| #### 4. THE MONASTIC RENAISSANCE: CHARTREUSE, CITEAUX, PREMONTRE |

| #### #### Throughout the last years of the century the movement of monastic revival continued to go forward. One of its most notable fruits was the foundation of the order of hermits we know as the Carthusians. They were the outcome of the holy life of one of the great scholars of the eleventh century, Bruno of Cologne. He came of a noble family and was educated in the schools of Rheims and Paris. At Cologne, in 1055, he was ordained priest and returning to Rheims, became head of the school of theology there and a famous preacher. Among his students was the future Urban II. In 1067 Rheims received as its archbishop a prelate who had bought his appointment. Bruno, now chancellor, was in the end compelled to denounce openly the scandals of the regime and a struggle began that only ended with the archbishop's deposition in 1082. Bruno was the obvious man to succeed him, but for years Bruno's secret desire had been a life of solitude and penance. He now took the opportunity to end his academic career. He resigned his offices and his benefices and retired to the strict Benedictine abbey of Molesmes -- whence, sixteen years later, the Cistercian order was to develop. Molesmes, however, did not meet Bruno's needs and his quest next led him to the frightful solitude of the Chartreuse in the diocese of Grenoble. Here in 1084 he began the way of life around which the new order grew up. The election of his old pupil as pope, in 1088, interrupted his solitude for a time for Urban II called him to Italy and the Curia. After four years he was, however, allowed to resume his religious life, and he founded a second Chartreuse in Sicily. Here in 1101 he died. #### St. Bruno left behind him a collection of sermons and, fruits of his scriptural studies, commentaries on the Psalms and on St. Paul’s epistles. He did not leave a rule. It was not until half-way through the next century that Gigues, his fourth successor as prior of the Chartreuse, set down in writing the customs and way of life of St. Bruno and his disciples. The new monasticism was an ingenious combination of the hermit life and that of the cloister. All the monks lived within the monastery, but each monk had for himself his own separate hermitage where he lived, worked, prayed and slept. They only met in common for the daily solemnities of the divine office and for an occasional meal. It was -- and it remains -- a life of unremitting penance and severe austerity, the monks having no contact of any kind with the outside world. #### The order took root slowly. Not until 1115 was the first new foundation made. By 1140 there were eleven in all, by the end of the century another twenty-five, and by the end of the thirteenth century a total of seventy-three. For a time each monastery was autonomous, and under the control of the local bishop. Gradually the principle of association took root. In 1142, when the first general chapter was held, five only of the charterhouses were exempt from the bishop's jurisdiction. Alexander III did much to assist the movement. During his pontificate all the houses obtained exemption, and in 1177 he gave the general chapter jurisdiction over all of them. #### More immediately important in the public life of the time, than this new order of hermits, was a contemporary reform in the ancient order of monks who followed the rule of St. Benedict which, from the Latin name of the first monastery where it was adopted -- Citeaux -- we know as the Cistercian rule. #### For two centuries now the great influence of Cluny had dominated Western monastic life, and gradually the influence of time had introduced new developments. The monks were no longer laymen. Most of them were priests. Study, and still more the performance of the sacred liturgy, were their chief occupation. Manual work had shrunk before the demands of these more important tasks. The hours in the monk's day which it once had filled were mow taken up with the solemn ritual of public prayer. The offices were lengthened and multiplied. Scarcely half an hour intervened after one finished before the next began. By the end of the eleventh century the Cluniac monk lived most of his life in the abbey church. This concentration of effort on the liturgy was the source from which flowed a whole renaissance of ritual, music and art. The Cluniac church was richly decorated, the mass and offices sung with stately pomp, the vestments and church furnishings were costly and elaborate. Public prayer took on a splendour it had never known before. #### But in some respects Cluny's development had, perhaps, been too richly bought. The great confederation of priories over which the Abbot of Cluny ruled supreme, a kind of monastic pope, had, inevitably, grown in wealth as it grew in influence. The collective work, through centuries, of individuals vowed to live poorly, must end in the accumulation of wealth. On the other hand the possession of wealth by persons vowed to be poor -- even though it be but collective wealth and in no way enrich the life of the individual -- is always something of a stumbling block for certain people. No matter how lawful the origin of the wealth, no matter how well it is used, its possession will always, with these, militate against the spiritual usefulness of its owners. And, of course, this monastic wealth was not always well used. Though Cluny remained substantially faithful to its ideals, there were houses of the federation where fidelity to the rule left much to be desired. Cluny had, moreover, liberally adapted to northern conditions the provisions of the rule regarding the monks, dress and food-an adaptation for which St. Benedict himself had provided. #### In every association there are to be found critics who long to restore the primitive observance, souls for whom modification spells relaxation, and for whom a return to