Return to simplicity
Like other contemporary monastic groups, they wanted to break away from the huge economic compounds that identified most abbeys of the period, and rediscover a poor and simple way of life. Like other monks of the time, they adopted the motto “to be poor with the poor Christ.”
Such a project called for a life far from large cities, dedicated to manual labor—principally agricultural—punctuated by a timetable more in conformity with ancient customs. In such a life there would once again be room for the celebration of the Divine Office (freed from additional elements that had accumulated over the years, making it noticeably burdensome), sufficient time for personal reading of the Scriptures and savoring them, and a certain austerity of lifestyle, which would find expression in fasting and vigils. Thus the ancient customs were retrieved and restored to life once more.
New foundations
After some years, however, it seemed to the group of founders that their wells were running dry. They had come to a point where, like so many other groups of the kind, they were facing imminent extinction. At zero point, the novices suddenly found themselves marveling at a flood of vocations. From the second decade of the century on, new foundations began to multiply. They spread throughout Burgundy, over its borders, and then further abroad into Italy, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, England, Ireland, and even Scandinavia. Around the middle of the 12th century, the order counted more than a hundred monasteries spread throughout Christendom.
This rapid expansion was doubtless due to the fact that Cistercian life and spirituality were a perfect fit for the religious needs of the 12th century. The accent was on the individual person, his subjective experience and his interior life, together with a heightened sense of community. These two aspects held pride of place in a strictly cenobitic life where almost continual silence was unbroken by any recreation. We should add to this a strong mystical current, moving souls to a desire for profound union with God. This current was a reaction against the increasingly rational and spiritually arid type of knowledge being encouraged in the cathedral schools and universities at that time.
The new order had the good fortune to possess at its center a number of eminently spiritual men, most of them formed in the Schools. Since they had opted for the monastic way of life, they were able to express their intuitions in a language that their contemporaries, sharing the same values, could grasp.
Saint Bernard
Outstanding among these men was Bernard of Clairvaux. Through his writings, but also because of the role, exceptional for a monk, whom he played in the Church of his day, he soon became the intellectual master not only of the Cistercian family, but also of the entire body of contemporary Christianity. His influence has spanned the centuries to our own day. Several other authors, who were his friends or disciples in this same 12th century, deserve to be mentioned with him. There was William of Saint Thierry—perhaps the most penetrating theologian of his period—Guerric of Igny, and Aelred of Rievaulx. (These three authors, together with Saint Bernard, have been called the four “evangelists of Cîteaux” by an historian of spirituality.)
Recovering God’s likeness
By preference they phrase their teaching not in the abstract terms of the Schools but rather, like the Fathers of the Church, in language redolent of the Scriptures. They excel in describing and interpreting the spiritual journey of the believer with its numerous vicissitudes. Although man was created in the image and likeness of God, through sin he lost the likeness, but not the image, which he still kept in the depths of his being. At this juncture he seeks to recover this likeness by way of the various monastic observances, and through temptations as well. His journey reproduces that of Christ, who became man precisely so that he could experience our weakness and temptations for himself, and offer them in his Person to the mighty God. For, as Saint Bernard never tires of repeating with Saint Paul, it is in weakness that, paradoxically, God’s power shows forth in all its fullness. For Christ, it was the weakness of the cross. For the believer, it will be the acceptance, in his following of Christ, of the inevitable trials he encounters on the way back to Christ: the cross he carries after him.
Insistence on the rigors of the journey never lets Bernard forget that this way is open to all, regardless of their past. Some of the most moving things he ever wrote give the most hardened sinner the right to hope that one day he will be folded in the welcoming embrace of the Spouse. To his brothers he once declared that even Judas would have found mercy if he had become a monk at Clairvaux!
©Magnificat November 2004
