Carthusians (Order of Carthusians)

The Carthusians are the most austere of the Western contemplative orders, and their proudest claim is a negative one: that they have never needed reforming because they never declined.

Hermits in community

The order was founded by Bruno of Cologne, who withdrew with six companions to the mountainous site of the Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble in 1084. Its form is distinctive, a compromise between the hermit and the monastery: each monk lives alone in a cell opening onto a private garden, keeping silence, praying, studying and working by himself, and the community gathers only for certain of the offices and for a weekly walk and meal together. The life is one of solitude supported by a light communal framework, and it is deliberately hidden, the order shunning publicity and permitting few visitors.

Stability across nine centuries

The Carthusian boast, that the order was never reformed because it was never deformed, is close to true: it has kept its rule with unusual constancy since the eleventh century and has never split into observances as the Benedictines and Cistercians did. It has always remained small, its houses few and its numbers deliberately limited, and it admits both monks and, in separate houses, nuns. The green liqueur made by the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, whose recipe the order keeps, is the one point at which this most enclosed of orders touches the ordinary world, and it funds the silence rather than interrupting it.

Carthusian tradition sums up its own history in a single, often repeated claim, that the order was never reformed because it was never deformed, meaning that unlike almost every other medieval monastic family the Carthusians never drifted far enough from Bruno of Cologne's original austerity at the Grande Chartreuse in 1084 to require the kind of corrective movement that produced the Cistercians, the Trappists or the Capuchins. Whatever the claim's exact accuracy, the order's practice has stayed close to its founding pattern of largely solitary life within a shared enclosure for an unusually long time, surviving even the suppression of religious houses during the French Revolution, when the Grande Chartreuse itself was seized and the community dispersed, only to be reoccupied by returning Carthusians once conditions allowed.

The monastery is also the source of one of the order's better known points of contact with the outside world: the herbal liqueur Chartreuse, produced from a recipe the monks have kept since the seventeenth century, remains a rare instance of an enclosed contemplative order maintaining a continuously operating commercial product across several centuries, a practical link to the wider economy that sits oddly beside an order otherwise defined by withdrawal from it.