XII

Cistercian Life in the Twelfth Century

TO UNDERSTAND the Cistercian life, you need a general idea of the way a monastery is organized. Once you have that, the rest is easy. A twelfth-century monastery of the Cistercian Order plainly and effectively tells its own story, even if all its monks are gone and half the walls are in ruins. And you can almost grasp the purpose of the monastery when you see the site where it was built, even if there is practically nothing left of the ruins.

The tradition of the White Monks was to build in lonely, wooded valleys. There were several reasons for this. But it would be just as well to say at the outset that they did not seek out such places for the sake of the scenery. That was something the twelfth century would not altogether have understood, even though St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, allowed the landscape of southern Italy a place in his contemplations.¹ And it is true that St. Bernard confessed he had learned all his wisdom from the “oaks and beeches of the forest” and invited the schoolmaster of York, Henry Murdach, to come to Clairvaux and “learn something from the woods that you will not find in books.” ² Nevertheless, the monks of the Middle Ages did not go into the wilds ‘looking for the beauties of nature. Father Vacandard³ tells us what we are to think of St. Bernard’s supposed “love of nature.” He shows us clearly enough that the founder of Clairvaux and of the Cistercian school of mysticism was far from being a twelfth-century Wordsworth. Rather, the solitude and peace of the forest gave his mind freedom to contemplate God in His revelation.

But there is one error far worse than this one. It is the mistaken idea that the Cistercian fathers liked to build in marshy and unhealthy places so that the monks would always be ill. This condition would enable them to do penance and would keep death, their last end, inescapably before them, and they would long for their deliverance with undimmed ardor. This theory has a frail foundation. It is based on a sentence attributed to St. Bernard in a letter of one of his contemporaries, his next successor but one in the abbatial chair of Clairvaux. The writer, Fastrad of Gaviamez, was giving a younger abbot a piece of his mind for leading a life that savored of relaxation. His language is dramatic and rhetorical, and the sentiments he attributes to St. Bernard seem to be rather heavily colored by his own penitential cast of mind.⁴ A closer acquaintance with the abbot of Clairvaux would show that although he may have said these words to Fastrad, they need to be balanced against the saint’s serious and explicit teaching about discretion: mater virtutum et consummatio perfectionis (“the mother of virtues and the seal of perfection”).⁵

Whatever the first Cistercians may have believed about penance—and their life was certainly most austere—they never favored a spirituality that sought perfection in suicide. On the contrary, St. Bernard was one of the most determined defenders of Christian sanity against the Manichaeism revived by the Albigenses, who condemned the body and all its works as essentially evil.

In any case, history records more than one occasion when St. Bernard ordered a monastery to move to a healthier site, after the original location proved harmful to the monks. One instance of this was at Belleperche, in marshy, low-lying country near Montauban, in southern France.⁶

The true reason the White Monks escaped to wild places and built their monasteries in mountains and forests was to get away from the world. And the reason they wanted to get away from the world was primarily to find not suffering for themselves but joy. They were looking for freedom: freedom from all the cares and burdens of worldly business and ambition. They desired this freedom not for its own sake but for the sake of union with God by contemplation.

The Cistercian manifesto that was the Exordium Parvum— probably written by St. Stephen Harding himself—tells us this clearly several times. Pope Paschal II, issuing a bull in approval of the new foundation, commended them for throwing off the burden (angustias) of worldly life and of mitigated monasticism and ordered them officially to continue in the way they had chosen, “in order that being all the more free from the disturbances and pleasures of secular life you may the more eagerly strive to please God with all the powers of your mind and soul.” Ut quanto a saecularibus tumultibus et deliciis liberiores estis, tanto amplius placere Deo totis mentis et animae virtutibus anheletis.⁷

The monks themselves made a point of appealing to St. Benedict’s precept a saeculi actibus se facere alienum (“to become strangers to the business of the world”) when they rejected the care and usufruct of parishes, manorial estates, tithes, and all the other intricacies of ecclesiastical feudalism.⁸ And then, in order to give themselves to a simpler and more interior way of prayer,⁹ they even rejected the excessive activity which the liturgical pomp of Cluny imposed upon the monks. The attitude of the founders of Cîteaux is summed up in one sentence by the author of the Exordium. He describes the satisfaction with which they arrived in the marshy woods that had been granted them by the Duke of Burgundy, and observed that the brush was too thick to encourage visitors. It was inhabited only by wild beasts, and the monks congratulated themselves on having found a place that was all the more perfect for their life because it was repugnant and inaccessible to seculars.¹⁰

Nevertheless, when the world tried to follow them, and the Duke of Burgundy signified his desire to come and visit the monks in state, with his whole court, Stephen Harding risked the whole future of the monastery and the Order by informing His Grace that he was not wanted unless he came alone, to pray.

It is understandable, then, that the founders of the Cistercian Order considered this matter so important that they wrote it into their original statutes¹¹ at the very beginning of the list. It is the first recorded item in the formal legislation of the General Chapters.

To pay for their solitude the White Monks were willing to accept the most unhealthy and uncomfortable situations. But that does not mean that they resigned themselves to pine away there and die. On the contrary, they took land that their contemporaries were afraid even to approach and entirely transformed it by their labor from a wilderness into fertile farms. They drained valleys that were too moist, they irrigated land that was too dry. They cleared forests. They even performed almost unbelievable feats of engineering in order to get themselves settled in difficult mountain passes. For example, the builders of Bonneval, in the rugged uplands of south central France,¹² built a terrace supported by gigantic blocks of granite in order to be able to place their monastery and its necessary gardens on the flank of a steep, wooded hill dominating a ravine.

