Pauline M. Matarasso (ed) - The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century

THE CISTERCIAN WORLD

Pauline Matarasso read modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and was awarded a Doctorat de lUniversit de Paris in 1958. Her thesis, Recherches historiques et littraires sur Raoul de Cambrai , was published in 1962. She has also translated The Quest of the Holy Grail and Aucassin and Nicolette and Other Tales for Penguin Classics, and has written an in-depth study of the former, The Redemption of Chivalry , published in 1979. Queens Maid , her combined biography of Anne of France, Anne of Brittany and Louise of Savoy, will be published by Ashgate in 2001.

The Cistercian World

MONASTIC WRITINGS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

Translated and Edited with an Introduction by

PAULINE MATARASSO

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 1993

Copyright Pauline Matarasso, 1993

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor and translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101491805

To the community of Mount Saint Bernard, who have made me welcome over the years and provided a living witness to the continuing vitality of their tradition.

Contents

Acknowledgements

My particular thanks to Hilary Costello O.C.S.O . for acting as a sounding-board, wrestling with linguistic teasers, fielding queries and undertaking extra manual labour in ferrying books between library and guest house, all with unfailing cheerfulness; to Professor Brian Patrick McGuire, head of the Medieval Centre at Copenhagen University, for much friendly encouragement and wise advice; to Jeannine Alton for the unfailing support of her friendship, and for leading me to both title and cover illustration; and to my son Franois for gifts of mind and heart placed at my disposal during the preparation of this book.

Introduction

The ruins of the great Cistercian houses that sprang up all over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stand today as silent witnesses to an Order for which silence was an integral part of the spiritual life. It is not too hard, when wandering among the blanched and fretted remains, to rebuild and even to repeople in the minds eye the abbeys in their later splendour. It is harder to understand what took men to the first foundations, what induced them to settle in small groups in outlandish and infertile spots, to opt for a way of life so austere in the early years that their own contemporaries viewed it with a mixture of horror and admiration. Happily, they left another witness, less monumental but less subject to decay: the written word. They were not only great exponents of monastic spirituality; they chronicled their beginnings and, as one generation of monks followed another, committed to parchment all the memorabilia of the heroic years in an attempt to fan their own zeal to a comparable flame.

The Cistercian Order came into being in Burgundy at the turn of the twelfth century as part of a movement of radical renewal then gathering momentum. It was an offshoot of the Benedictine tree, and it was not the first time that a fresh wind had shaken those spreading branches. For over a hundred years the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, itself the product of an earlier reform, had exerted a revitalizing influence, both directly and through its many dependent and affiliated houses. Its power was now at its height, its fervour perhaps on the wane. The Cluniacs observed the spirit, as they saw it, of St Benedicts Rule, adapting the letter to the conditions of their time. A greatly lengthened liturgy, in particular, left the monks no time for manual labour. The life was exacting but not harsh, and the Order, though subject only to Rome, remained tightly enmeshed in feudal society.

Rapid economic and social changes in the late eleventh century ushered in a period of self-questioning and a search for identity among different classes and groups, not least or last the professed religious. Neither the traditional Benedictine abbeys nor Cluny with its liturgical splendours satisfied a growing hunger for the Gospel values of poverty and simplicity. Those years saw the founding of half a dozen new orders dedicated to prayer and ascesis; of these the Cistercians, or white monks, were to become by far the largest and indeed in time absorbed some of the others. But nothing in their beginnings gave any hint of the phenomenally rapid growth to follow. The initial impetus was given in 1098 by Robert, Abbot of Molesmes. Feeling that this community, which he had himself established twenty years before, was falling short of his vision, he went in search of greater isolation and austerity, taking a score of brothers with him. They settled in a marshy clearing in the woodland south of Dijon bearing the name of Cteaux. Here they found that howling waste of the wilderness through which God led his people after their escape from slavery in Egypt. The communitys experience of living out the exodus in all its rigour proved no less searching than the Israelites, and manna was not at once forthcoming. The first setback was the loss of their leader. Abbot Roberts abandoned flock at Molesmes sued to the Pope for his return, and the following year he obeyed an injunction to rejoin them. At least half the brothers chose to accompany him back, and Cistercian chroniclers never quite forgave what they saw, perhaps unjustly, as his return to the fleshpots of Egypt. The remaining monks, first under Abbot Alberic, then under the authority of the Englishman Stephen Harding whose Charter of Charity was to guarantee unity and uniformity throughout the Order, eked out in the early years an existence of great hardship.

Their professed aim was a literal enactment of St Benedicts Rule. The overgrown office was pruned back to restore the right balance of prayer, lectio divina (the meditative reading of Scripture and the Fathers) and manual labour. The monks day varied with the seasons: more time for reading in the winter, longer hours in the fields during the summer months. The biggest break with the recent monastic past was the Orders rejection of any interdependence with feudal society. Gifts of land were accepted, but the Order had neither tithes, tenants nor serfs. The world was kept at bay: no schools, no parishes, no funeral ceremonies for lay patrons, no relics for public veneration, hence no pilgrims and no crowds. Breaking with custom was not easy; it was only under Stephen Harding that the community succeeded in preventing Hugh II, Duke of Burgundy and a good friend of the abbey, from holding his court on major feasts in the church his father had built for them.

The centralized yet flexible structure that was to preserve the Order from anarchy and fragmentation during its period of meteoric growth was the fruit of the organizational genius of Stephen Harding. Under his rule the New Monastery, as it was called, began to prosper. Gifts of land increased and granges were established to exploit those farthest from the monastery. This was to lead in time to a major new initiative, a break with custom and, indeed, the Rule. Finding it impossible to cover fully both their choir duties and their field work, and determined not to fall back into the trap of the manorial system, the white monks introduced a lay brotherhood of men under vows but living apart under a simplified regime. Within a generation these had become the chief labour force.

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