno recalls a day in a garden at Reims when he, Raoul, and a third companion were seized with the love of God and vowed together to leave the world. Bruno kept the vow; Raoul had delayed. Bruno writes, years later, from the Calabrian wilderness, describing the peace of solitude and gently, insistently urging his friend to fulfil what he had promised before it was too late. It is the parable of the third watch, written as a personal letter.
At his death on 6 October 1101, at the hermitage of La Torre in Calabria, Bruno made before his brethren a long profession of faith, confessing the Trinity, the Incarnation, and — explicitly — the true conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Lord. He had taught at Reims in the years of the Berengarian controversy; he died confessing the doctrine of the altar. It is a fitting final word for a man who had spent his life awaiting the Lord who “will gird himself and minister unto them.” The servant who watched went in to sit at the table where the Master serves.
V. For the Practice of the Faith
Few of us are called to the Chartreuse. But the readings make two demands that reach every state of life, and Bruno’s life shows how they are met.
Examine the opportunity refused. The Epistle praises the man “that could have transgressed, and hath not.” Ask yourself today not only what sins you have committed but what opportunities you are currently weighing: the honour you have earned and would like to collect, the advantage that is not quite dishonest, the purchase or promotion that would quietly become the centre of your attention. Name one, concretely, and decide before God whether it is a provision for the journey or a place you intend to settle.
Trim the lamp in the watch you are in. St. Gregory’s three watches are a mercy. Do not lament the watch you missed. Identify the one you are in — youth, middle years, old age — and do one thing today that keeps the lamp burning: a work of charity that gives light to another, done without being seen.
Keep a small silence. The Introit praises the mouth of the just man that meditates. Set aside fifteen minutes today of true silence — no reading, no listening, no speech — and simply remain before God as a servant awaiting his Lord. This is the Carthusian life in its smallest seed.
Write the letter you owe. Bruno wrote to Raoul to remind him of a promise made to God. If there is someone you know who once burned with the love of God and has let the flame dim, a word of encouragement — humble, unaccusing, as Bruno’s was — may be the knock that wakes them.
VI. The Collect
Sancti Brunonis Confessoris tui, quaesumus, Domine, intercessionibus adiuvemur: ut, qui maiestatem tuam graviter delinquendo offendimus, eius meritis et precibus nostrorum delictorum veniam consequamur. Per Dominum.
“We beseech Thee, O Lord, that we may be helped by the intercession of Thy holy Confessor Bruno: that we who have grievously offended Thy majesty by our sins may, through his merits and prayers, obtain the pardon of our offences. Through our Lord.”
It is notable what the Church asks for on this feast. She does not ask to imitate Bruno’s solitude or his learning. She asks for pardon, confessing that we have graviter — grievously — offended. The prayer of a saint who watched is placed on the lips of those who have slept. That is the whole economy of the Communion of Saints: the vigilance of the faithful servant is made to avail for the servants who were caught unready.
VII. Aspiration
O Bonitas!
Tradition holds that this was the exclamation constantly on Bruno’s lips: “O Goodness!” It is the cry of a man who has nothing left to want but God, and who finds Him sufficient. Repeat it slowly through the day, especially when the heart reaches for something it should let go.
Or, from the Gospel: Beati servi illi, quos, cum venerit dominus, invenerit vigilantes — “Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he cometh, shall find watching.”
VIII. For Further Study
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto several of our paths.
The Lives of the Saints path takes up Bruno’s companion piece, and with it the great monastic reformers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries — Romuald and the Camaldolese, Robert of Molesme and the Cistercians, and St. Hugh of Grenoble, the bishop who received Bruno into the Chartreuse after dreaming of seven stars.
The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats mental prayer and the discipline of silence, drawing on the Carthusian tradition of lectio divina as Guigo II describes it in the Ladder of Monks.
The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Eucharistic controversy of the eleventh century — Berengarius of Tours and the Church’s response — that forms the background to Bruno’s dying profession of faith.
The Sacred Liturgy path continues tomorrow with the Most Holy Rosary, the devotion of watchful repetition, in which the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries keep the lamp burning through every watch of the night.
Suggested devotion for today: the Sorrowful Mysteries, attending especially to the Agony in the Garden, where the Lord asked His disciples, “Could you not watch one hour with me?” (Matt. 26:40), and found them sleeping.
IX. A Note on Sources
Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims translation with the Vulgate where useful. The patristic witnesses are rendered in faithful paraphrase with their location rather than in direct quotation: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 13; St. Augustine, Epistula 199 (to Hesychius) and his sermons on the rich; St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam; Venerable Bede, In Lucae Evangelium Expositio; Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur; and St. Basil the Great, Homilia in illud: Destruam horrea mea. St. Thomas is cited at the level of the question. The principal facts of Bruno’s life — his mastership and chancellorship at Reims, the founding of the Chartreuse in 1084, his call to Rome under Urban II, his refusal of Reggio, and his death in Calabria in 1101 — rest on documentary witnesses, including his two surviving letters and the funeral roll circulated after his death. The tradition of his habitual exclamation O Bonitas is a pious tradition, received devotionally.
Sancte Bruno, ora pro nobis.