When St. Bernard and his companions were sent out by St. Stephen Harding in the early summer of 1115 to make the third foundation from Cîteaux in three years, they crossed the plateau of Langres to the valley of the Aube and found a wooded vale which penetrated the hills to the depth of a mile or so on the left bank of the river. The place had a bad reputation. It was supposed to be frequented by robbers. Perhaps that was only a legend. But in any case, Bernard was not moved to settle there by any such considerations as were attributed to him by Fastrad in the letter we have mentioned. It was watered by pleasant streams and sheltered from the world and from the weather. Closed off on three sides by hills, it opened south and eastward to catch all the sunlight of the day. Only late in the afternoon, when the sun began to sink behind the western slopes with their ancient oaks, did shadows steal across the simple little abbey built by the pioneers. Up to that moment it had been storing up light and heat all day.

True, not all of Bernard’s daughter houses enjoyed the same advantages. When his cousin, Godfrey de la Roche, founded Fontenay, he had to drain the swampy valley and collect its waters into many ponds before building his charming abbey—which was, according to the meaning written into its name, to “swim upon fountains.”¹³ These valley monasteries developed within the Cistercian Order a beautiful spiritual symbolism by their names alone, eloquent and harmonious names full of poetry and simple mysticism, in which the image of “waters” and “fountains” and “springs” plays a very important part. It was before St. Theresa of Avila wrote her famous allegory of contemplative prayer and the various aguas by which the soul is irrigated. This concept is more than traditional: Christ Himself gave His Church that figure of grace and the interior life in His own preaching, as His Spirit had also revealed it before to the prophets. He spoke to the Samaritan woman of the “water that would become a fountain springing up [in the believing soul] to life everlasting”¹⁴ and repeated the figure later, when preaching to the crowds at the feast of Tabernacles. His Evangelist explicitly tells us what He meant: “Now this He said of the Spirit which they should receive, who believed in Him.”¹⁵

Steeped in the language and imagery of Scripture, the Cistercians were acutely alive to the spiritual and poetic possibilities of their surroundings, which they condensed into names like Fountains, Clairvaux (“Clear Valley,” or “Valley of Light”), Trois Fontaines (“Three Fountains”), Vauluisant (“Shining Valley”), Aiguebelle (Aqua Bella, “Beautiful Water”), Senanque (Sana Aqua, “Clean Water”), Clairmarais (“Clear Marsh”), Bonaigue (Bona Aqua, “Good Water”), Fontfroide (“Cold-Spring”), Mellifont (“Fount of Honey”)—not to mention other such names as La Benisson Dieu (“God’s Blessing”), La Grace Dieu (“God’s Grace”), Beaulieu, Bonlieu, Bonport, Cherlieu, Rosières, Clairfontaine, and hundreds more, all of them ingenuous yet full of meaning, bearing witness to a deep spiritual ideal.

Surely, there is nothing in these names to indicate any deliberate intention of dying of malaria. . . .

When the monks had found their homes, they not only settled there, for better or for worse, but they sank their roots into the ground and fell in love with their woods. Indeed, this love of one’s monastery and its surroundings is something integral to the Cistercian life. It forms the object of a special vow: stability. When the monks of Melleray inscribed over their door In nidulo meo moriar (“Let me die in my little nest”), they were expressing something that has been in the heart of every true Cistercian since St. Alberic, whom St. Stephen praised as being a “lover of the brethren and the monastery, the place,” amator fratrum et loci.

It is difficult not to succumb, at least temporarily, to the charm of the typical Cistercian valley. Look at the poem Tintern inspired and what the eighteenth-century English water-colorists got out of Fountains and Bylands and Rievaulx and Jervaulx and Furness and the rest! Or look at Senanque, in the deep Provençal valley, near Petrarch’s Vaucluse, where boxbushes and dwarf oak cling to the hillsides among the pale outcrops of rock burnt white and ocher by the gorgeous sun. You will find the same attraction about the monasteries in Kentucky, Utah, New Mexico.

It all adds up to one thing: peace, silence, solitude. The world and its noise are out of sight and far away. Forest and field, sun and wind and sky, earth and water, all speak the same silent language, reminding the monk that he is here to develop like the things that grow all around him: he is planted in the garden of the Lord, plantatus in domo Domini, and his existence has now one meaning only: to reach out for the light of truth and the waters of grace, to sink his roots into God and raise his branches into God’s good air and breathe heaven and absorb its wonderful rays.

So, from the very outset, even the site of a Cistercian monastery is, or ought to be, a lesson in contemplation. And the monasteries built by the White Monks made it all more explicit.

At this point we are not so much concerned with the architectural beauty and austerity of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, except to say that it was not only in keeping with the natural surroundings but largely influenced by them. You cannot put a basilica on the scale of Cluny or Vezelay in a narrow valley or a mountain ravine. Nestling in a wooded hollow between hills, the Cistercian abbey was a structure in low elevation and had no stone tower. Towers were forbidden by the General Chapter in one of the few pieces of explicit legislation on architectural matters.¹⁶

The monastery conformed to a well-established type and was always a simple, four-sided group of buildings around a cloister garth, dominated by the monastic church with its low belfry generally perched on top of the transept crossing. There was usually a rose window in the façade of the church, another at the end of each transept, and a fourth at the end of the apse if, as was so often the case, it happened to be rectangular. But on the whole, one was struck by the lack of large windows in the rough stone walls of the exterior. All around the outside of the buildings you met a sober, austere bareness, broken up by small windows arching to rounded tops, as if questioning the traveler with the simplicity of peasant children. The sun poured down on the mellow brown tiles of the roofs. The place was so quiet you wondered at first if it were inhabited, until you heard the sound of hammering or sawing or some other work.

Not till you got inside did you realize, suddenly, that the whole monastery was lighted from within. That is to say, it was centered upon a quiet pool of pure sunlight and warmth, the cloister garth. All around this central court, invisible to anyone outside, the wide bays and handsome open arches of the cloister allowed the light to pour in upon the broad flagstones of the floor, where monks walked quietly in their hours of meditation or sat in corners with vellum manuscripts of St. Augustine or the Old Testament prophets.

