Carthusians, or Order of St. Bruno

Bruno of Cologne had been appointed chancellor of the Diocese of Reims in 1075, involving him in the daily administration of the diocese.

The pious Bishop Gervais de Château-du-Loir, a friend to Bruno, had meanwhile been succeeded by Manasses de Gournai, a violent aristocrat with no real vocation for the Church.

Suspended at a council at Autunn 1077 at the urging of Bruno and the clergy at Reims, de Gournai had responded, in typical eleventh century fashion, by having his retainers pull down the houses of his accusers.

He had confiscated their goods, sold their benefices, and even appealed to the pope.

Bruno had discreetly avoided the cathedral city until in 1080 a definite sentence, confirmed by popular riot, had compelled Manasses to withdraw and take refuge with Emperor Henry IV, the fierce opponent of the ambitious current papacy of Gregory VII.

Upon the verge of being made bishop himself, Bruno had instead followed a vow he had made to renounce secular concerns and withdrew, along with two of his friends, Raoul and Fulcius, also canons of Reims.

Bruno's first thought on leaving Reims seems to have been to place himself and his companions under the direction of an eminent solitary, Saint Robert, who had recently (1075) settled at Sèche-Fontaine, near Molesme in the Diocese of Langres, together with a band of other hermits, who were later on (in 1098) to form the Cistercian Order, but he had soon found that this was not his vocation.

After a short stay he goes with six of his companions to Saint Hugh of Châteauneuf, Bishop of Grenoble.

The bishop, according to the pious legend, had recently had a vision of these men, under a chaplet of seven stars, and he installs them himself in 1084 in a mountainous and uninhabited spot in the lower Alps of the Dauphiné, in a place named Chartreuse, not far from Grenoble.

With St. Bruno are Landuin, Stephen of Bourg, and Stephen of Die, canons of St. Rufus, and Hugh the Chaplain, and two laymen, Andrew and Guerin, who afterwards will become the first lay brothers.

They build a little retreat where they live isolated and in poverty, entirely occupied in prayer and study, for these men have a reputation for learning, and are frequently honored by the visits of St. Hugh who becomes like one of them.

This is the beginning of the Carthusian Order, also called the Order of Saint Bruno, a Roman Catholic religious order of enclosed monastics.

Founded in 1084, the Carthusians will grow to include both monks and nuns.

The order has its own Rule, called the Statutes, rather than the Rule of Saint Benedict, and combines eremitical and cenobitic life.

Contemplatives who lead solitary lives in hermitages, the Carthusians come together only for certain religious ceremonies.

The name Carthusian is derived from the Chartreuse Mountains; Saint Bruno builds his first hermitage in the valley of these mountains in the French Alps.

The word charterhouse, which is the English name for a Carthusian monastery, is derived from the same source.

The same mountain range lends its name to the alcoholic cordial Chartreuse produced by the monks since the 1740s which itself gives rise to the name of the color.

The motto of the Carthusians is Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, Latin for "The Cross is steady while the world is turning."

Construction begins in 1356 on the Carthusian monastery, or charterhouse, of Chartreuse de Val-de-Benediction at Villeneuve-les-Avignon in France.

Mount Grace Priory, founded in 1398 by Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey, the son of King Richard II's half-brother Thomas, earl of Kent, is to be the last monastery established in Yorkshire, and one of the few founded anywhere in Britain in the period between the Black Death and the Reformation. (Closed in 1539 during the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII, the priory is today the best preserved and most accessible of the ten medieval Carthusian houses—charterhouses—in England.)

Jean Gerson, former chancellor of the University of Paris, after returning in 1419 from the Tyrol to France,  had gone to Lyon, where his brother was prior of the Celestine monastery.

Although Gerson is retired from active university life, the past decade at Lyon has been a time of great literary productivity.

He has produced a harmony of the gospels (the Monotesseron), works on the poems of the bible climaxing in a massive collection of twelve treatises on the Magnificat (Lk. 1:46-55), a commentary on the Song of Songs, as well as an extensive literary correspondence with members of the Carthusian order and others on mysticism and other issues of spiritual life.

Shortly before his death at sixty-five on July 12, 1429, he produces a tract in support of Joan of Arc.

Henry VIII’s 1534 Act of Supremacy separates the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.

Parliament recognizes Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England and, with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, has abolished the right of appeal to Rome.

It is only now that Pope Clement takes the step of excommunicating Henry and Thomas Cranmer, although the excommunication will not be not made official until some time later.

Henry has thus established a state church and placed ecclesiastical structures under the authority of the crown.

In many German principalities the same Protestant principle is enshrined through the formula “cuius regio eius religio,” or "to each prince his own religion."

The dominant religion, in other words, is to conform to that of the secular ruler.

Opposition to Henry's religious policies is quickly suppressed in England.

A number of dissenting monks, including the first Carthusian Martyrs, are executed and many more pilloried.

The most prominent resisters include John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, both of whom refuse to take the oath to the King.

Fisher, who has maintained his interest in education and humanism throughout his life, has reacted strongly against the spread of Lutheranism in England, and was openly opposed to the dissolution of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

He refuses to recognize royal supremacy and the end of papal jurisdiction over the church in England.

Neither Henry nor Cromwell seek to have the men executed; rather, they hope that the two might change their minds and save themselves.