The Birth of the Cistercians

Cluny, or the burden of grandeur

At the end of the 11th century, Western monasticism was dominated by the immense network of Cluny. Founded in 910^[5], the Burgundian abbey had reformed hundreds of monasteries and given the Church popes, saints and a liturgy of unrivalled splendour. But this grandeur had a price. The Cluniac day was almost entirely absorbed by an excessively lengthened Divine Office; manual labour, willed by Saint Benedict, had been delegated to serfs and tenants; the abbeys, enriched with tithes, mills, lordships and feudal revenues, sometimes resembled great seigneurial houses more than "wildernesses".^[6][7]

None of this was a scandal: Cluny remained fervent, and many became saints there. But a malaise was growing among the most demanding souls. The Rule spoke of poverty, of silence, of the work of hands; reality offered wealth, long processions and sumptuous liturgy. Between the letter of the Benedictine text and the lived custom, a gap had opened, and that gap called for an answer.

The great longing for the "wilderness"

The answer did not come from Citeaux alone. The whole end of the 11th century is crossed by a single impulse: the return to the "wilderness", to solitude, to the austerity of the first monks. It is the age of hermits, of founders of new religious families, of protest against a monasticism judged too settled.^[8][9]

• In 1084, Saint Bruno founded the Grande Chartreuse and the Carthusian Order, a radical choice of eremitical solitude.
• In Tuscany, Vallombrosa (c. 1036) and the Camaldolese of Saint Romuald renewed the eremitical life.
• Robert of Arbrissel founded Fontevraud (1101); Stephen of Muret, Grandmont.

Citeaux and the Grande Chartreuse, born fourteen years apart, form the two peaks of this contemplative flowering. But where Bruno chose the solitude of the hermit, Robert of Molesme chose integral Benedictine cenobitism: common life, choir, manual labour, poverty of place and habit. Two different paths, one same refusal of laxity.

Taking the Rule "to the letter"

The watchword of the future foundation can be summed up in one formula: to observe the Rule ad litteram, "to the letter". Where Saint Benedict wrote that idleness is the enemy of the soul (RB 48, 1) and that monks will truly be monks when they live by the labour of their hands (RB 48, 7-8), Citeaux would take him seriously:

"Idleness is the enemy of the soul; therefore the brethren must be occupied, at certain hours, in manual labour. [...] They will then truly be monks when they live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did." — Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 48^[10]

This programme is no antiquarian whim. It expresses the conviction that fidelity to the text is the surest path of fidelity to God, and that softening the observances, however reasonable it may seem, always ends by extinguishing fervour. It is this conviction that Robert of Molesme would carry to the point of rupture.

A seeker of perfection

Robert was born in Champagne around 1028-1029, of a noble family. Entering very young the novitiate of the Benedictine abbey of Montier-la-Celle, near Troyes, he became prior there, then was called, around 1068, to govern as abbot the abbey of Saint-Michel of Tonnerre. There he came up against the laxity of the monks and failed to reform them: the first of a series of attempts in which the same man obstinately sought a place where the Rule could be lived without compromise.^[11]

His reputation for holiness drew to him a group of hermits settled in the forest of Collan. Two of them went as far as Rome to beg Pope Gregory VII to give them Robert as superior: the pope granted it, and in 1074 Robert initiated the hermits of Collan into monastic life. But the site proved unsuitable, and it was at Molesme that Robert founded their monastery, at the end of 1075.^[12]

The foundation of Molesme (1075) and its drift

Around 1075, Robert established this monastery at Molesme, near Chatillon-sur-Seine. The beginnings were of evangelical poverty: a few huts of branches around a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity. They lived on alms and the labour of the soil. The fervour of the origins soon attracted vocations, gifts and protectors.^[13]

And there the drama Robert already knew was played out: success corrupts austerity. Enriched with lands and revenues, Molesme settled into a comfort that stifled the primitive ideal. Robert wanted reform; part of the community resisted. The founder found himself a stranger in his own house.