For the rest of the buildings, light was no particular problem. In church the monks chanted the offices mostly from memory, and in any case, the most important of the canonical hours were sung in the middle of the night. Often the windows did not open into the nave itself but into the side aisles. The sanctuary, however, was lighted by a big, simple rose window or by three or more small arched windows, through which the morning light poured in upon the altar as the ministers ascended for the conventual Mass. Since the church was always orientated, the rays of the rising sun shone into the apse and shot long spears of light at the monks gathered under the bare stone arches to sing the hymn of Prime, Jam lucis orto sidere. In most Cistercian churches all the side altars were so arranged that the priest saying Mass faced the rising sun.

The chapter room opened into the cloister and had some fair-sized windows of its own. The refectory was sufficiently lighted by a few high windows. The only person who really needed a good light in the refectory was the monk appointed to read aloud to his brothers. He usually sat in a lectern built into the wall and reached by a flight of steps let into the wall itself, and lighted by its own little window. Light was not important in the warming room. This was where the monks were allowed to gather around the only fire accessible to them in cold weather, although they could not stay there for any length of time or read books there. Still less were large windows needed in the dormitory; here, the high stone ceiling gave the monks a cool and pleasant gloom for the midday siesta so necessary in summer, when they had longer hours of work and less nighttime sleep.

Everything in the monastery was centered on the cloister and dominated by the church. It was in the church that the monks prayed, in the cloister that they lived. The cloister was, in a certain sense, the most important of all. It was the meeting place of all the different elements of the monk’s life, the clearinghouse where he passed from material to spiritual things and settled down for the moments of transition between work and prayer, prayer and work.

He came in from the fields, took off his wooden sabots, and sat under the sunny arches to read and meditate while the tension induced by activity seeped out of his muscles and while his mind retired from exterior things into the peaceful realms of thought and prayer. Then, with this preparation, he passed into the dark church, and his mind and will sank below the level of thoughts and concepts and sought God in the deepest center of the monk’s own being as the choir began to chant, with closed eyes, the solemn, eternal measures of the liturgy.

When the monk returned from the inscrutable abyss of a contemplation which he himself could scarcely fathom, he emerged once more to the cloister, to sit or walk silently under those sunny arches or in the open garth itself, while the fruit of his prayer expanded in him and worked through his whole being like oil in a woolen fabric, steeping everything with its richness and life.

Yet, we must not think of the cloister as something altogether esoteric, a place filled with the same kind of sacrosanct hush you expect in a museum. It was a place where men lived. And the monks were a family. The cloister was not exempt from the noises of a society that was at the same time monastic and rustic. The young monks might practice difficult passages of chant that they had not yet mastered by heart. Others might be engaged in their laundry (for each monk washed his own clothes) or in repairing their shoes. Others might take it into their heads to bring their blankets down from the dormitory and beat the dust out of them. So, although they did not speak, the monks had to know how to be contemplatives in a busy and not altogether noiseless milieu.

The monk’s life was lived on three different levels. On each, there was the common element of constant prayer, constant union with God by the simple intention of love and faith that sought Him in all things: but apart from that, the three levels were characterized, respectively, by the predominance of bodily activity out at work; of mental activity in the readings and meditations of the cloister, and spiritual and affective activity in the church. If the monk happened, also, to have the grace of infused contemplation, he would be able at times to rise above all these levels and all these activities to a pure contact with God above all activity. But ordinarily speaking, even the contemplative monk lives and loves and therefore acts on these three levels.

Now, the cloister was the scene of the monk’s most characteristically human mode of being. It was there that he met God and his brothers as a social and thinking and affective and perhaps affectionate creature: St. Ailred testified that the bond between brothers might be expected to be warmed by a glow of genuine and holy fondness. But in any case, all these elements made the cloister the place where the monk was most truly on his own level as a human being. That was why it was the solvent, the common denominator, of everything else in his monastic life.

The cloister was his base of operations. It was from the level appropriate to the cloister that he set out on his flights into the areas above and beyond his nature, in church and liturgy. It was also from there that he went forth to the realms in which he commanded natures lower than himself and, by the work of his hands, diverted the things of the woods and the fields to the material uses of his brethren.

So, the Cistercian monastery became the perfect picture of the soul of the contemplative. Perhaps it was because the Cistercians were such refined psychologists¹⁷ that they could not help building themselves houses that reflected all the interests that most intimately concerned their own hearts. But the cloister, with its adjacent chapter room, symbolized the soul operating in its own human mode by a free play of the reasoning intellect and the affective will—making practical and speculative judgments and carrying them out in the light of reason and grace—always drawing strength and meriting fresh grace from the operation of the social and Christian virtues so necessary in the monastic community.

Firmly established in peace and harmony within himself, when all the powers of his soul are united by grace and virtue, the contemplative receives into his soul, into his intellect and will, the choice graces of God’s light and love.

Under the impulsion of these forces within him, he can go out of his cloister into the exterior world and do his share of the world’s activities, performing good works for Christ and the Church and enriching himself still more with the fruits of his activity.

But he does not stay active all day. Outside his cloister, he has no place to rest; he is only a wanderer, and soon he returns to the peace of recollection, where he is again flooded by the light of God’s grace.

This time, however, he is drawn further within and above himself. He passes from the cloister of his active faculties to the church—or innermost substance—of his soul—which the Cistercians called the memoria. By that word, they did not mean memory. It was the term they had inherited from St. Augustine to describe the very essence of the soul considered as the actus primus from which the faculties emanate and pass into action.

It is by the activity of our mind and will that we know and love: it is in the cloister that the monk finds his sunlight and companionship and books. But above activity, in the dark church of the memoria where there is no explicit thought, and where acts of the will are mute as in the depths of their ultimate causes, the soul meets God in the ineffable darkness of an immediate contact that transcends every activity, every intuition, every flame of virtue or love. Not that love and intellection have here ceased, but they have been drawn up to a level so transcendently simple that the soul acts without knowing that it acts, and loves and knows all at once in a movement so pure and so free of all expense of human energy that it seer not to be acting or knowing or loving at all.

It is in the inner sanctuary of the spirit that the monk achieves the supreme purpose of his whole life and really fulfils his vocation—by union with God in perfectly pure and disinterested love that seeks no reward, because God Himself is its reward; the soul now loves God with His own love of Himself.

