Sanctus Bruno, Confessor — for his feast on the sixth day of October, III classis
Os iusti meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua eius loquetur iudicium: lex Dei eius in corde ipsius. “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The law of his God is in his heart.” — Introit of the Mass, from Psalm 36:30-31
I. Identitas et Origines
Bruno was born at Cologne about the year 1030, of a family of standing in that city. The surname Hartenfaust sometimes given to his house appears only in writers of the sixteenth century and later, and is better left as a pious tradition than asserted as a fact. What is certain is that he was a Rhinelander by birth, that he received his first formation at Cologne, where he was made a canon of the collegiate church of St. Cunibert, and that while still young he was sent to the cathedral school of Reims, then one of the great schools of Latin Christendom.
The older lessons of the Breviary say that he studied at Paris. The University of Paris did not yet exist, and the formation that shaped him was at Reims; the Breviary here follows the habits of a later age, which supposed that every learned man of France must have passed through Paris. The correction costs the saint nothing.
He remained in Reims for the better part of forty years, and he became its most celebrated teacher. That is the first fact to hold about him: the founder of the most silent order in the Church was, for most of his life, a man who talked for a living, and talked well.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
About the year 1056 he was made scholasticus, master of the cathedral school of Reims, and he governed it for some twenty years. He taught the liberal arts and above all the Sacred Page — the Psalter and the Epistles of St. Paul — and his pupils carried his name across France and Italy. Among them, by the common account, was Odo of Châtillon, who would one day sit on the throne of Peter as Blessed Urban II. Commentaries on the Psalms and on the Pauline Epistles have come down under Bruno’s name; the first is probably his in substance, the second more likely the work of his school.
In 1075 he was made chancellor of the church of Reims, and here his life ran into the great struggle of his century. The archbishop, Manasses de Gournay, had obtained his see by simony and governed it as a lord governs a fief. Bruno, with others of the chapter, denounced him to the papal legate Hugh of Die. The archbishop retaliated: he stripped his accusers of their goods and offices, and Bruno was driven from the city. He did not yield. The case went to Rome, and in 1080 St. Gregory VII deposed Manasses. Bruno had taken the side of the reform of the Church against the corruption of her own prelates, and he had paid for it.
It is at this point, when vindication was in his hands and the way to high office lay open — there were those in Reims who wished to see him archbishop — that his life turns. In a letter written many years later from Calabria to his old friend Raoul le Verd, he recalls an afternoon in the garden of a certain Adam at Reims, where he, Raoul, and a third companion named Fulcius spoke together of the false delights and passing riches of the world and of the joys of eternal glory, and, burning with divine love, vowed to leave the world and take the monastic habit. Raoul did not keep the vow, and Bruno’s letter gently, insistently reminds him of it. Bruno kept it.
He went first, about 1082, to Robert of Molesme — the same Robert who would afterwards found Cîteaux — and under his guidance lived for a time as a hermit at Sèche-Fontaine. But he was seeking a stricter solitude than this, and in 1084, with six companions, he came to Grenoble and presented himself to its bishop, St. Hugh. The companions were Landuin, who would succeed him; two canons of Saint-Ruf, both named Stephen; Hugh, a priest; and two laymen, Andrew and Guerin. The tradition, preserved in the Life of St. Hugh written by Guigo the Carthusian, holds that the bishop had seen in a dream seven stars going before him into the mountains of his diocese, and recognised the seven men when they arrived. He led them himself, about the feast of St. John the Baptist, into the wild valley of the Chartreuse.
There, high in the Alps, they built a small oratory and a cluster of wooden cells beside it, each monk living alone with his prayer, his reading, and the labour of his hands, and coming together only for the Night Office, the conventual Mass, and on certain days for a common meal. Bruno wrote no rule. The Carthusian Consuetudines were set down a generation later by the fifth prior, Guigo I, who claimed only to be recording what the first fathers had done. The Order, in this sense, was formed less by a legislator than by an example.
