Death of St Bruno

The founder of the Carthusian Order would have been around seventy when he died at his monastery in Italy, after calling his brethren to him to hear his last confession. Born in Germany, at Cologne about 1030, he spent most of his adult life in France. He was greatly admired for his learning and as an incomparable teacher in the diocese of Rheims, where he taught the future Pope Urban II. He was appointed chancellor of the diocese, but found himself involved in the opposition to a new and scandalous archbishop, who was accused of buying the office, and was forced to flee for his life.

In 1080 Bruno was offered the archbishopric of Rheims himself, but his experiences had persuaded him to withdraw from the busy world and become a hermit.  After a spell as a solitary near the Benedictine abbey of Molesme, in 1084 he and six others decided to look for a far more remote retreat. Going to Grenoble to consult the bishop, Hugh de Châteauneuf, who was one of Bruno’s former pupils, they found that the night before they arrived Hugh had dreamed of seeing seven stars settle in the isolated valley of Chartreuse in the high, bleak mountains of Savoy, some thirty miles away. The seven went there and built a chapel with small wooden huts round it for themselves. This eventually became the famous monastery of La Grande Chartreuse.

Bruno had no intention of founding an order and did not write a rule for himself and his companions, but their way of life set the pattern for subsequent Carthusian (from Chartreuse) foundations, where monks or nuns lived a lonely existence as hermits in individual cells within a monastery. Praying, studying and copying manuscripts, eating and sleeping were all done alone in the cell. The Carthusians led an ascetic life, wearing rough clothes and hair shirts, eating little and shunning meat altogether. They worshipped together in the monastery church, ate together on Sundays and feast days, and shared regular long walks, but solitariness was a fundamental characteristic of the Carthusian life, and Carthusians were rare.

In 1090, Urban II summoned his old master to be his advisor in Rome, where the reluctant Bruno lived disconsolately in the ruined Baths of Diocletian. The pope offered him a second archbishopric, but he begged to be allowed to return to solitude and founded another remote retreat at La Torre, near Cantazaro in Calabria. It was there, among the mountains that he loved that he died. He was canonised some 300 years later, in 1514.