But just as the monk could not enter his church except by passing through the cloister, so the ordinary preparation for perfect union with God was the exercise of his faculties in the knowledge and love of God and his brethren, in which are included all virtues. Plenitudo legis est dilectio.

The Cistercian fathers looked upon the monastery as a school in which men acquired the supreme art that transcends all others, the art of love, ars artium, ars amoris.¹⁸

The cloister and chapter room, centers of the community life, as such, were also properly the school where charity was learned by humility, obedience, and brotherly love. Here, the monk was taught by other men, the abbot, the novice master, and the example of all his brethren. But nothing he could learn from them would be anything but a preparation for the real knowledge of God (Who is Himself substantial love) taught by experience in a union with Him consummated in the very substance of the soul by His own Holy Spirit.

Everything in the Cistercian life, every detail of the Rule of St. Benedict, was ordered and interpreted and understood in relation to that one end: perfect union with God.¹⁹

This explains the austerity which banished sculpture and painting and stained glass and mosaic from the Cistercian abbey: the monk must not only be stripped of all right to own rich and beautiful and precious things, but his mind and imagination must be delivered from all attachment to, and dependence upon, the means that led to God by a less direct road. Only die Crucifix remained for him to fix his eyes upon, if he could not close them and find God in the depths of his heart. All the rest was proscribed with a severity that nevertheless had its point. The General Chapter explained the reason for the ban on pictures and statues and stained glass in any part of the monastery by remarking that they often interfered with the profit of a good meditation: Dum talibus intenditur utilitas bonae meditationis vel disciplina religiosae gravitatis saepe negligitur.²⁰

The White Monks were applying principles that have also been made famous by St. John of the Cross. The Spanish Carmelite, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, admitted the usefulness and even necessity of sensible means to awaken the spiritual life in beginners and even certain advanced souls, but he declared that, for those who wanted to progress in the ways of mystical prayer, the time would come when God would demand the sacrifice even of one’s own interior fancies and images and concepts and memories:

Since no created things can bear any proportion to the being of God . . . nothing that is imagined in their likeness can serve as a means of proximate union with Him, but quite the contrary. All these imaginings must be cast out from the soul, which must remain in darkness as far as this sense is concerned in order to attain to divine union.

In order that one may attain supernatural transformation it is clear that he must be set in darkness and carried far away from all that is contained in his nature, which is sensual and rational . . . The soul must be like to a blind man leaning upon dark faith and taking it for a guide and leaning upon none of the things which he understands, experiences, feels and imagines. For all these are darkness and will cause him to stray; and faith is above all that he understands and experiences, feels and imagines.

And thus a soul is greatly impeded from reaching this high estate of union with God when it clings to any understanding or feeling or imagination or appearance or will of its own.²¹

It was simply an extension of the monk’s flight from the world. The need to build a monastery in physical solitude was supplemented by the much more fundamental need for interior solitude and exspoliation. Hence, too, the need for silence, for humility, for fasting, for subjection to superiors: all this was to help the monk to divest himself of every selfish desire, every shred of human attachment, because he knew that, once he was empty of self-love, he would be filled with the love of God.

Thus every human affection in the saints must, in an ineffable way, melt away from itself and flow over entirely into the will of God. Otherwise how is God to be all in all if in man there remain something that is still man?²²

 

We have been speaking of the cloister. Certainly it was a rugged life the monks led, under those stone arches open to all winds. That was their place of rest and reading and meditation in winter as well as in summer. True, it was the north side of the cloister, opening to the noonday sun, that was the usual place of reading. It was here that the books were kept in their armarium. It was also the most convenient place for prayer, for the church door was close at hand, and if one were moved to lay aside the book and enter into the silence of contemplative prayer, one could slip into the dark sanctuary—provided the book was left outside.

Remember, too, that the Cistercians had monasteries in Norway and Sweden and Denmark, not to mention the Highlands of Scotland, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Apennines. However, the usages explicitly allowed them to wear several robes and both their cowls in cold weather.²³

They had longer labor and longer fasts than the Cistercians have today. The ordinary workday in Lent began with several consecutive hours of reading and study after Prime, but the community went out to work in the fields, still fasting, about half-past nine in the forenoon, and worked until the tenth hour, which came late in the afternoon, about four or half-past four. Only then did they return home and sing Vespers and take their single meal of the day. By the time they rose from table in the refectory and made their way to church through the cloister, chanting the Miserere, the shadows of twilight were enveloping the gray walls and tile roof of their monastery, and the setting sun was withdrawing the little light that still touched the tops of the hills or the crowns of the budding trees. In a moment it would be time for Compline, and the community would retire to their straw mattresses. However, once they were there, they might perhaps get a longer sleep than the Trappist does today. It varied with the time of sunset, because they were in bed half an hour or so after the sun was down and rose at the eighth hour of the night. That granted them, in the wintertime, at least eight hours’ sleep; but in summer, sunset was much later and “hours” were much shorter.²⁴

We who live in an age that has developed so many accurate instruments for measuring out all man’s activities into exact periods of time and calculating the precise money value of every piece of work done and measuring the calories we consume and the vitamins we need, would find it hard to live by the easy and natural approximations of the Middle Ages. In a Cistercian abbey of the twelfth century the absence of the clocks and machinery and instruments and devices to which we have become conditioned gave the life of the monks a completely different tempo from ours. Their days had their own vital rhythm, something quite different from our own days—even where a modern monastery strives to keep the same Rule as the one they lived by.

The ordered sequence of prayer and work and reading and eating and sleeping into which the monastic day is divided could not be made to depend on any instrument. It followed the sun, the moon, the stars. It was integrated not into some abstract and mathematical norm of time but into the earth’s actual journey around the sun.

Therefore, the rhythm of the monk’s existence was something free and natural and organic. It was attuned to the waxing and waning seasons. It followed the sun’s course along the ecliptic. It knew the same free moods of expansion and contraction that made the sap swell in the trees or the leaves fall from their branches.