What was the virtue of that example? Guigo, in his account of the first Carthusians, notes that they were so poor that they would accept no gold or silver for their church except a single chalice, but so eager for books that they laboured to copy them, so that they might preach the word of God with their hands since they could not do it with their mouths. In that one detail the master of Reims survives inside the hermit of the Chartreuse: he has given up the chair, not the Page.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
The solitude lasted six years. In 1090 his old pupil, now Pope Urban II, summoned him to Rome to serve as his counsellor.
It was the hardest obedience of his life, and he made it. The community at the Chartreuse, deprived of its father, scattered for a time and then, under Landuin, returned and held its ground. Bruno came to a Rome torn by the schism of the antipope Guibert, who called himself Clement III and held the city in arms, and he followed the papal court when it was driven south into the Norman lands. He served the Pope in the cause of the reform as he had served it at Reims. Urban offered him the archbishopric of Reggio in Calabria; he refused it.
What he asked instead was leave to return to the desert, and the Pope, unwilling to lose him altogether, granted it on condition that he stay in Italy. In 1091, with the support of Count Roger of Sicily and Calabria, he founded the hermitage of Santa Maria della Torre in the wooded uplands of the diocese of Squillace, and beside it the house of Santo Stefano del Bosco. There he lived his last ten years, in the same manner as at the Chartreuse, now as the father of two families of sons on either side of the Alps. A pious tradition relates that he appeared in a dream to Count Roger during the siege of Capua in 1098 and warned him of a treachery being plotted in his camp, and that the count, finding the warning true, endowed the hermitage in gratitude.
From Calabria he wrote the two letters that are our surest window into his soul — the one to Raoul le Verd already mentioned, and one to his sons at the Chartreuse, written after Landuin had crossed the mountains to visit him. These letters, with the profession of faith he made at his death, are almost all we have from his own hand.
IV. Mors et Cultus
When he knew that death was near, he gathered his brethren, made before them a general confession of his whole life, and then a profession of faith which they wrote down and preserved. In it he confessed the Holy Trinity at length and with precision, and then the sacraments, ending with an explicit confession that the bread and wine consecrated on the altar are the true Body and true Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ — a pointed affirmation in an age still shaken by the errors of Berengarius. The old schoolmaster died a theologian. He died on Sunday, the sixth of October, 1101.
His brethren sent a mortuary roll through the churches of Europe to ask prayers for his soul, as was then the custom, and the churches wrote their responses on it. Some hundred and seventy-eight entries survive, from Italy, France, and England, many in verse and many praising his learning, his eloquence, and his holiness. It is one of the most remarkable contemporary witnesses to the reputation of any medieval saint.
He was never formally canonized. The Carthusians, who seek to be hidden, were in no haste to have their father proclaimed. In 1514 Leo X gave them leave, by oral approval, to keep his feast; in 1623 Gregory XV extended it to the whole Church. His relics rest at Serra San Bruno in Calabria, the successor of Santo Stefano del Bosco.
From the later Middle Ages a legend circulated that Bruno’s conversion was caused by the funeral of a celebrated Paris doctor, Raymond Diocrès, who rose three times from his bier to declare that he had been accused, judged, and condemned by the just judgment of God. The story is not found in any early source; it contradicts Bruno’s own account of his conversion in the letter to Raoul; and it was removed from the Roman Breviary in the revision under Urban VIII. It remains a memorable sermon, but it is not his life.
The Order he founded has kept its observance with a constancy almost unique in the Church’s history, and is commonly praised in the phrase Cartusia numquam reformata, quia numquam deformata — the Charterhouse never reformed, because never deformed. Its motto is Stat crux dum volvitur orbis: the Cross stands steady while the world turns.