The crisis of Molesme

Around Robert gathered a nucleus of fervent monks, among them Alberic, then prior, and Stephen Harding, an Englishman, who shared his desire for radicality. After attempts at compromise and even a temporary departure of Robert, rupture became inevitable. To avoid an internal schism and to live the Rule integrally at last, they had to leave elsewhere, begin anew, in a place no one coveted.^[14][15]

It is here that, properly speaking, the birth of the Cistercians begins.

21 March 1098: the foundation of the New Monastery

Armed with the authorisation of the papal legate Hugh, Archbishop of Lyon, an essential canonical guarantee, since no monastery is founded without the agreement of authority, Robert left Molesme with some twenty monks (tradition counts twenty-one). They walked southward, to a wild place some twenty kilometres south of Dijon.^[16][17][18]

The date is laden with symbols: 21 March 1098, the day of the feast of Saint Benedict, which that year fell on Palm Sunday. To begin the new life on the day of the father of monks and at the entry into Holy Week was to place the foundation under the double sign of the Rule and the Passion.^[19][20]

The place of Citeaux

The place is called Citeaux, in Latin Cistercium, whence the name "Cistercians" would come. The etymology remains debated: it has been linked to cisterna (the stagnant waters of the marsh), to the position cis tertium lapidem ("this side of the third milestone" on the road from Dijon), or again to the cistels, those reeds that abounded in that waterlogged soil.^[21] All these hypotheses say the same thing: a marshy, wooded, unhealthy place, exactly the "wilderness" the monks were seeking.

The land was given to them by Renaud, Viscount of Beaune, and the foundation received the support of Odo I, Duke of Burgundy, who contributed to the building. The monks first erected modest wooden buildings there, and Robert received the abbatial crozier: the monastery was born.^[22][23]

The "Novum Monasterium"

The founders did not yet call it "Citeaux", but the "New Monastery", Novum Monasterium. The name is a programme: not one reform among others, but a fresh beginning. The old is not patched up; they start again from the source. The intention is fixed by the letter of the legate Hugh of Lyon, copied in chapter II of the Exordium parvum: those departing had there made profession of willing to adhere "more strictly and more perfectly" (arctius... perfectius) to the Rule of blessed Benedict, which they had until then observed "lukewarmly and negligently" (tepide ac negligenter) at Molesme. And chapter III of the same account relates that they reached the wilderness of Citeaux to begin the New Monastery there.^[24]

This profession is the key to the whole Cistercian birth. It is not a matter of despising Molesme or Cluny, but of recognising a spiritual fact: at Molesme, God had been served "lukewarmly", the legate's word, and they now wished to serve Him without measure. Lukewarmness (tepiditas) is precisely what Scripture reproves (Revelation 3:16); the wilderness of Citeaux is the place chosen to conquer it.

Molesme claims its abbot (1099)

The foundation nearly died in the egg. Deprived of their abbot and his prestige, the monks who remained at Molesme, anxious too for their gifts and reputation, appealed to Pope Urban II. They demanded Robert's return. The pope charged the legate Hugh to decide: after about a year, in 1099, Robert was sent back to Molesme to restore peace and fervour there.^[25][26]

This recall could have tolled the knell of Citeaux. The founder gone, the little colony of the "wilderness" found itself alone, poor, without an illustrious protector. But Robert took back with him to Molesme some waverers, and left at Citeaux the nucleus of the most determined, those who would never turn back. The foundation was thus purified: only those remained who truly wanted the wilderness.

The end of Robert's life

Returned to Molesme, Robert resumed his work of reform there and governed the abbey until his death, on 17 April 1111, at more than eighty years of age. The Church has recognised his holiness: he was canonised in 1222 by Pope Honorius III. He is celebrated on 26 January with Alberic and Stephen Harding (solemnity of the founders of Citeaux, in the Cistercian proper); the Catholic Encyclopedia first fixes his feast on 17 April, later transferred to 29 April.^[27]

His figure remains paradoxical: founder of Citeaux, he did not end his days there. He was the man of the beginning, the spark; others would be the men of duration. Providence thus distributed the roles: to Robert the boldness of departure, to Alberic consolidation, to Stephen structure, to Bernard radiance.

