VII.

CISTERCIAN USAGES.

 

Alberic, now that he had obtained the sanction of the Holy See, set forward with a bold heart in his strict following of St. Benedict's rule. In the execution of all the reforms which distinguished what afterwards became the order of Citeaux, Stephen as prior was necessarily foremost; the whole movement indeed was but carrying into effect what he had before conceived at Molesme. The first alteration effected was the cutting off of all superfluity in the monastic habit.

The Church in the beginning of the twelfth century had a hard battle to fight with pomp and luxury within the sanctuary itself. Courtly prelates, such as Wolsey in a later age, were not uncommon, and this worldly spirit had invaded even the cloister. A reformation, therefore, such as that effected by Alberic and Stephen at the outset of the century, was of the utmost consequence in deciding the struggle in favour of Christian poverty. They were not as yet conscious of the importance of what they were doing; they were but a few poor monks, serving God in the midst of a marshy wild, in an obscure corner of Bur­gundy, and only aimed at securing their own salvation. But they arose in a critical time for Christendom, and just turned the scale as it was wavering.

Let us hear the words of a good old monk, who wrote in another part of the world during the first years of Citeaux. "How shall I begin to speak? For on all sides is the sacred end of monkish life transgressed, and hardly aught is left us, save that, as our holy father Benedict foretold, by our tonsure and habit we lie to God. We seem almost all of us prone to pride, to contention, scandal, detraction, lying, evil speaking, hurtful accusations, contumacy, wrath, bitterness, despising of others, murmur­ing, gluttony;" and he winds up all by saying, "we are seduced by a love of costly apparel."

 Bitter are the complaints that we hear of one monk clad in rich grey or party-coloured silks, and another ambling by on a mule which cost 200 solidi. What shall we say to the proud abbot with his train of sixty horse, riding forth, not like the father of a monastery, but like an armed castellan? Or to another with his robe of costly fur, and his sideboard of gold and silver plate, though he rode but four leagues from home? And if the abbot himself was in sober black, his secular attendants rode behind him in gay clothing of scarlet or green, the motley procession arresting the eyes of beholders along the road, whilst it frightened the porter of the poor monastery where they were to put up for the night.

It was high time for the Cistercian to step in with his rough woollen stuff, and to return to St. Benedict's rule. Alberic and his brethren rejected all habits that were not mentioned in the rule; they therefore would not wear garments with ample folds, nor garments of fur, shirts, nor hoods separated from the rest of the habit.

St. Benedict allows the habit to vary according to the climate; but for countries of a mean temperature, he gives it as his opinion that a garment called cuculla, a tunic, and a scapular are sufficient. At first these were only the common habits worn by the peasants of the country. The stern old Benedictine looked for nothing picturesque; he had made himself poor for his Lord's sake, and he wore the dress of the poor among whom he lived, and with whom he worked in the cold and heat, in the rain and in the sunshine. Ancient pictures are still seen of the monk in his tunic, and scanty scapular, reaching down to his knees, without sleeves, but with holes through which his arms were passed, and with a pointed cowl enveloping his head. Over this, which was his working dress, he wore in the choir, and in the house, the cuculla, which was a large mantle, not unlike a close cope, without sleeves, and enveloping the whole person. There was many a step between this coarse garb, and the ample folds into which it had developed around the noble figure of St. Hugh of Cluny.

In the Cluniac order the scapular was called cuculla, and the upper garment was called froccus. Instead of the pointed and almost conical cowl of the primitive Benedictine, their scapular had a fair and ample cowl, and the froccus had long and pendent sleeves two feet in cir­cumference; again, their scapular covered not only the shoulders, but it was also expanded into a covering for the arms, so that it scandalized our simple Cistercians. The froccus which Alberic and Stephen rejected was in fact the same garment as their own cuculla, as worn "with a difference" by the Cluniacs. They reverted as far as they could to St. Benedict's pattern, following the Italian rather than the French monks, for their scapular had the same form as that of Mount Cassino.

