harmonize with the more authentic facts of Bruno's life. It is, however, a striking expression of the ascetic fear; it also reflects psychologic truth. Who but the man himself knows the naughtiness of his own heart? its never-to-be disclosed vile and morbid thoughts? The modern may realize this. Hamlet did. And it was just such a phase of self-consciousness as the mediaeval imagination would transform into a tale of horror. Bruno himself had been a learned doctor, a teacher, and the head of the cathedral school at Rheims; he had been a zealous soldier of the Church. In all this he had not found peace. The profession of a doctor of theology, even when coupled with more active belligerency for the Church, afforded no certain salvation. The story of the Paris doctor may have symbolized the anxieties which dwelt in Bruno's breast, until under their stimulus the yearnings of a solitary temper gathered head and at last brought him with six followers to Carthusia (la grande Chartreuse), which lies to the north of Grenoble. 1084 is the year of its beginning.
It was a hermit community, the brethren living two by two in isolated cells, but meeting for divine service in a little chapel. Camaldoli may have been the model. Bruno wrote no regula for his followers, and the practices of the Order were first formulated by Guigo, the fifth prior, in his Consuetudines Cartusiae, about the year 1130.[1] These permit a limited intercourse among the brethren, for the service of God and the regulation of their own lives. Yet the broader object was seclusion. Not only severance from the world, but the seclusion of the brethren from each other, in solitary labour and contemplation, was their ideal. The asceticism of these Consuetudines is of the strictest. And somehow it would seem as if in the Carthusian Order the frailties of the spirit and the lusts of the flesh were to be permanently vanquished by this set life of labour, meditation, and rigid asceticism. Carthusia nunquam reformata, quia nunquam deformata, remained true century after century. This long freedom from corruption was partly due to the
- ↑ Guigo was born in 1083 at St. Remain near Valence, of noble family (like most monks of prominence). There was close sympathy between him and St. Bernard, as their letters show. Cf. post. Chapter XVII.