Founding in law what exists in longing

On Robert's departure, the monks of Citeaux elected as abbot Alberic (Aubry), the former prior, a companion from the first hour. His government, of some ten years, was decisive: it turned a fragile spiritual adventure into a firmly established foundation.^[28][29]

His first urgency was to protect juridically the New Monastery. He sent two monks, John and Ilbode, to Pope Paschal II. In 1100, the pope granted Citeaux the "Roman Privilege" (Privilegium Romanum): by these apostolic letters, he took the monastery under the direct protection of the Apostolic See, guaranteed its liberty and confirmed its right to exist.^[30][31] Without this parchment, Citeaux would have remained at the mercy of neighbouring bishops and lords; with it, the experiment of the wilderness became a recognised institution of the universal Church.

The white habit and the lay brothers

It was also under Alberic that two traits were fixed which would make Cistercian identity:

• The white habit. To distinguish themselves from the "black" Benedictines of Cluny, whose cowl was dyed black, the monks of Citeaux adopted an undyed woollen habit, white or grey. The motive is not aesthetic: raw wool is simply the poorest. Hence their nickname of "white monks".^[32][33]
• The lay brothers. Alberic organised the institution of the conversi, those professed religious who, without sharing in the long Latin Office, devoted themselves to manual labour and working the lands. They would allow the choir monks to hold together contemplation and the Rule, while clearing the "wilderness". The economic history of the order, granges and clearances, belongs to the article on the order itself; but its principle was laid down under Alberic.

When Alberic died, on 26 January 1109, Citeaux now existed in law as in longing. But the hardest trial was still to come.^[34]

An Englishman at Citeaux

The third abbot is Stephen Harding, English by birth, born in the middle of the 11th century at Sherborne, in Dorset, educated, says the Catholic Encyclopedia, "in sacred and profane learning", a great traveller who passed through Scotland, Paris and Rome (where he made a pilgrimage) before entering Molesme and then following Robert into the wilderness.^[35][36] He is the man of structures: he would give the nascent order its law and its books, and would draft the future Charter of Charity. His full biography is treated in the article devoted to him; only his founding role is retained here.

It is he too who, in the darkest years of the foundation, had to choose between softening and fidelity, a choice that would decide the whole future of Citeaux.

On the brink of extinction

The beginning of his abbacy was a near agony. The extreme rigour of the place and the observance put people off: vocations grew rare and the dead were not replaced, the Catholic Encyclopedia speaks of a foundation that seemed "doomed to die out", and it was feared the monastery would die with its last monks. Without posterity, the foundation of 1098 would have been but a utopia without a morrow, one of the countless forgotten eremitical attempts of that century.^[37][38]

Stephen yielded on nothing, however. Rather than soften the Rule to attract, he maintained integral poverty and austerity, even refusing the revenues, churches and lordships that would have compromised the ideal. He preferred a faithful and dying monastery to a numerous and lukewarm one. This heroic firmness is, spiritually, the true cradle of the order: Citeaux would survive only because it had refused to deny itself at the moment when it would have been so easy to do so.

The Bible of Stephen Harding

From these dark years dates nevertheless a masterpiece: the Bible of Stephen Harding, dated 1109 by the Monitum closing its first volume, a great Latin Bible which the abbot had established by carefully collating the Latin text, even consulting rabbis for the Hebrew, and which numbers among the first illuminated manuscripts of the Citeaux scriptorium: two full-page illustrations, six miniatures and twenty-nine historiated initials in the second volume. It is kept today at the Municipal Library of Dijon (mss 12-15) and remains the witness of the intellectual exactingness of the first Cistercians.^[39][40]

Thirty companions at the gate of Citeaux

Then came the miracle. One day in 1112, the Catholic Encyclopedia retains 1112, the English-language Wikipedia 1113, a young Burgundian nobleman of some twenty years presented himself at the gate of Citeaux, not alone, but with some thirty companions whom he had himself drawn along: four of his brothers (Guy, Gerard, Andrew and Bartholomew), two of his uncles, friends, knights. This young man was called Bernard, born around 1090 at Fontaine-les-Dijon.^[41][42][43]

The event was unprecedented. Where Stephen had struggled to recruit one novice, here thirty vocations at once knocked at the door, carried by the spiritual magnetism of one man. The dying community received at a stroke youth, ardour, a future.