Monastic historians have not given an altogether satisfactory answer to the question of just how the monks managed to get up at the eighth hour of every night, when the eighth hour fell each night at a different time. Perhaps the bell ringer or the abbot had developed some sixth sense that told him when to crawl out of his blankets and wake the brethren. Perhaps the first cockcrow, which is supposed to come a little after midnight, gave the necessary alarm. But in any case, the Rule provided for the accident of a late rising: the cantor would shorten the night office by cutting some of the “lessons” (lectiones) read aloud at each nocturn. And the bell ringer would do a suitable penance.

The night hours from about two o’clock (according to our modern reckoning) until daybreak were devoted to liturgical prayer. The hymns of the office attuned the monk’s spiritual consciousness to the darkness around him and to the peril it symbolized. The stone vaulting of the church was lost in shadows. Only one small light flickered before some altar or near the ambo, where the lectionary lay open. The monks themselves were scarcely visible in the gloom. Sometimes the abbot went around the choir with a lantern to make sure that no one had fallen asleep.

And in that darkness the full, slow measures of the psalmody rose and fell with even cadences, each verse broken at the mediant by the long, significant pause which was typical of the Cistercian office. Between every pair of psalms the spell woven by the monotonous cadences was broken and a voice intoned the antiphon. With a momentary dash of color and flame this brief cry of melody was taken up by all those hidden voices, only to sink again into the austere monotony of the next psalm.

On most days of the year the canonical office was followed by the singing of the office of the dead. The choir broke up toward the end of the tenth hour of night for a period of reading, only to return for another office, Lauds, in which a new note of hope anticipated the coming of their Christ, their rising sun.

Sunrise, of course, changed the whole temper of the office and of the monk’s day.²⁵ Now the chanting of the canonical hours went more quickly. Only three psalms were appointed for each hour. The hymn Jam lucis orto sidere hailed the risen sun, and those who were praying the office, roused from deep meditation on eternal truths, looked outward to the fields and workshops and begged God to send grace for the day’s work. And soon the monks were on their way to the woods and pastures.

In all seasons of the year one or another of the day hours would be chanted in the fields by all those who were not working within easy reach of the church. Usually it was the midday hour of Sext (about noon), but in times of special work, such as harvesting, vintage, sheepshearing, Tierce and None might also be sung in the fields.

The monks could tell by the sun when it was near the time for Sext. When the bell was heard ringing in the distant abbey church, the heads of the various work groups would give the signal, and their helpers would gather together and begin chanting, after the usual silent prayers, standing in two choirs among the wheat sheaves or in the rows of vines, with their grape baskets resting in the shadow of the leaves; or if working in the olive groves, they would pray beneath the silver foliage, bowing in their gray robes, their hard, brown hands on their knees.

Those who were working within the enclosure, splitting wood or digging in the garden, pruning fruit trees or copying manuscripts, tanning hides or making cheese, would gather in choir. If they were caught in the fields at the hour of None, they had the chance to sing these words: “Because thou shalt eat the labors of thy hands, blessed art thou, and it shall be well with thee.”²⁶

Meanwhile, toward the middle of the morning work the cooks had presented themselves to the prior and received his permission to leave the fields or the orchards or wherever they were working and return to the monastery. There, they washed up and began to prepare dinner for the community, after having broken their own fast with a chunk of black bread and a cup of wine.

The monks came in a few hours later and sang another hour of the office. Then, if the dinner was not yet ready, they sat down to read in the cloister. They had to be prepared for any kind of emergency in this matter, because all the monks took turns at cooking, and one could generally tell when the community would have to wait half an hour overtime for their food, or when the soup would be burned.

Once they were in the refectory, things were not rigidly systematic. Although perfect silence had to be observed, no one was allowed to walk about the room eating, and there were a few little points of monastic etiquette to be observed. It was not unlikely that the cellarer might come and put some extra portion before you—a wedge of cheese or some eggs or fruit. You were certain to receive an extra portion if you had been bled by the surgeon or had some other weakness or ailment, or if a feast day.

In the summertime the monks rested in the dormitory for an hour, or an hour and a half, while the sun was at its height. They would keep their own rakes and pitchforks by their bedside, for in harvest time the monks did not hand in their tools after work. If the work was heavy or far afield, the monks might take their dinner in the country and sleep out their siesta under the trees at the edge of a wheat field or under the roof of one of their granges. Sometimes they even spent two or three days away from the monastery, staying at a grange. If there was a chance of returning home the same day, they might sing Vespers in the fields, although this was very unusual. If they were obliged to stay at a grange, they found simple but clean quarters—a dormitory, refectory, and chapel. If they were there over a Sunday or feast day, they spent the day in reading, meditation, and prayer, as they would have done in the cloister. The usages insisted on the usual strict silence at the grange and restricted the use of sign language. Also, the monks were not allowed to wander off into the woods by themselves.

In summer and winter the monks’ day ended with the setting sun, and they went to bed a little after dark had fallen However, before they retired, St. Benedict wanted all the various activities of the monastery to fold themselves back into a single unit. He wanted to gather his family together for the night. Perhaps it was again a spontaneous, unconscious reflection of the way the contemplative collects his faculties before entering into the darkness of his wordless prayer. But in any case, while the last rays of the sun still slanted down over the wooded hills and across the monastery, the monks and brothers gathered in the cloister, and one of their number read aloud to the whole family. This was called “collation,” because St. Benedict had suggested that, among other works, Cassian’s Collationes (Conferences) would be the most appropriate book for this time.²⁷

As the light gradually waned, they listened to the last songs of the birds under the eaves and in the forest, punctuating the pauses in the reader’s voice, while swallows flew about the garth and the belfry in the dusk. Finally, the abbot gave the signal to rise, and after a brief prayer they filed into the church, not to begin the office of Compline but only to conclude it: for that reading was a regular part of the office.²⁸

The day finally ended with the murmur of corporate prayer pulsing through the shadows of the dark church, until the monks, blessed by their abbot in the shadows of the transept, ascended the steps that led directly from the church to the communal dormitory.