With all their severity, there is a grace about the Cistercian habit, from the fond associations with which they connected it. In the black scapular worn over the white tunic, broad about the shoulders, then falling in a narrow strip to the feet, they saw the form of our Lord's cross, and thus they loved to bear it about with them even in sleep. Their cuculla was compared by pope Boniface VI to the six wings of the seraphim, for "it veils the head of the monk as it were with two wings, and the arms as it were with twain, and the body as it were with twain."

Another characteristic of the Cistercian habit was its white colour. The scapular, as we have said, was black, and when on a journey, they might ride booted and spurred, with a grey cuculla, so that they were called in Germany grey monks; but their proper habit was white, and much wonder it excited amongst the brethren of other orders. The black monks meeting a white monk on a journey would stop and stare, and point at the stranger, as if he were a traveller in a foreign dress.

They reproached the Cistercians with wearing a garment fit only for a time of joy, whilst the monastic state was one of penitence. But the white monks answered, that the life of a monk was not only one of penitence, but was like that of the angels, and therefore they wore white garments, to show the spiritual joy of their hearts. And notwithstanding their coarse bread and hard beds, there was a cheerfulness about the Cistercians, which may in a great measure be traced to what we should now call a sympathy with nature. Their life lay out of doors, amongst vineyards and cornfields; their monasteries, as their names testify, were mostly situated in sequestered valleys, and were, by a law of the order, as old as the time of Alberic, never in towns, but in the country. From their constant meditation as they worked, they acquired a habit of joining their recollections of Scripture to natural objects; hence also the love for the Song of Solomon, which is evident in the earlier ascetic writers of the order. We shall see, in the course of this narrative, abundant proof that Stephen's white habit did not hide a gloomy or unfeeling heart.

The reason assigned for the change of colour in the habit is the devotion to St. Mary, observable in the order from the beginning. It was a standing law that all Cistercian monasteries should be "founded and dedicated to the memory of the queen of heaven and earth, holy Mary”; the hours of the Blessed Virgin were also recited very early after the foundation of Citeaux; and the angelic salutation was one of the common acts of devotion put into the mouth of even the lay brethren of the order.

The immediate cause of the adoption of the white habit is mysterious; it seems difficult to account how it should all at once appear, without the sanction of any statute of the order, especially as it was opposed to the custom if not to the rule of the primitive Benedictines. A tradition is even current in the order, that Alberic saw the blessed Virgin in a vision putting upon his shoulders the white garment; and that he changed the tawny colour of St. Mary Magdalene to the joyful colour sacred to the mother of our Lord, in consequence of the consolation which the vision afforded him in the difficulties with which he was then struggling. The vision has not much historical authority, though the tradition of the order, and the strange circumstance of the change of colour itself, are in favour of its truth. The one thing certain is, that it was assumed in honor of the spotless purity of St. Mary, the special patroness of the Cistercians; and the circumstance that she was chosen to be the peculiar saint of the rising order is in itself characteristic.

One would have thought that the austerity of Alberic and Stephen would have led them to choose some martyr or some unbending confessor of the faith; but they rather raised their minds to her on whom the mind cannot rest without joy, though her own most blessed soul was pierced through with a sword. She was the spotless lily of the valleys in which the King of Heaven deigned to take up His abode; and the Cister­cians thought it well that she should protect by her prayers their lowly houses, which were hid from the world in secluded vales, and make them also the dwelling-place of her Son.