"St. Bernard's entrance into the Order of Citeaux, in 1112, was the signal of this extraordinary development." — Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Cistercians"^[44]

The biography and the immense role of Bernard far overflow the frame of this article: he would become the preacher of the Second Crusade, the counsellor of popes, the "mellifluous doctor". But in the history of the Cistercian birth, his function is clear: he is the man through whom the foundation ceased to be fragile.

The explosion of vocations

The influx was such that Citeaux, barely saved, had at once to swarm. All these monks could not be kept in a single house: foundations had to be made elsewhere. In a few years, the "New Monastery" became a fruitful mother.

What these young men tasted was not comfort, they had left all of it behind, but a peace and a freedom which Bernard would later describe in a famous saying, inviting a friend to come and see for himself:

"You will find something more in the forests than in books. The trees and the stones will teach you what you cannot hear from any master." — Saint Bernard, Letter 106 to Henry Murdac (aliquid amplius invenies in silvis quam in libris)^[45]

From the year following Bernard's entry, Abbot Stephen Harding sent out from Citeaux its first colony. In three years were born the first four daughters, which would become the heads of the great lineages of the order across Europe:^[46][47][48]

In 1115, Bernard, barely twenty-five years old, was sent with twelve companions to found Clairvaux, in a valley first named Val d'Absinthe ("vale of bitterness"), which he renamed Clara Vallis, the "bright valley". From this house alone would come more than one hundred and sixty abbeys: around 1152-1153, of some 333 Cistercian abbeys in Europe, nearly half had been founded, directly or indirectly, from Clairvaux.^[49][50]

The tree planted in the marsh of Citeaux was beginning to cover Christendom.

What this expanding family still lacked was a constitution: a law that would allow dozens of abbeys to remain united without dissolving or enslaving one another. It is the work of Stephen Harding: the Charter of Charity (Carta caritatis), approved by Pope Callistus II on 23 December 1119.^[51][52]

Its genius lies in one idea: to unite without enslaving. Each abbey remains autonomous, with its elected abbot and its patrimony, but all are held by a bond of charity, whence the name, guaranteed by the annual general chapter, the regular visitation of each mother abbey to its daughters, and the system of filiation. The detail of this institutional architecture, which would inspire all later orders, is developed in the article on the Cistercian Order.

What must be retained here is that the Charter of 1119 closes the founding period: by that date, what in 1098 had been but an adventure of a few monks in the wilderness had become a constituted order, recognised by Rome, endowed with a law, a government and daughters. The birth of the Cistercians was accomplished.

Writing their own beginnings

The first Cistercians did not only found an order: they wrote its memory. Two texts, composed in the time of Stephen Harding, recount and justify the foundation.^[53][54]

• The Exordium parvum ("Little Exordium of Citeaux") is the official account of the foundation. It numbers eighteen chapters, nearly half of which are copies of authentic documents, letters of the legate Hugh of Lyon, of Bishop Walter of Chalon, of the pope, acts of departure, set within the narration to establish on incontestable canonical grounds the legitimacy of the New Monastery. It is both a chronicle and a juridical dossier. Its principal attribution belongs to Stephen Harding; the nucleus of the account goes back to the years 1113-1119, under his abbacy, and chapters III and XV-XVIII were added in the years 1130-1140.^[55][56]
• The Exordium Cistercii ("Exordium of Citeaux"), briefer, in two parts (the departure from Molesme, then the beginnings of Citeaux), forms the narrative preamble accompanying the Charter of Charity and the usages; it is generally dated to the years 1123-1124, perhaps at Clairvaux.^[57][58]

These texts are not mere archives: they fix Cistercian identity. Reading them, each generation of white monks would know whence it came, why its fathers departed, and what it had pledged itself to. Few orders have, from their cradle, so clear a consciousness of their own birth.