Nothing could be simpler than such a life. Yet it was never monotonous—any more than the seasons are monotonous, or the development of growing things. It was an austere life, without being rigid. There was enough sane latitude to keep formalism out of it, and it was so close to the earth and so bound up with nature that it had to be rich in spontaneity. It had to be genuine. And anyone who really gave himself to the Rule and to the prayer and labor and poverty and obedience it demanded, found himself deepened and broadened and matured more than he had ever dreamed possible. Without burdening himself with systems and rigid sets of pious practices, but simply by laboring and chanting the praises of God—and by reading the Scriptures and living in harmony with his brethren—and by taking the fasting and the heat and the cold and the poverty as they came from day to day—the monk grew and became strong in spirit and found his way, without realizing it, into the pure atmosphere of sanctity.

However, this could not be accomplished merely by the material and natural organization imposed upon the monks’ life by the Rule. There was needed a special, formal element of spirituality to draw all these material elements together and give them a higher life. And though the Cistercians would have been completely perplexed at the notion of inventing or devising a new system of spirituality or discovering a new way to God, they did, nevertheless, have a distinctive spirituality of their own. There was nothing in it of special method or new technique. It was simply St. Benedict and the Gospel over again: but in the Cistercian monasteries of the twelfth century, Benedictine simplicity was invested with a special vitality and purity and charm.

The result of this was that the Cistercians, without consciously intending anything of the sort, came upon a new and peculiarly delightful region of the spiritual life that was all their own. To attempt an explanation of how that came about would be the subject for a fascinating book all by itself. But it was the fruit of a Providential combination of natural and supernatural elements: the Gospel, the Rule of St. Benedict, the ferment of the twelfth-century renaissance, the woods of France and England and Belgium and Germany, the ardent and poetic souls of a Bernard of Clairvaux, an Ailred of Rievaulx, a William of St. Thierry, a Guerric, an Adam of Perseigne, an Isaac of Stella, a Baldwin of Ford. . . . But above all, the special grace of the Spirit of God was there, forming souls in these hidden monasteries to a life of charity and deep contemplation.

It was the Holy Ghost Who infused into these monks a special fire of inspiration which tempered with love the tremendous austerity of their reform. It was the Spirit of God, God’s own love, that sweetened their sufferings with an indefinably powerful unction and raised them above the level of penitential drudgery and routine and formalism. And it was God’s love that opened their eyes to new horizons in the interior life and replaced the gloom of the hardened ascetic with the serene, unbounded confidence of the mystic who dares to aspire to the possession of God and who, with impetuous and unconquerable desires, cries out for the embrace of His love and will not be denied.

It was the Holy Ghost Who taught these saints the one magnificent truth that so many austere penitents had seemed to forget: that if we love God, it is because God has first loved us more, and that God has created us not so much to fear Him and honor Him and worship Him, as to love Him, since love is the perfection of all adoration and homage. God would rather have us love Him than merely fear Him, because fear keeps us far below Him, while love alone can make us His equal. The Cistercians never grew tired of asserting it over and over again. Love makes man equal to God, and God wants us to love Him in order that we may be equal to Him and share His nature and all His infinite goodness and joy. God wants us to love Him beyond measure, because then He can give Himself to us beyond measure and our joy will then know no measure, but will go on expanding inexhaustibly forever as we lose ourselves more and more in the interminable substance of Him Who is love. We are perfectly ourselves only when we have lost ourselves in this pure love of God for His own sake; and God calls us to Him in order to transform us into love. And when our whole life and being is nothing but a perfect act of love, we have become what God is, and we share His ineffable joy—the joy of pouring ourselves out and of giving ourselves without end. And the more we give ourselves to Him, the more He gives Himself to us in return. The exchange goes on forever, and the wonder of it and the exultation increase without limit, for everything that the soul has is given to God, and all that is God is given to the soul: quippe quibus omnia communia sunt, nil proprium, nil a se divisum habentes.²⁹ And so, God’s love, flowing through the soul, returns in the soul’s love of God to its own principle, its own fount, from which it never ceases to flow back into the soul. Magna res amor, si tamen ad suum recurrat principium, si refusus suo fonti semper ex eo sumat unde jugiter fluat.³⁰

God loves us that we may learn to love Him for love’s sake, because He knows that pure love is the most perfect beatitude, and that is what He wants to share with us. Nam cum amat Deus, non vult aliud quam amari: quippe non ad aliud amat nisi ut ametur, sciens ipso amore beatos qui se amaverint.³¹

If contemplation and the pure love of God became the explicit end of the monastic life in the mind of St. Bernard and his school, the spirituality of the Cistercians was also characterized by certain particular means to this end. And this is the triumph for which St. Bernard is best known.

There were men of all kinds coming to Clairvaux and to the hundreds of monasteries of White Monks that sprang up all over Europe: men like the ones who alarmed William of St. Thierry by bringing the works of Abelard and William of Conches into the novitiate at Signy, and others like the unlettered knights who asked to be admitted to Clairvaux after an overnight visit. There were mature monks from Cluniac monasteries and young men, like Bernard’s brother Nivard, who had little spiritual formation. There were intellectuals and soldiers, theologians and farmers, clerks and merchants and courtiers and serfs. But meditation and the ways of the interior life were laid open to them all by a method that transcended every method and obviated all difficulties and all intricacies from the very start.

There was nothing involved about it. You came to the monastery to learn, or rather to relearn, the love whose seeds were implanted in your very nature. And the best way to do this was to open the eyes of faith and gaze upon the perfect embodiment of God’s love for men: Christ on the Cross.

