The Cistercian Founders and the Rule: Some Reconsiderations
All sources of Cistercian history avow repeatedly that the primary aim of the founders was a stricter adherence to the Rule. Most scholars accept this but disagree considerably over what this implied in practice. Against an older view that the Cistercians were determined to observe the Rule in every...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1984
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| In: |
The journal of ecclesiastical history
Year: 1984, Volume: 35, Issue: 3, Pages: 358-375 |
| Online Access: |
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| Summary: | All sources of Cistercian history avow repeatedly that the primary aim of the founders was a stricter adherence to the Rule. Most scholars accept this but disagree considerably over what this implied in practice. Against an older view that the Cistercians were determined to observe the Rule in every detail and to prohibit not only what St Benedict condemned but even what he failed to mention, a number of more recent commentators, including P. Salmon, B. K. Lackner and J. Leclercq, have argued that the ideal was not a complete literalism so much as a complete fidelity to its spirit of renunciation, penitence, prayer and work. L. B. Lekai has taken this argument several steps further to claim that the Cistercian movement had little to do with a return to the Rule for its own sake. It derived rather from a general desire among the more advanced spirits of the eleventh century ‘to create a life of perfect austerity and seclusion from the world’. The founders ‘handled that venerable document of monastic legislation with remarkable liberality. They invoked and applied it when it suited their purpose; they ignored or even contradicted it when it could not be fitted into their concept of monasticism, largely based on the ideals of the eleventh-century reforms’. The increasing emphasis on the Rule, which Lekai does not deny, is to be explained by two secondary objects: to establish the movement on an indisputably legal foundation and to defend the Cistercians against charges of novelty. In fact, so little were the first Cistercians concerned with literal adherence to the Rule that they immediately departed from it in several important respects. Other deviations followed quickly, not as is often alleged because the Cistercians betrayed their ideals almost as soon as they proclaimed them, but because a literal interpretation of St Benedict had never been their intention in the first place. |
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| ISSN: | 1469-7637 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of ecclesiastical history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0022046900028669 |