the literal following of the first rule seems the only way of correcting what is wrong, and of safeguarding the future of their common ideal. Hence, as the eleventh century drew to its close, a variety of movements began within the Benedictine world, reacting against the development associated with Cluny, and all aiming at a greater simplicity of life. The movement of Citeaux was merely one of these -- and for a long time it was not the most successful. But Citeaux, proposing merely to restore the life planned by St. Benedict, ended by producing a new religious order -- the first religious order founded as such. #### The pioneer of the new reform was Robert, Abbot of Molesmes. St. Robert had been all his life an enthusiast for the strict observance of the Benedictine rule. Molesmes itself had been founded-as recently as 1075 and St. Robert was its first abbot -- as a house of strict discipline. But gradually the mitigations which contemporary monasteries found necessary were introduced here too, and by 1090, although not a lax community, it was indistinguishable from its neighbours. Whence the beginnings of discontent among the surviving founders, and a period of restlessness, which the abbot determined to end by leaving, with such of the monks as preferred the harder life, to found -- with the sanction of the papal legate -- a new house at Citeaux, a dreary solitude in Burgundy. This was on St. Benedict's day -- March 21, 1098. #### For a short twelve months there was peace, until the monks at Molesmes, their reputation lost by the rumours that they had driven out the saints of the community, besought the abbot to return and, to make certain his consent, the monks brought pressure to bear from the pope. In July, 1099, then, Robert went back to Molesmes, succeeded at Citeaux -- still a mere collection of cabins -- by the monk who had been his prior at Citeaux and, before that, at Molesmes. This was St. Alberic, and to him the reform owed its first set regulations and its habit which, in striking contrast to tradition, was white. #### Alberic ruled for ten years and then there succeeded the onetime sub-prior of Molesmes, the Englishman, Stephen Harding, the real founder of the order to be. It was under St. Stephen that silk and gold were banished from the ecclesiastical life of Citeaux; vestments henceforward were of linen, chalices at best of silver, candlesticks and thuribles of iron, the crosses of wood; the church was bare of pictures or painted glass. The monk's dress was just as St. Benedict -- legislating six hundred years earlier -- had prescribed in his own gentler climate. The warmer underclothing, the furs, the extra garments with which Cluny had adapted the primitive austerity, were abolished. From the dietary meat, fish, eggs, cheese, butter and white bread were banished entirely. Vegetables only and coarse bread, with oil and salt as condiments, and water for sole drink were all the Cistercian allowed himself. The offices were deliberately shortened, and the time gained was given to manual labour -- the labour of reclaiming the barren waste and swamps where the monastery lay, seven hours a day from October to Easter, six hours during the summer. For sleep six hours in all was allowed, on a rude bed, clad in the habit, and this short spell was broken by the night office. For spiritual reading two hours daily was allowed, in summer three. Recreation, even in the monastic sense, there was none. Except when necessity called for it the Cistercian never spoke. Since the days when the last of the Irish monasteries adopted the rule of St. Benedict, nothing so austere had been proposed as the ordinary life of a monastic community. #### But the new monks differed, in one very important respect, from those earlier ascetics. Citeaux was not a centre of intellectual life: it was an association of penitents; and for all that the chief influence in its foundation, St. Stephen, was a man of quite unusual learning, the prosecution of learning formed no part of the Cistercian vocation. Nor did the apostolate. The Cistercians became apostles, as they reclaimed the barren lands -- accidentally. They were founded to pray and to make amends for their sins. Their monasteries were to be planted in desolate solitudes, away from mankind; nor were they to possess more property than what was needed for the monks' penitential labour and their scanty support. The property would never, it was hoped, become such a distraction to the monastic life as in the great houses of Cluny which, often enough, were the centres of all life, social and economic, no less than religious, for the district in which they were placed. Another, most important, innovation was the institution of lay brothers to whom might be committed the care of the monasteries' inevitable contacts with the secular world, lest the monks in time might come to lose their primitive fervour. It is not surprising to read that, as this regime developed, the new foundations ceased to attract vocations. Less than fifteen years after the flight from Molesmes, Citeaux seemed fated to perish. Its history would have been that of yet another heroic effort that had ended with the pioneers who promoted it, but in 1113 there came to the abbey, demanding admission as novices, a band of thirty young men drawn from the noblest families of Burgundy, at their head Bernard, a young man of twenty-three. This spate of recruits was the turning point of Citeaux's fortunes, and in Bernard it received the saint whose genius was to dominate all Catholic life for the next forty years. #### Immediately new foundations began to be made, La Ferte in 1113, Pontigny in 1114, Clairvaux and Morimond in 1115. The Carta Caritatis, the constitution regulating the relation of the new houses to Citeaux, was published four years later, and the rule of life. Thenceforward the order grew as no order before had grown. From the four