Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and the Carmelite Charism

The Rule that the Patriarch Albert of Jerusalem gave to a group of Latin hermits gathered on Mount Carmel at the beginning of the 13th century reads:

"Let the hermit brothers remain in their separate cells, meditating day and night on the Law of the Lord and keeping watch in prayer."

The Origins: Unceasing Prayer and Monasticism

"Meditating day and night on the Law of the Lord" is therefore the classic formula with which the monastic tradition resumed the command that the Apostle Paul had already given to Christians to "pray without ceasing." The biblical precept of "unceasing prayer" has characterized the entire Church since its origins; and it is precisely from this need that the monastic experience was born.

From this, then, comes the Carmelite experience which, within the panorama of monasticism, will always present itself as "original and paradigmatic."

If Christians are required to commit themselves to ensuring that "their whole life is a continuous prayer," obeying in every circumstance the will of God by listening to His Word; monks, on the other hand, are asked to ensure that "prayer becomes their entire life." By seeking inner "stillness" (hesychia) and outer stillness (the desert), they would achieve the ideal of a prayer capable of embracing every moment of life, day and night.

These were the objectives of the early centuries: "To make all of life a prayer" and "To make prayer all of life".

The monks, having over time become cenobites, took on the task of ensuring that all of life becomes constant listening to and fulfillment of the "Law of God." This eremitic ideal remains as a thorn in the side, for laity and monks alike, always ready to resurge in every era of ecclesial history, as an impulse toward "totalizing prayer."

Eremitism on Mount Carmel

Carmelite life, already at the beginning of the 13th century, represents one of these "eremitic" rebirths, which develop according to the traditional criteria of ancient patristic "hesychasm."

Already the first "formula of life" that Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote for those hermits who had spontaneously gathered on the sacred mountain of Carmel, represented a slight correction of ancient eremitism in a cenobitic direction.

Cenobitism, consolidated over centuries, had long since understood that pure eremitism is Christianly dangerous because it risks removing the disciple of Christ from that community and ecclesial embrace necessary to live concretely the Incarnation of the Son of God. The radical hermit, in the ceaseless attempt of asceticism toward God, could risk forgetting the need for the ecclesial embrace of brothers and sisters in faith.

For the first Carmelites, the "formula of life" therefore represents a balance, as the result of the encounter between a fervent and spontaneous rebirth of the eremitic vocation and the now centuries-old wisdom of the Church, which offers small and appropriate community corrections.

However, the eremitic project remains substantially intact and the indications of the Rule are fundamentally those elaborated in ancient hesychasm.

The Carmelite experience, however, adds something specific: those first hermits interiorized a profound sense of responsibility and, because they were gathered on the sacred mountain of Carmel, felt they were direct heirs of the great prophet Elijah, universally recognized as the Founder of all monasticism.

Over time, this certainty, which traced the Carmelites back to the pre-Christian period and connected them with the very origins of the event of Christ, particularly with the Holy Virgin, made them feel with particular strength and ecclesial responsibility the problem of fidelity to their eremitic origins.

Migration to the West and Evolution of the Order

The eremitic experience on Carmel could only last a few decades and ended, with the fall of the Latin Kingdom (1261), with a forced migration of all the hermits to the West, where however they had begun to transfer since 1235.

In the West, the Carmelites first attempted to persevere in the eremitic form, but were soon forced to assimilate to the forms of religious life then flourishing and become similar to "mendicant fraternities." For this purpose, the original "Formula of life" was appropriately mitigated and approved as a Rule by Innocent IV in 1247.

The proper history of the Order in the West develops first in a certain climate of responsibility toward the ancient primordial identity and then in various attempts at reform.

The lifestyle of the Carmelites became more cenobitic and the foundations of convents in the cities reduced their eremitic solitude to an ideal state, with an increasingly active participation in the "care of souls," in the manner of other Orders.

This transition for the Carmelites was accompanied by strong perplexities: they felt even more the "problem" of those ancient noble origins that connected them to the prophet Elijah and the holy Fathers of the Old and New Testament; and this made more traumatic for them the shift toward the cenobitic, mendicant, apostolic form of living.

"We have left the world in order to better serve the Creator in the castle of Contemplation": thus official documents still expressed in 1287.

Eremitism of the Heart and Marian Devotion

Eremitism, however, remained the Order's own spiritual heritage, even though it was now understood above all as "eremitism of the heart", giving a privileged place to contemplation in one's own life. Elijah and Mary were considered the founders of the Order. In particular, the icon of the Annunciation was for the Carmelites the one that best expressed the meaning and purpose of their vocation.

The popular rooting of the Order occurred through the spread of Marian devotion, particularly through the devotion of the Scapular, a simple method for the faithful to entrust themselves to the Mother of Mercy who covers her children with her holy garment.