Christ was the center of the Rule of St. Benedict. Christ had drawn St. Pachomius into the desert. Christ was with St. Anthony in the Thebaid.³² The love of Christ is the center of all Christian mysticism. Obviously it must be so, for that is what the word Christian means. Nevertheless, it is true to say that St. Bernard transformed and, in some sense, transfigured Christian spirituality by filling it with that lyrical love of Christ and His Virgin Mother which pervades the whole Middle Ages. It is true that St. Bernard and his Cistercians rediscovered that love of the Savior which had put such fire into the Gospel of St. John and the Epistles of St. Paul. They realized how close Christ is to us, not only as God but as Man, and they were able to grasp the full meaning of the truth that “no one comes to the Father but by Him.”³³ They understood that God wanted to draw all men to Himself through His Incarnate Word, through Jesus, the Son of Mary. Nemo potest venire ad me nisi Pater qui misit me traxerit eum.³⁴ They knew that all blessedness, eternal life, was to be found in the knowledge of “the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.”³⁵ And they saw that in Christ alone was the gate to all true spirituality, to all true mysticism. “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.”³⁶ Qui videt me videt et Patrem.³⁷

That was why St. Bernard based all his teaching on that one foundation, the love of Christ. He saw that Christ was the key to everything that mattered in the universe: for all created things, by their goodness and order and beauty, awake in our hearts the love for the God Who made them and make us obscurely desire the possession of Him. But that joy would be forever impossible unless Christ were sent to take us back to God and to teach us the way to love God by showing us how God really loved us. Above all, it is only through the merits of Christ’s death on the Cross that we can obtain the grace to rise above our own selfishness to the pure and selfless love of God for His own sake, which is the very essence of mysticism for the Cistercians. And so, St. Bernard exclaims:

Great must be my love for Him through Whom I have existence, life and wisdom. If I am ungrateful to Him, then I am unworthy of Him. Worthy indeed of death is the man who will not live for Thee, Lord Jesus, and he is, in fact, already dead. And the man who has no sense of Who Thou art, is senseless. And the one who desires to live for anything else but Thee is living for nothing and is, himself, nothing. For after all, what is man, if he has no knowledge of Thee?³⁸

St. Bernard was impatient of the dialectical wrangling that kept the great logicians and humanists of his day so busy with technicalities and abstractions that they forgot to live. The abbot of Clairvaux—who was himself one of the great intellectuals of the twelfth century—knew that the true perfection of the intellect did not lie there: these interminable analyses of the words and terms and the outer surface of revelation were only a blind alley; if the professors thought they could arrive at the full possession of truth by their debates, they ran the risk of getting nowhere.

God has not revealed Himself to us in Scripture and tradition in order that we may spend our lives haggling about the prepositions and conjunctions in the different manuscripts through which the deposit of faith came down to us. The Letter of Scripture must be studied and understood: but the content of revelation will not be exhausted when we have argued out all its terms and propositions to suit our own reason. To expect any such satisfaction would be hopeless from the start.

And so, St. Bernard taught his monks to read Scripture and the Fathers with an altogether different spirit. Searching the sacred text with the eyes of faith rather than with those of scholarship, they filled their minds and memories with the mysteries in the life of Jesus and with the prophecies and types of Christ in the Old Testament. Then, in the silence of deep and humble meditation they sought to penetrate the surface and slake their thirst at the springs of living water which only God could lay open to them.

God, in His turn, seeing the soul’s desire to know Him, and seeing its recognition of its helplessness to penetrate the mysteries which transcend its natural powers, rewards its love and faith by the gift of understanding. The light infused into the mind by the Holy Spirit, together with love that inflames the will, opens up deep and penetrating insights into the mysteries of God, until suddenly the soul becomes aware that God has made Himself present to the eyes of the mind in a manner that baffles all description and can only be understood by those who have tasted the experience.

St. Bernard tells us that this presence of God has nothing in it of an imaginary vision, nothing in it that appeals to sense or to mere emotion. Vide tu ne quid nos in hac Verbi animaeque commixtione corporeum seu imaginatorium sentire existimes. And he goes on to give a classical description of the way the Word is present to the soul in mystical experience:

Not in any figure, but infused into the soul: the Word is apprehended not under any outward appearance but by His effect. . . . He is a Word that does not sound in the ear but penetrates the mind; He does not speak, He acts; He does not make Himself heard in the senses but in the desires of the will. His face has not a visible form, but impresses a form upon the soul; it does not strike the eyes of the body but fills the heart with joy.³⁹

The secret of Cistercian spirituality was simply to seek the perfect possession of God through the love of Christ: a love that expressed itself in the search to know Jesus in His mysteries and in all Scripture, and in the ardent desire to serve Him by the perfect observance of the Rule of St. Benedict. Qui habet mandata mea et servat ea, ille est qui diligit me.⁴⁰

But it would be an error to think that, for St. Bernard, the whole contemplative life was summed up in the love of Christ as Man. This is only the beginning. It has a definite purpose: to prepare us for the infused and experimental knowledge of Christ in His Divinity as it has just been described. The importance of devotion to the Humanity of Jesus in Cistercian spirituality is that the White Monks considered it the simplest and most effective preparation for infused contemplation.

This is the point where a superficial study of the Cistercian spirit will generally go off the rails. As soon as we begin to talk about devotion to the Humanity of Jesus, we think of all the books of meditations and all the devotions and all the pious art that abound in our time, and we unconsciously assume that St. Bernard was thinking of all this when he urged his monks to cultivate an ardent love for Christ. Yet, we have already seen how rigorously all such means were banned from the Cistercian abbey church. The monks were not allowed to use books of devotion or even to meditate from books in church; they had no pictures to look at; they had their “devotions” but these were simple and unadorned, unlike those of our own day. There was not even a time prescribed for formal meditation. Yet, to tell the truth, there has never been such rich and vital and perfect interior life in Cistercian monasteries as there was in the twelfth century—the age of the great Cistercian saints and of the purest Cistercian mysticism. How did they manage to nourish their interior life under such conditions?