first foundations others were made in swift succession. There were nineteen houses in 1122, seventy by the time St. Stephen died (1134) -- fifty-five of them in France -- 350 nineteen years later at the death of St. Bernard, of which sixty-eight were due to St. Bernard himself, and 530 houses in all by the end of the century; the speed of the development was such as to alarm the very founders. Not all of these houses were new foundations. Often an abbey of Benedictines or a college of Canons Regular passed over in a body to the new life. #### It remains to say something of the feature which marked the Cistercian movement as little less than revolutionary in the history of monasticism. St. Stephen Harding's plan for a congregation of monasteries was not new. To omit other examples, Cluny against which Citeaux may be said to have reacted, is an obvious instance. But though Cluny had first developed the idea of submitting all the monasteries to a common power, it had not, in so doing, retained that autonomy of the individual monastery which is the very heart of Benedictine monasticism. In Cluny's system each monk did indeed remain subject to his abbot, but there was only one abbot, the Abbot of Cluny. St. Stephen devised the happy compromise that the Cistercian abbot, for all his subordination, was the real head of his own autonomous monastery. Nor was the Abbot of Citeaux the personage that the Abbot of Cluny had been and still remained. The real power in the new foundation was the general chapter of all the abbots which was to meet annually at Citeaux. [ ] The supervision of the abbots, the task of visitation to enquire into the observance of what the chapters decreed, was left to the four abbots of the first four foundations, each for the houses that derived from his own. The Abbot of Citeaux was supervised by these four acting jointly. When an abbot died his successor was not appointed from Citeaux, but elected by the monks of the abbey concerned, together with the abbots of its daughter houses and the abbot visitator. Such is the striking innovation of the great English Cistercian, destined, in time, to affect, in some degree, every other religious order. Between Citeaux and its innumerable daughter houses there was no other link but that of charity. There were no taxes, no tributes, nor dues of any kind. The order was a federation of monasteries all accepting, and bound to, the customs, uses and liturgy of Citeaux, to the rule of St. Benedict as Citeaux had re-proclaimed it and as the Chapters-General interpreted it. A new force of immense magnitude had entered Christendom. #### Side by side with the new monasticism of Citeaux, there developed the order of the Canons Regular of Premontre, whose founder, Norbert of Gennep, was in his later life closely associated with St. Bernard. #### St. Norbert, born in 1080, was German and, although a cleric and canon of the collegiate church of Xanten, in the lower Rhineland, he lived the life of a worldly noble at the imperial court. It was not in fact until his thirty-fifth year that a miracle halted his career of dissipation, and turned him from a worldling to a penitent and a reformer. He now received holy orders, and after a vain attempt to persuade his colleagues at Xanten to embrace a more regular observance, he withdrew from the world for three years to prepare himself in solitude for the life of preaching to which he had resolved to give himself. #### This novitiate over he began to tour the villages of the Rhineland, preaching ceaselessly penance for sin and amendment of life, healing feuds and reconciling enemies. Inevitably he met with opposition, and the Council of Fritzlar, in 1118. condemned him for preaching without proper authorisation. Whereupon Norbert, giving his property to the poor, left Germany for France and the pope, Gelasius II, who, at St. Gilles in Languedoc, sanctioned his way of life and gave him licence to preach. From this moment the saint's real vocation was determined, a life of poverty and austerity while he moved from place to place preaching ceaselessly, not Latin sermons to monks but exhortations in the vernacular to the laity. #### Disciples gradually came to him and, in 1119, he was at Rheims begging the new pope -- Calixtus II -- to renew the permission given by his predecessor. The pope, willing enough to bless the good work, showed himself none too enthusiastic as to the chances of the survival of this organisation of itinerant preaching ascetics. It was in the pope's cousin, Bartholomew of St. Vir, Bishop of Laon, that the little group found its first really influential patron. He did much to win the pope round to a more active support, and he insisted that Norbert should make some kind of foundation in his diocese and help in the great work of clerical reform. The first settlement, in the church of St. Martin at Laon, did not succeed. As at Xanten, the chapter had no desire to embrace a better life. Finally Norbert fixed on the desolate solitude of Premontre, not far from Laon, where, in circumstances that recall the first days of Citeaux, the settlement of the new institute took shape. #### St. Norbert was a canon and, in so far as he is a reformer of clerical living, he is directly a reformer of chapters. Premontre and the numerous houses which in imitation of it now began to be founded, were not monasteries: they were houses where lived in common observance the canons who served the churches attached to them. The canon was, by definition, a cleric who, if not already a priest, was in process of becoming a priest. The church he served was not merely the rendezvous for the general spiritual exercises of a community vowed to penance, but a centre of active pastoral work. Canons were parochial clergy, and the effect of the movement that began at Premontre was to introduce into the lives of such clergy something of the systematic asceticism which, from