CARTHUSIANS, an order of monks founded by St. Bruno (q.v.). In 1084 Bruno and his six companions presented them selves before the bishop of Grenoble and explained to him their desire to lead an ascetic life in a solitary place. He pointed out to them a desolate spot named Chartreuse, on the mountains near Grenoble, rocky and precipitous, and snow-covered during a great portion of the year, and told them they might there carry out their design. They built themselves three huts and an oratory, and gave themselves up to a life of prayer, silence and extreme austerity. After a few years Bruno was summoned to Rome by Urban II., as an adviser in the government of the Church, c. 1090; but after a year or so he obtained permission to withdraw from Rome, and was able to found in the forests of Calabria near Squillace a sec ond, and later on a third and a fourth monastery, on the same lines as the Chartreuse. At one of these south Italian foundations Bruno died in II01. On leaving the Chartreuse he had appointed a successor as superior, and the institute steadily became more settled and developed.
There was no written rule before 113o, when Guigo, the fifth prior of the Grande Chartreuse, reduced to writing the body of customs that had been the basis of Carthusian life (Migne, Patrol. Lat. cliii. 631) ; enlargements and modifications of this code were made in 1259, 1367, 1509 and 1681 : this last form of the statutes is the present Carthusian rule.
The life is very nearly eremitical: except on Sundays and feasts, the Carthusians meet only three times a day in the church— for the Midnight Office, for Mass and for Vespers; once a week, on Sundays (and feasts) they have their meal in the refectory, and once a week they have recreation together and a walk outside enclosure; the rest of their time is passed in solitude in their hermitages, which are built quite separate from one another. Each hermitage is a house, containing living-room, bedroom and oratory, workshop and store-room, and has a small garden attached ; the monks are supplied with such tools as they wish, and with such books as they need from the library.
The manner of life has been kept up almost without variation for eight centuries : among the Carthusians there have never been any of those revivals and reforms that are so striking a feature in the history of other orders—"never reformed, because never deformed." The Carthusians have always lived thus wholly cut off from the outer world, each one in almost entire isolation. They introduced and have kept up in western Europe a life resembling that of the early Egyptian monks, as under St. Anthony's guidance monasticism passed from the utter individualism of the first her mits to the half eremitical, half cenobitical life of the Lauras (see MONASTICISM).
The first English Charterhouse was established in 1178 at Witham by Selwood Forest, and at the Dissolution there were nine, the most celebrated being those at Sheen in Surrey and at Smithfield in London. The Carthusians were the only order that made any corporate resistance to the ecclesiastical policy of Henry VIII. The community of the London Charterhouse stood firm, and the prior and several of the monks were put to death in under circumstances of barbarous cruelty. In Mary's reign a com munity was reassembled at Sheen, and on her death it emigrated, fifteen in number, to Flanders, and finally settled in Nieuport ; it maintained itself as a British community for a considerable time, but gradually dwindled, and the last of the old British Car thusian stock died in 1831. There is now a Charterhouse in Britain established at Parkminster in Sussex in 1833 ; the community for the most part is made up of foreigners.
At the French Revolution the monks were driven from the Grande Chartreuse, but they returned in 1816; they were again driven out under the Association Laws of 1901, and the commu nity of the Grand Chartreuse is now settled in an old Certosa near Lucca. Of late years the community of the Grande Chartreuse has consisted of some 4o choir-monks and 20 lay brothers. Before the expulsions of 1901 there were in all some 20 Charterhouses in France.
A word may be added as to the famous liqueur, known as Chartreuse, made by the monks. At the Revolution the property of the Carthusians was confiscated, and on their restoration they recovered only the barren desert in which the monastery stood, and for it they had to pay rent. Thus they were for some years in want even of the needful means of subsistence. Then the liqueur was invented as a means of supplying the wants of the community; it became a great commercial success and produces a large yearly income. This income the monks have not spent on themselves, nor does it accumulate. The first charge is the main tenance of the Grande Chartreuse and the other Charterhouses, and out of it have been built and established the new monasteries of the order, as at Dusseldorf, Parkminster and elsewhere; but by far the largest portion has been spent on religious and charitable purposes in France and all over the world.