A demanding narrative, not a triumphalist one

The sobriety of these accounts must be noted. The Exordium parvum hides neither Robert's humiliating recall, nor the near extinction of the community, nor the poverty of the beginnings. It is no smoothed golden legend, but an honest testimony in which fragility itself becomes a sign: if Citeaux survived, it was not through the power of men, but through fidelity to the Rule and the grace of God.

The wilderness as a place of truth

Why leave for a marsh? Because the wilderness, in the whole biblical and monastic tradition, is the place where the soul strips itself to find God alone. Israel was tested and formed in the wilderness; Christ was led there by the Spirit; the Desert Fathers of Egypt sought there the "flight from the world". The founders of Citeaux deliberately placed themselves in this lineage: their marshy Cistercium is a theological choice, not a suffered constraint.^[59][60]

Their own account takes up, moreover, to describe the site, an expression from Deuteronomy on the wilderness where God formed His people:

"A place of horror and vast solitude." — Exordium Cistercii, taking up Deuteronomy (32:10): locus horroris et vastae solitudinis^[61]

This is no complaint: it is a title of glory. The place men fled is precisely the one God chooses to form His own there. The white monks saw in it the sign that their Cistercium is indeed a land of covenant.

Voluntary poverty against lukewarmness

The heart of the Cistercian birth is a refusal of lukewarmness. Not that Cluny's wealth was a sin, but because comfort, imperceptibly, extinguishes desire. The founders had experienced it at Molesme: they had seen a fervent community fall asleep in success. Their remedy was radical: to choose poverty, not as suffered misery, but as liberty. Nothing to defend, nothing to lose, therefore everything to give.

A lesson for every reform

The birth of the Cistercians carries a lesson that overflows the 12th century. Every living institution, religious family, parish, movement, individual soul, tends to settle, to grow heavy, to confuse means and end. The Cistercian answer is not revolution, but return to the source: reread the Rule, return to the Gospel, begin again ad litteram. That is why, through the centuries, each time the order grew drowsy, it reformed itself by returning to Citeaux, down to La Trappe and beyond, as the article on the order recounts.

"They reached the wilderness of Citeaux..." — Exordium parvum, chapter III: the account of the arrival; the intention, to observe the Rule "more strictly and more perfectly", is the one those departing had professed before the legate Hugh, in chapter II^[62]

On Stephen Harding's death, around 1133-1134, the order born in a marsh already numbered some seventy monasteries, fifty-five of them in France.^[79] In little more than a generation, a handful of monks who had left with nothing gave birth to the most dynamic religious family of its time. That fulgurant growth, granges, economy, the architecture of stripping, the spirituality of charity, belongs to the history of the constituted order and is not the subject of this article.

What the birth of Citeaux bequeathed is first a model: that of a reform by return to the source, carried by complementary saints, the boldness of Robert, the solidity of Alberic, the firmness and juridical genius of Stephen, the radiance of Bernard. It is then a conviction: that integral fidelity to the Rule, even when it leads to the brink of death, is more fruitful than compromise. The marsh of 1098 became, through that fidelity, one of the great spiritual sources of the West.

• Cistercian Order — the order as institution and spiritual family: the Charter of Charity in detail, granges, architecture, decline under commendation and the great reforms down to the Trappists.
• Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — the life and work of the greatest of the white monks.
• Saint Stephen Harding — the legislating father of Citeaux, drafter of the Charter of Charity.
• Cistercian Spirituality — the school of charity of the first Fathers of Citeaux.
• Carthusian Order — the other great contemplative foundation of the late 11th century (1084).
• Saint Benedict of Nursia — the father of Western monks and author of the Rule Citeaux willed to take "to the letter".
• The History of Religious Orders — to situate Citeaux in the great monastic flowering of the Church.