A wide range of goals, a range of ways of understanding organized community, of negotiating hierarchical structures, and of collegial participation could all be realized and advanced through the distinct form of organization that the Cistercians now called a religious order. In broad terms, it brought to the vita religiosa both powerful institutional consolidation and stabilization as well as well-regulated procedural structures that served the interests of reform and renewal.
Although during the pontificate of Alexander III (1159–1181) and Innocent III (1198–1216) sharp accusations of a love of material goods had already been cast against the now-wealthy Cistercians, in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council (as will be discussed below) gave the Order its due as the creator of new constitutional structures.1 From Cistercian practices of organization the council developed a legal norm of general church law and prescribed, even for monasteries and canonries that were not part of any order, the observance of a general chapter of all prelates, according to the model of the Cistercians (iuxta morem Cisterciensis ordinis). The measure concerned above all individual houses of Benedictines and regular canons. Under Honorius III in the years 1219 and 1225, an analogous command followed, directing Benedictine abbeys in various lands to carry out mutual visitations and to establish provinces for that purpose. Both measures found their way into the latest codification of church law, the Liber Extra, and thus became universally valid law.2
Each individual case of these orders’ institutionalization makes clear, however, that a phenomenon of mutual isolation was under way: the statutes of the orders were valid only within the organization that produced them, the general chapter was responsible only for its own members, and only an order’s own members could reach its positions of leadership. A variety of different views on religious life (first articulated with the emergence of new forms of eremitical life in the early eleventh century as a quest for the best path of individual salvation) eventually inspired the monastic world to divide into competing organizational structures, none compatible with the others.
In view of such diversity, the threefold typology that had finally been articulated at the Second Lateran Council (1139) is applicable in only a general way. The council spoke of the life of monks (vita monastica), of (regular) canons (vita canonica), and of hermits (vita eremitica). Each had found its guiding principles, respectively, in the three principal rules (regulae principales) of Benedict, Augustine, and Basil.3
In the second half of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries, when the new religious movements had yet to take shape, a differentiating polemic of protest directed itself broadly against older, now supposedly hardened and superficial forms of monastic life. Now, as the twelfth century progressed, a contest developed over which form of religious life was the most attractive. Its purpose, among other things, was to lure new recruits where possible or to convince those already committed elsewhere to transfer. With powerful rhetoric that called forth the full range of religious life’s symbolic repertoire—for example, the different positions on the proper material and color of the habit4—polemical treatises inspired by competing institutional forms of monastic life fought a battle over who upheld the strictest form of life (the vita strictior or arctior).5
The divisions these conflicts inspired were most unsettling to contemporary observers, because a new multiplicity threatened to overwhelm what had been thought to be the foundations of a shared orientation. Around 1145 the Premonstratensian Anselm of Havelberg captured this widespread anxiety by saying that many of his contemporaries wondered why so many novelties had taken root in God’s church, and why so many new regulations had grown up.6 He reflected further: Who could not lament the Christian religion (so they complained), now subject to so much multiplicity, transformed through so many innovations, hounded by so many new statutes and customs, beleaguered by so many rules and norms, all of them renewed almost yearly. In the church of God, they say, one could now see how many would now rise up, those who lived by their own lights, who wore unusual clothing, who chose a novel way of life, and who saw themselves—whether under the pretense of monastic profession or the vows of canonical discipline—as they wished, who sang the psalms in novel ways, who established novel observances of abstinence and diet, and who modeled themselves neither after the monks who fought under the Rule of Saint Benedict nor after the canons who lived an apostolic life according to the Rule of Saint Augustine.
Anselm argued vehemently against such skepticism. He appealed to the one Holy Spirit, who gave life to the church but also shared its gifts in many ways. The Spirit gave its gifts to humankind in different ways across different ages, he said, in order to preserve the one faith that bound all together. As Klaus Schreiner explains, “‘Diversity,’ a structural principle of God’s creating and ordering action, also justified the plurality of forms of monastic life and community.”7
A roughly contemporary treatise, revealingly titled the Little Book on the Diverse Orders and Professions that Are in the Church (Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia),8 also arranged the diversity of the era’s religious life within God’s plan for salvation. In this text the diversity of the world of monasticism found its parallels in Christ’s many different ways of interacting, and in the corresponding interactions and groups in the Old Testament. The diversity of monastic life was thus understood by contemporary thinkers to be a message that promised salvation, and one that Christ had signaled in various ways: by retreating into the desert, by carrying the cross on Calvary, and by praying on the Mount of Olives. The spectrum of these possibilities as they were lived out in the monastery corresponded to the elements of a divine plan for salvation that was unified but that expressed itself in various ways; religious life thereby encompassed things that were diverse (diversitates) yet not opposed (adversitates).9
In these models, which advanced claims of an ontologically fundamental nature, difference provided the building blocks of unity, insofar as unity allowed itself to be captured only through complementary aspects of multiplicity. Difference, in a functional sense, was complementarity. Contemporaries anxious to find stable middle ground had to be reminded that after an age of new beginnings, of reform of the church and religious life, of a drive for a more inward faith, and of reaching out for both new and forgotten models, religious life had by the middle of the twelfth century come to take on a variety of forms. But they had also to be reminded that overall such diversity was of unimaginable value for Christendom.