It was not, however, only in their habit that the Cis­tercians imitated the primitive monks; they returned also to the scanty diet which St. Benedict prescribes. It was most of all in this particular that the abuse of dispensations crept in, for in this portion of the rule the abbot was especially to exercise his discretion. A few years after the time when the Cistercian reform was effected, the Cluniacs degenerated, after St. Hugh's death under abbot Pontius; not only did they eat meat every day in the week except Friday, but they ransacked earth and air for highly flavoured dainties. They kept huntsmen, who searched the forest through for venison and wild-boars; their falconers brought them the choicest birds, pheasants, partridges, and wood-pigeons. The province under the archbishopric of Lyons seems at that time to have been especially full of monasteries from which religion had disappeared, inhabited by monks, “whose cloister was the whole world, whose god was their belly”. Wine, well spiced, and mixed with honey, and meats highly seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cinnamon, were then to be found in the refectory of Cluny, with all kinds of costly spices, brought from beyond the sea, and even from the East. Monks used also to retire to the infir­mary under pretence of sickness, in order to eat meat; and strong healthy brethren might be seen walking about with the support of a staff, which was the mark of the infirm. The liberality of the faithful had also augmented the evil, as might be seen from the necrologies of monasteries, in which certain benefactors were com­memorated, who left sums of money to be laid out in pittances or relaxations for the monks on certain days beyond the rule.

St. Benedict gives his monks a pound of bread a day, besides two cooked dishes; and on days when they had more than one meal, a few raw vegetables or fruits for supper. As far as the letter of the rule went, these dishes might be fish, eggs, milk, cream, cheese, roots, and vegetables of all sorts; even fowls were not excluded; but the custom of the primitive monks of the order had banished all but the plainest vegetables boiled with salt. Cluny, even in its best times, had added to these frugal rules, and it is probably against the Cluniac innovations that Alberic and Stephen's regulations were framed.

The Cluniacs divided their messes into two sorts, one called generale, which was allowed by the rule, another was pitantia, and beyond it. The regular cooks had nothing to do with the pittance, which was always distributed by the cellarer, the theory being that it was benevolently allowed beside the rule; again, it was never blessed. The general was given separately to each monk; the pittance was in one dish between two brethren. The common food of the brethren were beans and other vegetables: minute directions are given "that the beans be stirred from the bottom with a spoon", lest they be scorched. Also they are to be boiled with grease; and one of the cooks, it is especially provided, may taste "the water of the beans, that he may prove if they be well seasoned". On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the general consisted of beans and vegetables; besides which there was a pittance, which might be four eggs, or cheese.

On other days, the general, besides the vegetables, might be fish or five eggs. No one can accuse this diet of excess, and yet it was beyond the rule of St. Benedict; there is even a story to the effect, that St. Peter Damian was shocked at the style of the refectory at Cluny, and especially at their using grease with their vegetables; and that he expressed his dissatisfaction to St. Hugh. It is also quite true that amidst the marshy soil and damp woods of Citeaux, and with much more manual labour than was practised by the Cluniacs, Alberic and Stephen succeeded in establishing a much more strict system than that of Cluny. They rejected, says the Exordium, "dishes of divers kinds of food in the re­fectory, grease also, and whatsoever was opposed to the purity of the rule." It is known that they did not eat fish; even eggs seem to have been excluded, and milk was used only at the season of harvest, and that not as a pittance, but as one of the two dishes allowed by the rule. After half a night spent in singing the divine office, in reading and meditation, and a day spent in agricultural labour, they assembled to what was during a great part of the year their single meal, which consisted solely of what St. Benedict allowed, and that procured by the sweat of their brow. Their fare was the convent bread, and two messes of vegetables, boiled, not with the culinary accuracy of Cluny, but in the plainest way.

