Posts Tagged ‘who lives in stillness’

Into Great Silence a documentary movie about Roman Catholic Cathusian monks, who lives in stillness

Monday, December 6th, 2010

I’ve been told by a friend (Matthijs) about a Roman Catholic Monastery located in France known under the name of Le grande chartreuse

He mentioned in a casual talk this monastery is one of the most interesting Roman Catholic Monastery. It’s basicly a Roman Catholic order of Cathusian monks who has decided to live in silence.

The monks there are allowed to speak just a bit and only on Sundays, the rest of the days there is a rule in the monastery that the monks live in complete silence.
This definitely catched my attention, since I’ve red in the Ancient Paterik a book about the sayings and livings of the early Holy Church fathers about this stillness practiced widely being in practice by the monks especially in the early ages after Christ’s resurrection.

I’ve red in that book that in the ancient times there were hermits who lived a live like as Hesychasts in complete silence. Some of this holy men I read in the old books haven’t told a word for many years (30 years!).

This from the modern stand point is completely impossible to achieve spiritual heroism.
Most of the monasteries we have in the Orthodox Christian world doesn’t any more keep this kind of silence practice, the only monasteries I know where they still have this stillness practice in our Orthodox Christian monasteries is among monasteries and brotherhoods situated on the the Holy Mount Athos

From that perspective it’s very interesting to see that the Roman Catholics has still monks who still live up to an ancient church practices.
It was quite interesting for me to read a bit more about the Grande Chartreuse monastery in wikipedia

A documentary movie was produced about the monastery by Philip Gröning . The movie came out in 2005 under the name Into a great silence . The movie director Philip Gröning spend 6 months in the monastery shooting the movie and he spend another 2.5 years to edit the film and prepare it for the general public.
That’s really a hell a lot of time. What is unique about the movie is it contains no commentaries or any sound effects added and everything was recorded without any artificial light.
Even the Cathusian monks loved the film. The movie trailer I found as a quite interesting one to see:

Here is the movie trailer;

Along with that I found it interesting to see a movie prepared by some pilgrim on his road towards the Grande Chartreuse monastery;

Enjoy 🙂