No one knew how to make this case better than the Cistercian monk and bishop of Freising in Bavaria, Otto (1112–1158).10 Equipped with a refined learning that had been honed in Paris and building on Augustine’s teachings about the City of God, he profoundly explored the course of salvation history. As he came to speak of his own day, he too depicted the various forms of religious life in order to highlight all that the appearance of the religious had in common: “So adorned both inwardly and outwardly, they spread out across the whole world, multiplying fruitfully and richly, and their number and their merits grew astoundingly in just a brief time; now they shine in the brightness of their signs [signa], and through their wondrous works they light the way. As their numbers were once greatest in Egypt, so they are now in Germany and France.”11 Following these reflections, he came to his powerful conclusion: “On account of the multiplicity of our sins, and on account of the malodorous sinfulness of this most disturbed time, we believe that the world could not long endure were it not preserved by the merits of the holy [religious], the true citizens of the City of God.” No passage could have been a more moving witness for the role of religious working for the salvation of all of humankind.
The Cluniacs had once claimed to bear the spiritual responsibility of making the world “bright and new”—in other words, that was the ambition of this single religious congregation that had served as a model for all others. By the middle of the twelfth century, it was the broad diversity of monastic life that served as a guarantor and symbol for the salvation of the world. “In my Father’s house there are many rooms,” the Bible taught (John 14:2)—a passage that Stephen of Thiers had also recalled.12
Alongside the grand theological concept of a City of God with “many rooms,” there was also of course a practical interest in capturing so much multiplicity within available structures. Stripped of its claims to legitimacy within a framework of salvation history, the broad spectrum of religious associations might be understood as the result of an all-too-random process. A few decades later, the Roman Curia sought to control that process by channeling initiatives for making new foundations. The Fourth Lateran Council issued the following resolution in 1215:13 Lest the great diversity of religious forms of life—religio was the concept used here—create confusion in the Church of God, it was strictly prohibited that anyone should found a new religio. Whoever should wish to do so was to embrace one that had already been established. Anyone who was to found a monastery in the future should also adopt the rule and legal traditions (institutiones) of an approved form of religious life.
In this context the only available choice, in principle, was between the rules of Benedict and Augustine. But the expectation was not that there should be strict and exclusive observance of one rule or the other. It was essential that special statutes should also have their place in order to articulate a normative framework suitable to the particular circumstances of each individual monastery, congregation, and order. Far more at issue was a fundamental decision about whether to embrace a tradition oriented more toward contemplation or action. That decision was crucial for the many communities that were to be founded in the coming era—the Dominicans, for example, and the many future communities of hermits.
It should thus be clear that the boundaries of the normative frameworks outlined here in fact remained fluid. But they gave the papacy a means through which to control and to channel initiatives for founding new monasteries and orders, and as will soon become clear, the papacy made use of it.
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1 Jean Leclercq, “Passage supprimé dans une épître d’Alexandre III,” Revue bénédictine 62 (1952): 149–51; Guido Cariboni, “Il papato di fronte alle crisi istituzionale dell’ordine cistercense nei primi decenni del XIII secolo,” in Il nostro ordine è la Caritá. Cistercensi nei secoli XII e XIII (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2011), 93–126.
2 Corpus Iuris Canonici, Pars Secunda: Decretalium Collectiones. Decretales Gregorii 3.35.7 and 8, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1881).
3 Jacques Dubois, “Les ordres religieux au XIIe siècle selon la curie romaine,” Revue Bénédictine 78 (1968): 203–309, here 287–88.
4 Peter von Moos, “Das mittelalterliche Kleid als Identitätssymbol und Identifikationsmittel,” Unverwechselbarkeit. Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen Gesellschaft, ed. Peter von Moos (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 123–46.
5 Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gillian R. Knight, The Correspondence between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
6 Anselm von Havelberg, Anticimenon (Dialogi), PL 188:1141–42; Markus Schürer, “Innovation und Variabilität als Instrumente göttlicher Pädagogik: Anselm von Havelberg und seine Position in den Diskursen um die Legitimität religioser Lebensformen,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 42 (2007): 373–96.
7 Klaus Schreiner, “Dauer, Niedergang und Erneuerung klösterlicher Observanz im hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Mönchtum. Krisen, Reform- und Institutionalisierungsprobleme in der Sicht und Deutung betroffener Zeitgenossen,” in Institutionen und Geschichte, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), 295–341, here 326.
8 Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard S. Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
9 Hubert Silvestre, “Diversi sed non adversi,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 31 (1964): 124–32.
10 Hans-Werner Goetz, Das Geschichtsbild Ottos von Freising (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984); Joachim Ehlers, Otto von Freising. Ein Intellektueller im Mittelalter (München: Beck, 2013).
11 Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, ed. MGH SS rerum Germ. (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1912), 372. Cited from Walther Lammers, ed., and Adolf Schmidt and Hans-Werner Goetz, revisers, Otto Bischof von Freising, Chronik oder die Geschichte der zwei Staaten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 561; subsequent citations from 559 and 561.
12 Regula venerabilis viri Stephani Muretensis, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, ed. Jean Becquet, CCCM 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 66.
13 Antonio García y García, ed., Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum Commentariis glossatorum (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, 1981), chap. 13, p. 62; Michele Maccarrone, “Le costituzioni del IV concilio lateranense sui religiosi,” in Nuovi studi su innocenzo III, ed. Roberto Lambertini (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1995), 1–45; Pietro Silanos, “‘In sede apostolica specula constituti’. Procedure curiali per l’approvazione di regole e testi normativi all’alba del IV concilio lateranense,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 94 (2014): 33–93.