 It is instructive to observe the contrast between St. Hugh and Stephen. The abbot of Cluny himself lived a most austere life, but he was also a builder of magnificent churches, and of ecclesiastical ornaments. He also gave dispensations to weaker brethren; in one case allowing a nobleman, whose dainty flesh had worn from his birth soft silks and foreign furs, to wear for a time a less rough habit than the rest of the brethren; in another, increasing the daily portion of the younger monks beyond what the rule prescribed. Stephen, on the other hand, was cast in another mould; he was made, not to bring on the weak: but to lead the strong. All that belonged to earth he looked upon as an encumbrance, even though it was hallowed by consecration on the altar. He loved coarse and scanty food, because it was a partaking of Christ's sufferings; and he clung to the rough monastic garment, because it was an imitation of Christ's poverty. It was this love of poverty which also induced them to make another regulation, widely differing from the general practice of the monasteries at that time. "And because," it is said, "neither in the rule, nor in the life of St. Benedict, did they read that that doctor of the Church possessed churches, or altars, or oblations, or burial-grounds, or tithes belonging to other men, or bakehouses, or mills, or farms, or serfs,therefore, they rejected all these things."

They did not by any means intend to do away with the lands or offices of the convent; on the contrary, they had already accepted a grant of land with the serfs, and all that was upon it, from the Viscount of Beaune, and we may be sure that both mills and bakehouses were already in full operation at Citeaux; for St. Benedict's rule prescribes "that all necessary things, such as water, a mill, a garden, a bakehouse, should if possible be contained within the monastery, and that divers arts should be exercised there." Monks were to be their own millers and bakers, farmers and gardeners: and doubtless such strict observers of the rule as the brethren of Citeaux had already sunk wells and enclosed a garden.

Doubt­less, too, they had erected a mill, though it may be safely conjectured, that it was not so large as that of Farfa, a convent which was built after the pattern of Cluny, the mill of which was an edifice seventy feet long, and twenty broad, with a tower over it; nor had it adjoining, as at Farfa, a manufactory where gold­smiths and other artificers were at work. At Cluny, the mill was an important place, where specially before Easter and Christmas a servant of the abbey ground the corn of which the altar-breads were to be made, dressed in an alb, and with a veil enveloping his head. The bakehouse, too, was not left without ornament; it was adorned with boughs of walnut-trees; many things connected with household affairs were at Cluny consecrated with rites of an almost oriental beauty, which reminds one of patriarchal times; thus the new bread was specially blessed in the refectory, as were the first-fruits of beans; and again, the first grapes, which were blessed at the altar during mass. Our poor Cistercians were as yet struggling for existence, and the place where they baked their coarse food was not so picturesque as that of Cluny; but they did not mean by the regulations above quoted, to make use of mills and bakehouses out of the precincts of the abbey; and they expressly say, a little farther on, that "they will receive lands for from the dwelling-place of men, vineyards, and fields and woods, and water to make mills, but for their own use."

The wood of Citeaux was, therefore, already an active scene, where the monks might be seen working in silence, broken only by the stroke of the spade, or the noise of the water turning the wheels of the mill, or the bell calling them from their labor. The meaning of the above regulation, then, was, that they were not to possess large domains, with wood and water, corn-fields and vine-yards, which they did not cultivate themselves, but let out to tenants. Many were the broad lands possessed by the monks of Cluny, with vassals, and servants both men and women. For the use of the three hundred brethren, as well as of the poor and the guests of the abbey, 560 sextarii of wheat, and 500 of rye monthly, were stored up in granaries, from the various farms which were within reach. The possessions of the abbey were divided into districts, over each of which was a dean, appointed to take care that it sent in the proper quantity of whatever was required of it. As for those lands, which were too far from Cluny to send thither their produce, the corn and wine which grew there was sold on the spot, and paid to the Camerarius, who procured clothing and all necessaries for the brethren. Italy, Spain, and England, sent the produce of their lands to clothe the brethren; one province especially, from the Rhone to the Alps and the sea, was appointed to this duty, and sent its treasures to the camera of Cluny. An English manor, given by King Stephen, usually furnished the monks with shoes and stockings. Such was Cluny, and that not in a time of degeneracy, but under St. Hugh, and afterwards under Peter the Venerable, when the monks fasted and prayed, and rose in the night to sing psalms; when its vast revenues were not misspent, but daily fed a large number of poor. It was a vast kingdom where Christ reigned, where its saints rested in peace, and which raised an image of peace in a world of strife and bloodshed. Happy were the vassals transferred from a secular lord to the rule of the abbot of Cluny; instead of being robbed and harried two or three times a year, by exactions over and above their rent, and bought and sold like the cattle on the estate, they were treated as brethren and sisters. A castle given to the Cluniacs, instead of a den of thieves, became an oratory. If the brethren sold the produce of the estates at a distance from the abbey, their dealings were marked with a fairness and a generosity, which showed that they trafficked not for gain, but for their own support and to feed the poor.

