Monks, the Pope, and the Origins of the Crusades by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Author:Diarmaid MacCulloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

4

Cistercians, Carthusians, and the Rise of Mary

It was not long before the triumph of Cluny came under challenge. In a world which seemed by contemporary standards newly awash with wealth, with the institutional Church a chief beneficiary, it was natural for many devout and serious Christians to react by emphasizing simplicity and self-denial. Catharism was one such reaction, but the twelfth century abounds with different examples of the mood, not least among monks. The crowds on pilgrimage and in the armies of the Crusades represented a new, more widely practised Western Christian spirituality; what did that say about the aristocratic ethos of the great monasteries, with their sprawling estates and hordes of servants? For many, Benedictine abbeys were no longer the perfect mirror of God’s purpose for the world. Benedictine houses did not disappear – they were too powerful and well established – but alongside them came a large variety of new religious orders, seeking to change the direction of monasticism. What is significant is how few of the new orders were confined simply to one region of the Western Church. They expressed the continent-wide character of the huge changes which the Church experienced during the Gregorian reforms.

An explicit return to Benedictine roots came in the Cistercian Order, so called from its original house in Cıˆteaux (Cistercium in Latin) in Burgundy. Cistercian houses generally required endowment with lands on the same heroic scale as older Benedictine foundations, but they felt that contact with the sinful world had been their predecessors’ downfall, so they sought lands far from centres of population, in wildernesses. There were advantages for donors in this: wildernesses were cheaper investments for benefactors than long-standing, well-cultivated estates – but the Cistercians did go to the length of creating wildernesses by destroying existing villages, sometimes not without a certain shamefacedness. One Cistercian chronicler of the foundation of his house during the 1220s at Heinrichau (now Henryków in south-west Poland) went to the extent of asserting that villagers who were victims of monastic cleansing went away of their own accord after a murderous community feud; the two murdered men ‘mutually killed one another’ apparently. Later monks of the house less scrupulously asserted that the founders of Heinrichau had come into a classic Cistercian wilderness.48 This ruthlessness in the service of Christ is a mark of the militancy which the Cistercians brought to the religious life. They exhibited the new aggressiveness also to be seen in the crusading movement. Aggression was certainly one of the main characteristics of their most formidable early representative, Bernard of Clairvaux, and his electrifying preaching was influential in launching the Second Crusade in 1145.

Two years before those crusaders marched east, a Cistercian and former monk under Bernard had been elected pope as Eugenius III. By the end of the century, there were 530 Cistercian houses throughout Europe, tightly organized into a single structure centred on Cıˆteaux. This was as much of an international corporation as the Cluniacs who had provided its model, but in conscious rejection

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.