Chartreuse and the Carthusians

I was intrigued by The Wall Street Journal about the Carthusians of Chartreuse limiting their production of that famous liqueur, published on Good Friday: "The Monks Who Make Chartreuse Don't Care About Fancy Cocktails"! The Robb Report offers these two quotations from the article, which is of course behind a paywall:

“The monks are not in this to drive Mercedes and live a lavish life,” Tim Master, the senior director of spirits at Frederick Wildman and Sons, the only American importer of Chartreuse, told the WSJ. . . .

“Unlike nearly all other companies in the world, the monks don’t care about constant growth,” Father Michael Holleran, a former Carthusian monk who led Chartreuse production in the late 1980s, told the WSJ.

The Carthusians, according to their external partner in production have decided they needed to “protect their monastic life” and were “not looking to grow the liqueur beyond what they need to sustain their order.” So production has been capped at about 1.2 million bottles a year, about 10 percent less than in 2021."

The Robb Report article comments: 

Perhaps if the monks shared the recipe, they wouldn’t have to be the only ones in charge of meeting demand. But that seems even more unlikely than increasing output . . .

And The Wall Street Journal article ends with a quotation from Joseph McDonald from a Nashville retailer: "In two years you'll probably have eight companies trying to knock that recipe off" (p. A9 of the print edition for Friday, April , 2023.

As the Carthusian motto states: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (The Cross Stands Still as the World Turns).

Reading the reaction to the production curtailment of the yellow and green shades of the liqueur as afficiandoes try to understand the monks' decision reminded me of Dom David Knowles' appreciation of the Carthusians of London Charterhouse, dying of dehydration and starvation during Henry VIII's reign:

Rarely indeed in the annals of the Church have any confessors of the faith endured trials longer, more varied or more bitter then these unknown monks. They had left the world, as they hoped, for good; but the children of the world, to gain their private ends, had violated their solitude to demand of them an approval and a submission which they could not give. They had long made of their austere and exacting Rule a means to the loving and joyful service of God; pain and desolation, therefore, when they came, held no terrors for them. When bishops and theologians paltered or denied they were not ashamed to confess the Son of Man. They died faithful witnesses to the Catholic teaching that Christ had built his Church upon a rock.

From Saints and Scholars: Twenty-Five Medieval Portraits, with St. John Houghton, holding his heart, on the cover (based on the painting by Zurbaran).

Now, I'm not saying that cocktail drinkers are as bad as Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, but there is a gap in understanding how the monks of Chartreuse, in their Great Silence, regard their eternal purpose versus the world's demand for a liqueur! 

But notice what the "world" says: you should meet our demands! Or you should give us the recipe! When you don't, we will steal (knock off) your recipe and make the liqueur ourselves!

Nor am I saying that these monks are making a decision as meritorious as that of the Carthusians under Henry VIII's demands, but still, they are trying to remain true to their purpose and their way of life without concern for how the world turns. 

As The Wall Street Journal article headline on the front page says: "The Monks . . . Don't Care"!

I have never tasted Chartreuse, by the way, and if I was going to spend that much for something, it would be for a book!

Saint Bruno of Cologne, pray for us!

Saint John Houghton and all the Carthusian martyrs of England, pray for us!

The Exeter Madonna at The Frick

At The Frick in New York City, an exhibition explores some artifacts and paintings from the world of the Carthusians, associated with the Charterhouse of Bruges:

This exhibition brings together two masterpieces of early Netherlandish painting commissioned in the 1440s by the Carthusian monk Jan Vos, reuniting them for only the second time in their history. The panels — the Frick’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos, by Jan van Eyck and his workshop, and The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos by Petrus Christus, now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin — were commissioned by Vos during his tenure as prior of the Carthusian monastery (or charterhouse) of Bruges. The panels are presented with Carthusian objects that place them in their rich monastic context, offering a glimpse into the visual environment of the charterhouse and highlighting the role that images played in shaping devotional life and funerary practices in Europe during the late Middle Ages.

The Charterhouse of Bruges is on view in the museum’s Cabinet Gallery and is curated by Emma Capron, the 2016–18 Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at The Frick Collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue published by The Frick Collection in association with D Giles Ltd., London.

The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos by Petrus Christus is also known as the Exeter Madonna because its "first modern owner" was Brownlow Cecil, the 2nd Marquess of Exeter (second creation in 1801). He acquired it in 1815 and sold it in 1888.

The Charterhouse of Bruges referred to in this exhibit was at Genadendal. The other famous Charterhouse in Bruges was the Sheen Anglorum, founded after the Carthusians in England were either executed, starved to death, or sent into exile during the English Reformation.