Cistercians

“ Mr. Willis Bund says, “How unnatural for any Welsh prince to found a Cistercian abbey!” Surely it was the most natural thing in the world.
The Cistercians had far greater influence in Wales than any other monastic order. The Cistercian abbeys were Aberconway, Basingwerk, Valle Crucis, Strata Marcella, Cymer, Strata Florida, Cwm Hir, Whitland, Neath, Margam, Llantarnam, Tintern, Grace Dieu, Dore. We have in Gerald a very unfavourable and prejudiced witness on the Cistercians. ”

“ The Cistercians in the beginning of their foundation were reformers, ascetic, and essentially agriculturists. Their great leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, the advocate of silence and work, once said, "Believe me, I have learnt more from trees than ever I learnt from men." ”

“ The monastery of Citeaux in southern France, from which the Cistercians take their name, was another attempt to live in the world but not of it. ‘The White Monks’, so called from the colour of their woollen frocks, sought solitudes in which to build their houses. Their churches and monasteries remain among the glories of architecture; but through fear of riches they refused to place in them crosses of gold and silver or to allow their priests to wear embroidered vestments. No Cistercian might recite the service of the Mass for money or be paid for the cure of souls. ”

“ We roamed about in silence from nave to cloisters, from refectory to chapel-room, and then, hand-in-hand, went with something of awe in our hearts into the old chancel, where in the days of the monks none ever went but the cowled, white-robed Cistercians themselves—an angel and virgin choir meet to sing the praises of the Lamb. By the sedilia, in the beautiful carved recesses of which scarcely a stone is out of place or an ornament broken off, we knelt down and said the rosary together for the conversion of England. ”

“ If men were moved to rigid asceticism, however, and had a taste for bald simplicity; if art, and music, and ornate architecture, had no charm for them, and they dreamt that God could only be sought and found in the wilderness, the Cistercian houses offered such a congenial asylum. The Cistercians were the Puritans of the monasteries, and appealed to that mysterious sentiment which makes some minds shrink with fear from the touch of luxury, and regard culture as antagonistic to personal holiness. The sentiment was strong in the reign of Henry II., when nineteen Cistercian houses were founded ”

“ It was as agriculturists and horse and cattle breeders that, after the first blush of their success and before a century had passed, the Cistercians exercised their chief influence on the progress of civilization in the later middle ages: they were the great farmers of those days, and many of the improvements in the various farming operations were introduced and propagated by them ”

“ The amount of manual labour [Pg 17] prevented the Cistercians from becoming a learned order, though they did produce a few men distinguished in literature; they were excellent farmers and horticulturists, and are said in early times to have almost monopolised the wool trade of the kingdom. They changed the colour of the Benedictine habit, wearing a white gown and hood over a white cassock; when they went beyond the walls of the monastery they also wore a black cloak. St. Bernard of Clairvaux is the great saint of the order. ”

“ They are beautiful, not because the Cistercians loved pleasant places, but because they loved solitude, whilst the Benedictines had either planted themselves in towns or had allowed towns to grow up round their monasteries. ”

“ Cisleithania, Austria proper as distinguished from Hungary, which is called Transleithania, on account of the boundary between them being formed by the river Leitha.
Cistercians, a monastic order founded by Abbot Robert in 1098 at Citeaux, near Dijon; they followed the rule of St. Benedict, who reformed the Order after it had lapsed; became an ecclesiastical republic, and were exempt from ecclesiastical control; contributed considerably to the progress of the arts, if little to the sciences.
Cithæron, a wood-covered mountain on the borders of Boeotia and Attica; famous in Greek legend. ”

“ The keynote of Cistercian life was a return to a literal observance of St Benedict’s rule—how literal may be seen from the controversy between St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny (see Maitland, Dark Ages, § xxii.) . The Cistercians rejected alike all mitigations and all developments, and tried to reproduce the life exactly as it had been in St Benedict’s time, indeed in various points they went beyond it in austerity. The most striking feature in the reform was the return to manual labour, and especially to field-work, which became a special characteristic of Cistercian life. ”

“ When the abbot returned from France, he and his monks resolved to remain in Skeldale, where they were joined in course of time by Serlo and Tosti, Canons of York, whose wealth greatly enriched the abbey. Within three years of their arrival beside the Skell, the monks of Fountains had acquired land and riches.
Though the Cistercian abbeys do not contain so much rich moulding, nor in any way approach the intricate workmanship of the great Benedictine abbeys, the austere dignity and simple grandeur make the Cistercians’ work every whit as imposing and beautiful as that of the earlier orders. ”

“ One attempt after another to bring back the old monastic discipline had failed deplorably. The Cluniac revival had been followed by the Cluniac laxity, splendour, and ostentation. The Cistercians, who for a generation had been the sour puritans of the cloister, had become the most potent religious corporation in Europe; but theirs was the power of the purse now. Where had the old strictness and the old fervour gone? Each man was lusting for all that was not his own; but free alms, where were they? ”

“ Accordingly, the lay brothers of Fountains were so named not to distinguish them from their brethren in priests’ orders, but to mark a difference between them and the cloister brothers. The conversi, as they were called, were divided from the monachi not by a barrier of ordination, but by a barrier of education. They were monks who could not read. When the Cistercian Order began, there were many such persons, some of good birth, many of good ability, but ignorant of letters. It was characteristic of the Cistercians that they made a place for the piety of these men. ”

“ The Cistercians, who were probably the richest religious body in England, owed their wealth mainly to their success in the wool [Pg 195] trade. But perhaps the most curious evidence of this kind may be found in the invaluable collections from the Berkeley papers made in the 17th century by John Smyth of Nibley, and published by the Bristol and Gloucester Archæological Society. We there find a series of great barons, often holding distinguished offices in peace or war, but always exploiting their estates with a dogged unity of purpose which a Lombard might have envied. ”

