In praise of God’s glory, Christ, the Father’s Word, has always chosen men by the Holy Spirit to lead them into solitude and to unite them in an intimate love. Responding to this call, Master Bruno, in the year of the Lord 1084, entered with six companions into the desert of Chartreuse and settled there. There, these men and their successors, remaining in the school of the Holy Spirit, and letting themselves be formed by experience, developed a proper style of hermitic life, transmitted to subsequent generations, not by writing, but by example.

Other hermitages joined the hermitage of Chartreuse, and on their repeated insistence, Guigues, the fifth prior of Chartreuse, wrote a description of this way of life; all welcomed it and decided to abide by it, so that it would be the law of their observance and the bond of charity of their nascent family.

Around 1145, the nuns of Prébayon in Provence decided to embrace the rule of life of the Carthusians. This was the origin of our Order.

The Carthusian nuns, also sometimes called charterhouse nuns, have been the women’s branch of the Carthusian Order for almost nine centuries. They now have two houses in France, one in Italy, one in South Korea, and one in Spain, currently attached to a French house. A foundation in Latin America could see the light of day in the still quite distant future.

All the beauty of the King’s wife is inside. It is not easy to convey the essence of the contemplative Carthusian life, a life of searching for God in solitude and silence. However, the texts can shed light on the deepest intentions and the images can give a glimpse of this secret.