The answer is simple. The whole harmonious structure of regular observances, the monastic life we have been discussing, the simple round of prayer and labor and reading, the life of the cloistered cenobite, far from the activities of the world, close to nature and with God in solitude—all this was saturated in Scripture and in the liturgy. In fact, the liturgy elevated and transformed every department of the monk’s existence, penetrated to every recess of the monastery, and incorporated all the monk’s activities into a vital and organic whole that was charged with spiritual significance. The monk lived by the sun and the moon and the seasons, granted: but all nature was elevated and made sacred by the liturgy, which gathered up all the monk’s acts and all his experience, ordering and offering everything to God.

Perhaps, at first sight, that may look complicated: but it was really extraordinarily simple. The liturgy, far from complicating life with ritualistic functions, had been purified by the Cistercians and stripped down to its primitive essentials and was therefore doing the work it had done in the days when St. Benedict wrote his Rule. Nothing was plainer and at the same time richer than the liturgy of primitive Cîteaux, in which, stripped of all conflicting elements, the temporal cycle of the Church’s year dominated all.

In other words, the Cistercian really worked his way through the liturgy of the fundamental seasons—Advent, Christmas, Septuagesima, Lent, Easter, and post-Pentecostal—in all their fulness. The mighty lessons taught by the Church in every Nocturn and every Mass had a chance to work themselves right into the blood and marrow of the monk’s existence. In Advent he virtually lived and breathed Isaías. The words, which he knew by heart, sang themselves over and over in his mind and soaked themselves into the landscape of the season and its weather and its every aspect, so that when December came around, the very fields and bare woods began to sing the Conditor alme siderum and the great responsories of the night offices. In the snows of January, the triumphant antiphons of Christmas or the mysteriously beautiful responsories of the Epiphany followed the monk to the bare forest. Later, the office Domine ne in ira began to echo through his mind and prepare him for the austere and somber cycle of offices that would go from Septuagesima to Passion Sunday and Holy Week in an ever-increasing seriousness and dramatic power until the final anguished katharsis of Good Friday.

Then suddenly the dazzling joy of the Easter liturgy and its incomparable lightness and relief and triumph led the monk into spring, and the budding woods and the songs of the birds and the smell of flowers and the first green blades of the coming harvest filled the sunlight with silent alleluias: and on to another climax of confidence and vision and peace at the Ascension. Then Pentecost gave the whole interior life of the monk a new direction, and he entered the summer and the long series of Sundays that discussed, in poetry and music, every phase of Christ’s public life and teachings, while in the night offices he chanted his way through the Books of Kings. In August he was in the Books of Wisdom; in September, Job and Tobias; in October, the Books of the Machabees, and in November, Ezechiel and Daniel.

The liturgical cycle took the monk through all Scripture, all the Old and New Testaments, with commentaries and explanations by the greatest of the Fathers, all of it chanted and prayed and absorbed and literally lived. The attitude of the Cistercians toward all this is doubly clear when we reflect that the books of the Bible sung in the church were also, at the same time, read in their entirety in the refectory during the same season.

In this way not only did the monk live in the midst of nature and the joys and beauties of the woods and mountains, but his whole life was steeped, besides, in perfect poetry and music, and his mind was filled with fascinating stories and images and symbols and pictures. He moved and breathed in the spiritual world of the prophets and patriarchs. He was familiar with Gedeon and Joshua and Moses and Aaron and Elias and Jeremías. He lamented with Job and he praised God with Daniel and he saw the heavens open in the wild, brilliant theophanies of Isaias and Ezechiel.

The Vulgate became so much a part of the monk’s mind, that he could not help thinking in its language and seeing things in the light of its symbols and images, and gradually the whole universe became impregnated with the poetry and the meaning of Scripture. And this was all the more simple and easy because there was nothing else to get in the way. The monk had no other interests. All his other reading revolved around Scripture, because the monks read nothing that was not more or less a commentary on the Vulgate.

The influence of this kind of interior life is obvious the moment anyone reads a page of St. Bernard or St. Ailred. Bernard, especially, is a poet after the manner of Isaias (although his best poetry is all prose), for his language is full of the vegetal exuberance of the great prophet of the Incarnation. So fresh and rich and ingenuous and outspoken is the style of the abbot of Clairvaux that one wishes his sermons on the Canticles had been illustrated by Eric Gill.

Such is the atmosphere of all Cistercian spirituality: and it is incomparable.

The Cistercians transfigured the Old Testament with their one great obsession, the love of Christ. For it was, precisely this that was their “method” of arriving at Christ and of keeping in touch with him. They did not have any systematic meditations on Christ—still less, scientific or psychological histories of Christ’s life. But they developed the habit of seeing Christ in every page of the Bible, whether of the Old Testament or of the New. And carrying the substance of the Vulgate in their memories, they went about everywhere with an inexhaustible mine of material in which their faith found Christ under every symbol and every allegory and every image; all spoke to them of the union of the contemplative soul with the Word of God by pure love. What is more, the monks’ simple faith and ardent desire often bore fruit in the one thing they longed for: the ineffable “touch” of the Divine Substance meeting the depth of their own being in the direct contact of mystical love, and filling their very substance with wisdom and with peace.

Infused contemplation was the end to which all this simple and harmonious interplay of liturgy and prayer and reading and sacrifice and poverty and labor and common life was directed. Mystical prayer was the fullest expression of the Cistercian life: the end to which all were encouraged to aspire, although it was to be expected that not all, perhaps not even a majority, would reach it. If they did not taste the perfection of that experience on earth, that did not matter. What was important was to love God’s will and live to do His will and contribute as best one could to His glory by the perfection of obedience and humility.

But the final result of this combination—a hundred or two hundred monks and brothers living out this existence in all its ramifications—was that for a few score of years and in a score of the most truly Cistercian of the Cistercian abbeys, the contemplative life was lived, and lived in community, with a simplicity and completeness and a perfection that had scarcely been known in the world since the days of the Apostles.

This still constitutes the peculiar function of the White Monks in the Church: to contemplate God as perfectly as it can be done by men living in common, to contemplate God day and night, winter and summer, all the year round, not merely as individuals in a community but precisely as a community.

And that is the Cistercian vocation.