Still, with all this, what our Cistercians said was quite true; Cluny had, we will not say degenerated from, but changed, St. Benedict's institution. The possessors of these wide domains, though they lived a life of more than ordinary strictness, never touching animal food, and mortifying the flesh with watchings and fasts, yet could not be said to be Christ's poor ones, in the same sense as men who had nothing to depend upon but their own manual labor. It may be said that Cluny was an ancient abbey, enriched by the bounty of kings and bishops, and that Citeaux was but a poor monastery, struggling into existence; but it is also certain, that a stricter profession of poverty was the very distinction between Citeaux and other abbeys: if ever, therefore, it became rich, it was because it broke through its original institution, whilst the riches of Cluny were not necessarily a mark of decline, but a legitimate development. The idea of the monastic state in Stephen's mind was quite different from that conceived by Peter the Vener­able.

We have purposely put off the first part of Alberic and Stephen's regulation as to the possessions of the convent, because it forms the most striking contrast with the spirit of Cluny. They would not possess any of the property which had originally belonged to the parochial clergy. The Church, about the end of the eleventh century, was endeavoring to win back the tithes and the revenues of livings from the hands of their lay possessors; but the iron gauntlet of the feudal noble was found to retain as tight a hold as the dead hand of the Church. The tithes had probably first come into the possession of laymen by the gift of the bishops themselves, in times of danger; the system of feudalism was extended even to Church property, and the parish churches were put as fiefs into laymen's hands, on condition that they would defend the Church. Though they were never meant to be a perpetual gift, yet the nobles who had them in possession would not give them up; they had won them by their good sword, and keep them they would. Other nobles had simply seized upon the tithes by violence, principally in the lax times of the Carolingian dynasty; and the same injustice which had at first robbed the Church, afterwards resisted it. In vain did St. Gregory VII and Urban II order the restitution of tithes, the nobles in very many cases would not disgorge the spoil. The supreme pontiffs acted with the greatest moderation in not pronouncing, though they often threatened, the sentence of excommunication. In the meanwhile, a middle course was found; laymen possessing tithes were allowed to give them up to monasteries, or to found religious houses with them, if the consent of the bishop of the diocese was first obtained. In this way tithes first got into the hands of monasteries; and though this was not the best possible course, as was afterwards proved, yet it was at the time a remedy for a glaring evil. Bishops, who at one time vehemently opposed this transfer, were led to sanction it by the necessity of the case. In other instances, bishops themselves, with the sanction of their chapter, gave parish churches into the hands of abbeys, thinking that they would exercise their patronage with the greatest wisdom. The feeling which induced the Cistercians to rule that their monastery should possess no tithes, was probably rather a zeal for poverty, than a notion that the thing was wrong in itself. A monk, according to the Cistercian idea, was not to administer the holy Sacraments nor to teach, but he was to remain within his cloister, in prayer and contemplation, in poverty and mortification. In the regulation quoted above, tithes and church property in general are classed with mills, and bakehouses and lands; all come under the same head, as being possessions, and therefore opposed to poverty. Stephen himself, when abbot of Citeaux, as will be seen by and by, was present at the council of Troyes, where the Templars were allowed to possess tithes, if the bishop consented; and St. Bernard, his disciple, himself wrote to an archbishop, to exhort him to consent to the gift of tithes, presented by a layman to a monastery. Their argument, therefore, was not that monks, as being laymen, cannot under any circumstances possess tithes, but that, as cultivating lands of their own, they do not come under the old distribution of Church property, one-third to the bishop, another to the clergy, and the rest to the poor, who have no means of earning their own living. Their principal reason then was, that monks must till their ground with their own hands, instead of living upon property which belong to the clergy.