the beginning, had been of the very essence of monasticism. The canons of Premontre lived as severely as did the monks of Citeaux. For the first fifty years of the order every day was a fast day; even after the mitigation then introduced, they fasted daily from Holy Cross [ ] to Easter. They never ate meat. They lived in perpetual silence. But while the Cistercian's life ended with his monastery the Premonstratensian, by institution and not by development merely, must have ever in view the life of the mission. #### The candidate who offered himself at Citeaux need not even be able to read, but in the first statutes of the canons of Premontre it is laid down that, first of all, the newcomer's knowledge is to be tested. Again a knowledge of Grammar and Latin is required before he can be clothed, and progress in knowledge is made a condition of ordination. Study is part of the canon's day -- a prescription of the rule directly traceable to the rule of St. Victor at Paris; each house has its librarian and, from the beginning, there are instituted definite courses of study. #### St. Norbert's personal share in all this organisation is not too clear. The foundation at Premontre did not, by any means, bring to an end his active itinerant apostolate. The foundation, it has been said, was a place that saw him only at intervals. Then, in 1126, he was forced into high office as Archbishop of Magdeburg, and for the last eight years of his life he was inevitably caught up in the movement of ecclesiastical politics. He played in Germany much the same role that St. Bernard played in France, securing to the cause of Innocent II the support of the emperor Lothair, and checking the same emperor when he showed a disposition to reopen the questions settled at Worms. With Norbert there went to Magdeburg his own Premonstratensians, and the city once more became a centre of missionary work for the conversion of the obstinately pagan peoples of the countrysides beyond the Elbe. Further Germany, Poland, and Scandinavia were to be strongholds of the new order down to the Reformation. With the Cistercians, and in these lands even more than the Cistercians, they must be counted one of the main forces of social development too, and civilisation. #### So long as St. Norbert lived, [ ] his personal influence and example sufficed for a rule. But once the episcopate claimed him, and even more once he was dead, the order began to develop somewhat away from his plan. Here we must be cautious in assertion, for the rule now drawn up by Norbert's successor, Hugh of Fosses, was the work of the saint's most intimate friend. It seems beyond doubt, however, that the itinerant preaching now disappeared. The statutes nowhere make any mention of it. Also the canons do not merely serve the particular church attached to their house -- the monastery church so to call it -- but they serve, singly and in groups, the parishes founded by the abbey on its domain or on the adjacent domains. The development has begun that makes the Premonstratensian abbey the first seminary for the training of a parochial clergy. The success of the organised institution was equal to that of the contemporary Cistercians. It answered to a practical need of the day. In the time of Hugh of Fosses alone, two hundred abbeys were founded, and by the end of the century there were thousands of these white canons serving parishes on all the marches of Christendom. #### The rule of the order was eclectic. Its basis was the so-called rule of St. Augustine. It borrowed from St. Benedict, and it borrowed from St. Victor at Paris. In its organisation the order had much in common with Citeaux. Each house was ruled by an abbot whom the canons of the house -- those engaged in work outside together with the actual community -- elected, under the supervision of the abbot of the house whence the electing house was first founded. The abbot's powers were very wide, but he was subject to visitation from the Abbot of Premontre or his deputy -- one appointed for each province -- and subject also to the General Chapter. It was the abbot who named all the officials of his abbey, the Prior, Sub-Prior and, a particular invention of Premontre, the Circator -- an official charged to watch over the general observance of the rule. In the order the Abbot of Premontre, Dominus Praemonstratensis, was a great figure. He was a kind of primate but his primacy was modelled on Citeaux, rather than on Cluny. His rule of his own abbey was controlled by visitation from the first three daughter houses of Premontre and in his rule of the order he was subject to the General Chapter. #### From the beginning there were also Premonstratensian nuns, and for a time some of the abbeys were dual -- an abbey of canons and an abbey of nuns sharing a common church. From the beginning, too, there were lay brothers, homines illiterati, to whom was committed the exploitation of the domain and the necessary material cares of the abbey, and for whom, on that account, there was a milder rule of fast and abstinence. #### One last point merits special notice. The chief scene of St. Norbert's labours in the years that followed the great foundation of 1120 was northern France and Belgium, then infected with heresy of a virulently anti-sacramental type. Antwerp in particular was notorious for it, and for a long time the whole city was under the dominion of such a heretic, Tanchelm or Tanchelin, an anticlerical visionary of a semi-religious, semi-social type. One of the doctrines Tanchelm most strenuosly opposed was that of the real presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist. St. Norbert's sermons against Tanchelm on this point give him a place among the very first of the saints who built their spiritual teaching around the Blessed Sacrament, and his special devotion to the Mass finds many traces in the early rule and practices of the order. ####  |