The Cistercians and Bernard of Clairvaux

In 1098, according to the Cistercians’ own account of their origins, Robert of Molesme and some of his monks went to the papal legate, Archbishop Hugh of Lyon, and declared that they wished to keep the Rule of Benedict more strictly than it was kept in their abbey. With his authority twenty-one monks left Molesme for Cîteaux, a wooded and unvisited place in the diocese of Chalon, cleared it and began a wooden monastery, which the duke of Burgundy completed for them. Their documents call it the New Monastery (Exordium Parvum 1–3). The monks of Molesme soon appealed to Pope Urban II; the legate sent Robert back, and the prior, Alberic, became abbot (Exordium Parvum 5–9).

The same account lists what the new community decided. It gave up whatever in dress and diet went beyond the Rule. It refused revenues such as churches, tithes, manors and serfs, on the ground that Benedict had none and that monks should live from their own land and work. To make that possible it took in bearded lay brothers, who were not monks, to run its outlying farms, and it resolved to build only in places far from towns (Exordium Parvum 15). Under Alberic’s successor, the Englishman Stephen Harding, the church was stripped to wooden crosses, an iron candlestick and vestments of plain cloth. Recruits were few, and the monks feared they would have no successors (Exordium Parvum 16–17).

Then, the account says, thirty men entered the novitiate together (Exordium Parvum 16–17). William of Saint-Thierry, in his Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, says that Bernard entered Cîteaux in 1113 with more than thirty companions (Vita Prima of Bernard 1.4.19 (PL 185, col. 237)). Some time later Stephen sent out a group of monks to found Clairvaux, in the diocese of Langres, and set Bernard over them as abbot, to their surprise, since he was young and in poor health. The valley, William says, had been called the Valley of Wormwood and was a haunt of robbers; the monks at first ate bread of barley, millet and vetch and cooked beech leaves (Vita Prima of Bernard 1.5.25 (PL 185, col. 241)).

New foundations followed quickly: twelve houses within eight years (Exordium Parvum 18). The Charter of Charity, drawn up by Stephen and his monks (Carta Caritatis prologue), bound them together. The mother house takes no payment from a daughter house. All keep the Rule as it is kept at the New Monastery, with the same books and customs. Each abbot visits his daughter houses once a year, and all the abbots meet once a year at Cîteaux (Carta Caritatis 1–3, 5, 7).

Bernard wrote as well as governed. His treatise On Loving God, written as abbot for a Roman cardinal, answers that God is to be loved for his own sake and without measure, and traces four degrees by which love grows (Bernard, On Loving God dedication) (Bernard, On Loving God 1) (Bernard, On Loving God 15). When he died in 1153, Geoffrey of Auxerre, a monk of Clairvaux, called him the father of more than a hundred and sixty monasteries (Vita Prima of Bernard 5.2.15–18 (PL 185, col. 360–362)).