Saint Bruno
Priest, Founder of the Carthusians
(c. 1030–1101)
Saint Bruno was born around 1030 at Cologne in Germany and received an excellent education, eventually becoming one of the most distinguished teachers of theology and philosophy in Europe. He taught at the cathedral school of Reims with such brilliance that students came from great distances to hear him, and among his pupils was the future Pope Urban II. He served as chancellor of the archdiocese of Reims under Archbishop Manasses, whose corrupt administration he eventually had the courage to denounce publicly, a stance that cost him his position and led to his temporary exile.
The experience of these ecclesiastical struggles, combined with a deep personal attraction to contemplative solitude, moved Bruno to seek a way of life entirely removed from the world. Around 1084 he went with six companions to the Bishop of Grenoble, Saint Hugh, and asked for a place of solitude. Hugh gave them a remote and difficult valley in the Alps called the Chartreuse, the Grande Chartreuse, and there Bruno and his companions built the first Carthusian monastery.
The life they established combined the eremitical tradition of the desert fathers with elements of the communal monastic life: each monk lived in his own cell with a small garden, working, praying, and studying alone for most of the day, but coming together for the night Office and on Sundays and feasts for common prayer and a common meal. This combination of solitude and community, this middle way between the hermit life and the cenobitical life, became the Carthusian charism, which has remained essentially unchanged to this day.
Pope Urban II, his former student, summoned Bruno to Rome in 1090, and though Bruno tried to return to his beloved solitude, he was unable to leave Italy and established a second Carthusian foundation in Calabria, where he died on October 6, 1101. He was never formally canonised by a papal process but was inscribed in the Roman Martyrology in 1623. His feast is celebrated on October 6th.