In the traditional Roman calendar the feast is kept on the sixth of October with the Mass Os iusti from the Common of Confessors not Bishops. The reformed calendar keeps it on the same day.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The Mass of the day reads two passages that might have been written for him. The Epistle praises the man “that hath not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money nor in treasures,” who “could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed: and could do evil things, and hath not done them” (Ecclus. 31:8-10). Bruno had the chancellorship of Reims, the expectation of its see, and the ear of a Pope, and he put each of them down. The Gospel is the parable of the servants whose loins are girt and whose lamps are burning, waiting for their lord “whether he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch” (Luke 12:35-38). Every night since 1084, at the hour Christ named, the bell of the Chartreuse has called the monks from their cells to the Office.
His own words, few as they are, repay attention.
To Raoul, he writes of the solitude of Calabria and of what silence gives to those who love it: that only those who have experienced it can know what usefulness and divine joy the solitude and silence of the desert bring; that there strong men may recollect themselves and dwell within; that there, by the labour of contemplation, the eye is purified which the Bridegroom wounds with love, and by which, made clean, God is seen. (Letter to Raoul le Verd, paraphrased.)
To his sons at the Chartreuse, he writes with particular joy of the lay brothers, men who could not read. He rejoices that, though they are unlettered, Almighty God writes with His own finger on their hearts not only love but knowledge of His holy law; that they show by their works what they love and what they know; that they keep true obedience, which is the fulfilment of God’s commands, with care and zeal. (Letter to the Carthusians, paraphrased.) The greatest teacher of his generation, at the end of his life, found the summit of wisdom in men who had never opened a book — lex Dei eius in corde ipsius, as the Introit says. It is the same lesson that the Gospel teaches on the day of St. Joseph Calasanctius: to be taught first what a child is.
And it is in the same spirit that his profession of faith ends, not in a treatise, but in a confession and an act of trust. Bruno did not leave the world because he despised learning. He left it because he had learned enough to know what learning was for.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the day:
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 Saint Bruno, Thy Confessor: that we, who by grievous sin have offended Thy majesty, may by his merits and prayers obtain the pardon of our offences. Through our Lord.”
It is worth noticing what the Church asks on the feast of a contemplative. Not lights in prayer, nor sweetness, nor the gift of silence — but pardon. The Carthusian solitude is first of all penitential; the hermit goes into the desert to weep for his sins and the sins of the world, and the Collect, with a characteristic Roman sobriety, asks for the one thing every sinner needs before any other.
VII. Aspiratio
O Bonitas! — “O Goodness!”
Tradition attributes this brief cry to St. Bruno as his habitual ejaculation, and it is carved beneath his image in many a Charterhouse. Repeat it slowly through the day: it is the whole of contemplation in two words.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
The Lives of the Saints path continues with the founders of the eleventh-century monastic renewal: St. Romuald and the Camaldolese, St. Robert of Molesme, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, with whom the Carthusians maintained a warm friendship. The Church History path treats the Gregorian Reform and the struggle against simony and lay investiture in which Bruno fought at Reims, and the pontificate of his pupil Urban II. The Spiritual Practices path takes up silence, solitude, and mental prayer as they may be lived by those whom God has not called to the cloister. And the East-West Comparative path may consider the Calabria of Bruno’s last years, still thick with Greek monasteries, where the father of the Latin hermits ended his life among the heirs of the Eastern desert.
Practice
Examine. Where do I allow noise — of speech, of screens, of my own thoughts — to stand between me and God? Not “do I pray enough,” but this: where, today, did I choose distraction when silence was available to me?
Do. Keep a quarter of an hour of real silence today, with no reading and no device, before the Blessed Sacrament if possible or else in your own room. Bruno’s letters promise nothing to those who merely admire solitude; they speak to those who enter it.
Pray. The Collect of the day, given above, with attention to its petition for pardon; and, if you are able, the Psalms of Compline before sleep, in union with the Carthusians who will rise in the night to pray for you.
Devote. The Fourth Joyful Mystery, the Presentation, in which the aged Simeon, who had waited long in the Temple, takes the Child in his arms and is ready to depart in peace; or a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, with the profession of faith Bruno made on his deathbed renewed in your own words.
Sancte Bruno, pater eremitarum, ora pro nobis.