Encountering the sound of silence that recoils from public life: the Benedictines of La Trappe

Between Rouen and Le Mans, set deep in the Forêt du Perche – some 400,000 acres of beech and oak – skirted by still lakes, orchards and arable farmland, is the Benedictine Abbaye de La Trappe. It was here, in a period of decadence for 17th-century monasticism in France, that this eponymous branch of the Cistercian order was founded. The Trappists were infamously the strictest order in all Christendom, once described as a “bitter cactus-land of expiation”.

A brief history of La Grande Trappe, inflamed with pious faith since the 12th century, seems to swing between the most extreme fluctuations conceivable; between decadence, unrelenting observance, destruction, peace, influence, service and prayerful silence.

In its long history it has hosted James II in exile, Huysmans in decline, de Gaulle and Louis XVIII, Charles X – each in different postures of recoil from public life – and countless pilgrims besides.

The sobriquet is apt: all of those figures, weights that briefly sat on Europe’s balance in one way or another, returned to La Trappe in varying states of personal or spiritual crisis. Like so many others of Europe’s working monasteries, it is now once more being dragged reluctantly along a precipice of near-extinction. But the abbey’s turbulent history is in itself a sign of resilience in the face of threats posed by a secular Republic on an increasingly secular continent.

After decades of moral and spiritual decline – an age of “Hogarthian living” punctuated by “gargantuan pork joints”, as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in A Time to Keep Silence – the community was saved by the unlikely candidate of 17th-century France’s most accomplished playboy. Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé canonised the vie du monde with a zeal matched only by that which he later applied to the strictest known observance of the Benedictine rule as abbot of La Trappe.

De Rancé was one of the richest men in France by the age of 25, receiving an inheritance on the death of his father which incurred an interest that he could not humanly outspend. His godfather was Cardinal Richelieu, through whom he knew the Medici; his “companion” was the Duchesse de Montbazon, a woman double his age.

His biographer, François de la Rochefoucauld, suggested that her skull sat on the newly-mitred abbot’s desk in memento mori of both her and his previous life.

The ancient vapours of French court life by the end of the subject’s youth are intoxicating: La Rochefoucauld’s work reads as the progress of a terrifyingly intelligent, fox-hunting maniac who was appointed commendatory abbot of La Trappe in 1636 – as was customary for a man of his status. After a spectacular conversion of life, however, he finally visited his abbey in 1662; two years later, he was elected its abbot in the conventional religious way, and served in office until his health failed in 1695, five years before his death.  

Once more, France’s monasteries call for such a phenomenon, for figures with the vision to prove vocation as viable – and attractive – to Europe’s youth. Photographs of the community at La Trappe taken in 2000 show the abbey’s misericords with about 40 monks. At the time of writing, that number is 17 – with two novices. On a recent visit, I asked the père hôtelier why some supra-body – a Vatican envoy, motivated Parisian Catholics, the billionaire benefactors of Notre Dame – had not contrived a well-mapped campaign to promote the Benedictine vocation.

The response was the one my thoughtless optimism had warranted: “Il n’y a pas les chrétiens” (“there are no Christians”). La Trappe’s turbulent past is a constant element of this particular abbey: thrice razed, hijacked under the Terror (“that systemic war which impious sophists had waged against religion”, as Chateaubriand called it), sold by the state, emptied by state expulsion, bankrupted, then later bombed and occupied by Nazis.

But the testimonies of the Benedictines, or the Rule of  St Benedict itself, need not only be read, but witnessed as lived-out action in the 400 or so monasteries of the order across Europe. In Rod Dreher’s brilliant analysis of the practical crisis facing Christians in an atomised, “emotivist” society, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a post-Christian Nation (2017), he posits a solution based on the Benedictines that answered the comparable problem for Christians in the sixth-century Roman world: how to live in a society troubled by pestilence, corruption and war.

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Dreher’s answer was inspired by Alastair Macintyre’s understanding of the moral crisis facing the west in After Virtue (1981): that the reverence of maximal individual freedoms will lead to the total abandonment of all inherited social and moral norms, and the repudiation of any tradition that discloses a culturally binding narrative – religious or otherwise.

“If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages,” wrote Macintyre, “we are not entirely without hope…We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict.”

It is a condition, as Dreher puts it, that “approximates to barbarism” in which people are “governed only by their will to power” and without knowledge or care “about what they are annihilating”.

Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested that the book “answers secular purism with religious purism”: “by retreating to neat homogeneous monocultures, most separatists will end up doing what all self-segregationists do…They will close off the dynamic creativity of a living faith.”

But neither the author nor his critic acknowledges that the astute Benedictine analogy – which is still very real – is perhaps no small part of the solution for those who wish to outlive the “culture of death”.

“A sign of contradiction to modernity” no doubt, the working Benedictine monasteries afford the coherent, ascetic spiritual resort for both novitiate and pilgrim – an invaluable resource.

I had it explained to me that the entire Christian monastic principle since the Desert Fathers and even before that – which undoubtedly extends to any other theistic religion – hinges on one simple principle: the efficacy of prayer. CS Lewis wrote about the medievals having lived in “an enchanted world” – one hard to even conceptualise today – saturated in the greatest conceivable meaning.

This was not some nominalist or subjective sense of meaning in the mundane, but something, as visitors to these sacramental worlds still in existence will testify, all-consuming and real.

The Church would be much the poorer without it.

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Photo: The Benedictine Abbaye de La Trappe (file photo).

This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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