“ A lay brother was never ordained, and never held any office of superiority. It was by this system of lay brothers that the Cistercians were able to play their distinctive part in the progress of European civilization. But it often happened that the number of lay brothers became excessive and out of proportion to the resources of the monasteries, there being sometimes as many as 200, or even 300, in a single abbey. ”

“ Desiring to remove the reproach which the friars were in the habit of casting on the Cistercians as lacking learning, and no doubt specially moved by the pretensions at that time advanced by the Dominicans in the university of Paris, he in 1244 obtained license from Innocent IV to found a house in Paris for scholars of his order. ”

“ He required that his horses and hounds should be housed at the Abbey, and that his seven bailiffs should be entertained and fed once a week in a special room. There was naturally considerable friction, which was finally ended by a formal written agreement.
The outbreak of the French Wars made the Cistercians unpopular, and eventually they had to abandon their foreign dependence. Heavy exactions were levied on them. Corrodians were quartered on them without remorse. The Black Death added to their difficulties. ”

“ Of these there are 71 in Italy, 15 in Spain, 12 in Austro-Hungary, 11 in France (before the Associations Law) , 4 in England, 3 in Belgium, 2 in Germany, and 2 in Switzerland. The Cistercians of all Observances have a total of 77 Abbesses. Of these 74 belong to the Cistercians of the Common Observance, who have most of their houses in Spain and in Italy. ”

“ Rome herself soon found it needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance of the military orders. [2169] Reformers in the next generation vied with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux. [2170] The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all ”

“ A screen supported the gallery, making a vestibule for the church, keeping out the wind. A fragment of the base of this screen remains on the south side, near a bit of the pavement which was put in by John of Kent. Standing in the screen door and looking to the east, the high roof reached over the nave, the choir, the presbytery, and the chapel of the nine altars, to the splendour of the east window. The Norman nave and transepts, with their great pillars and round-headed clerestory windows, sent the primitive Puritan simplicity of the Cistercians. ”

“ The Cistercian was beginning to imagine himself the victim of an irreverent practical joke, and that the stories of the spectral crier which had reached the distant abbey long before the ferryman's visit were a pack of falsehoods, when about midnight, he suddenly jumped from the chair upon which he was dozing by the wood fire, hastily made the sign of the cross, and hurriedly commended himself to the protection of his patron saint, for sharp and clear came the dread cry, followed rapidly by a number of shrieks and groans and a smothered appeal for a boat. ”

“ A little while, and the rusted iron bolts ran noiselessly and smoothly in their massive channels; the monk's lament had given him an opportunity more precious than any other could have been in that moment, and in easing the run of the bolts for the gatekeeper's indolence, he paved the way to a facile exit by night from the monastery, if by any means he could also obtain the great key that swung from the Umbrian's girdle.
"You have a wonderful science, my son," said the Cistercian, with musing amaze. "You can do all things that you turn your hand to it seems!" ”

“ A few words as to Cistercian ideals, and especially as to Cistercian rule, as compared with that of Cluny, may not be out of place here.
For the sites of all their monasteries, they chose invariably lonely and wild lands, marshy valleys, swamps, or lake, or forest, where the monks would be under no temptation from the vicinity of worldly attractions, nor from too close contact with the secular clergy, whose influence was sometimes harmful. The Cistercian's first duty was the first duty of man—to reclaim the dark places of the earth from watery desolation to culture and fertility ”

“ The Cistercian nuns are as ancient an order as the monks. Saint Hourbelle, mother of Saint Bernard, and several other ladies of rank, adopted the order of Cîteaux, and were celebrated for their virtue and austerity. But they did not long retain the favour of their early piety. They acquired great wealth and, as the annals of the convent state, “their iniquity sprouted up from their fatness and their obesity.” ”

“ In 1148 the brotherhood joined the Cistercian order. Stephen granted to the monks the lordship of Furness, and his charter was confirmed by Henry I., Henry II. and subsequent kings. The abbot’s power throughout the lordship was almost absolute; he had a market and fair at Dalton, was free from service to the county and wapentake, and held a sheriff’s tourn. By a succession of gifts the abbey became one of the richest in England and was the largest Cistercian foundation in the kingdom. ”

“ Where did Turlough get the workmen whose teeming brains devised, and whose cunning hands executed this beautiful arch? It has been said that the workmen who built the grand Cistercian monasteries during the latter part of this twelfth century were imported from France and England. Well, be it so. But no one can deny that it was Celtic artists who built and adorned Cormac’s Chapel and Tuam Cathedral; and there has been nothing finer executed in any Cistercian monastery in Ireland or England either. ”

“ The sharp-witted Primate of Saint Andrews had foreseen the deficiencies of the abbot of Saint Mary's, and endeavoured to provide for them by getting admitted into his monastery as sub-prior a brother Cistercian, a man of parts and knowledge, devoted to the service of the Catholic Church, and very capable not only to advise the abbot on occasions of difficulty, but to make him sensible of his duty in case he should, from good nature or timidity, be disposed to shrink from it. ”

“ With the accession of Bernard, the Cistercian monastery grew speedily into the Cistercian Order; and the Cistercian Order came in due time into England.
Turstin, Archbishop of York, wrote to Bernard at Clairvaux, asking for Cistercian monks; and Bernard, being now, in Stephen's old age, at the head of the Order, sent over a colony which settled in the valley of the Rie, at Rievaux. There they lived their new life of simple devotion. And presently the fame of the sanctity of the monks of Rievaux began to vex the consciences of their neighbours. ”