The Reform That Took the Rule at Its Word

The Cistercians are the great medieval reform of Benedictine monasticism, founded on the conviction that the older monasteries had drifted from the plain sense of the Rule.

A stricter return

The order began in 1098 when Robert of Molesme led a group of monks to a marshland site called Citeaux in Burgundy, seeking a stricter and simpler observance than the wealthy and elaborate monasticism of the day allowed. The reform stripped away the accumulated ceremony and ornament, restored manual labour to the centre of the life, and settled the houses in remote and undeveloped country, so that clearing and farming the land became part of the discipline. The white undyed habit distinguished the reformed monks from the black-robed Benedictines they had left.

Expansion and its cost

The order spread with extraordinary speed in the twelfth century, carried above all by the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, and it became a European institution with a network of daughter houses bound to their mothers by an annual visitation and general chapter, a constitutional apparatus that was itself an innovation. The same efficiency that cleared the wastes made the abbeys rich, and the wealth in time drew the very criticism the founders had made of others, so that the Cistercians in their turn generated the stricter reform of the Trappists. The pattern by which austerity brings prosperity and prosperity invites reform runs through the whole history of the order.