Very different were the maxims of Cluny; one bishop alone gave sixty parish churches to different priories of the Cluniac order. Exclusive of the parish churches in and about Cluny itself more than 150 churches were at one time in the gift of the abbot. It is easy from this fact, to frame an idea of the almost pontifical power of the ruler of this vast abbey; and the whole of the affairs of the house were conducted on a scale of corresponding grandeur. It was not in the person of the brethren that this magnificence was seen, at least not in the good times of Cluny, for the price which their habit was to cost was fixed, and they were not above menial arts, such as taking their turn in the kitchen as cooks; but the Church and the buildings of the abbey were in a style which befitted its importance. So far, then, were they from giving up tithes and church lands, in order to depend on their own labour for daily bread, that manual labour was very little practised at all. Udalric, the compiler of their customs, says that he must ingenuously confess, that their manual labor was confined to shelling beans, weeding the garden, and sometimes baking bread. Their time was occupied in long and splendid services in the Church, in reading, praying, and meditation, and in the usual routine of the abbey. They were even allowed to write after vespers, when all were sitting in the cloister in silence, provided the pen slipped so noise­lessly over the parchment, that no sound broke the perfect stillness. How is it possible, says Peter the Venerable, for monks fed on poor vegetable diet, when even that scanty fare is often cut off by fasts, to work like common labourers in the burning heat, in showers of rain and snow, and in the bitter cold? Besides, it was indecent that monks, which are the fine linen of the sanctuary, should be begrimed with dirt, and bent down with rustic labors. The good part of Mary must not thus yield to that of Martha. And yet Stephen and his companions found it possible to do all this. Their poor worn-out bodies did not sink under their heavy burdens, nor were the garments of their souls less white because they were thus exposed to suffer from the inclemency of the season.

It was, indeed, inexplicable, even to their contemporaries, how they thus could live; but the secret lay in the fervency of the spirit, which kept up the lagging flesh and blood; their lives were above nature, and because, for Christ's sake, they gave up church-lands and tithes, in order to be poor, He bore them up, so that they did not faint under their labors. Besides, they were not the less like the lowly Mary sitting at the Lord's feet, because they worked in the fields; suffering is not incompatible with the better part. The order which produced St. Bernard cannot be accused of not being contemplative. While their bodies were bent in agricultural labors their souls were raised to heaven. Again, they had an expedient by which they were enabled to remain within a short distance of the cloister, however scattered their farms might be, and thus no time was lost in journey to and from the place of their labor, and they could always return to the duties of the choir, and be within the monastery at the times set apart for meditation.

Alberic at once felt the difficulty of keeping up the choir service, when the monks might be obliged to sleep in the farm-houses, or, as they were called, granges of the monastery, and he determined on obviating it by turning to account the institution of lay brethren, which had subsisted for a long time in the Benedictine order. It arose from the nature of things, and not by a regular distinction into choir and lay brethren, at the time of the taking of the vow, as it was afterwards to be. Amongst a great number of monks, many could neither read nor write, and had not faculties for learning the choir services; it was natural that these should be employed in the many menial offices which a large mo­nastery would require. Hence arose the institution of lay brethren; it however appears to have taken its most systematic shape at the very beginning of the Cistercian order. Some of them dwelt in the abbey itself, others in the scattered and lonely granges around it; they kept the flocks and herds of the community, and were its tailors, shoemakers, and blacksmiths. Those who were in the granges were excused from the fasts of the order, except in Advent, and on the Fridays from the 14th of September to Lent. Whenever the bell of the abbey rang for a canonical hour they fell on their knees, and in heart joined the brethren who sang the office in the abbey church. There were thus in every Cister­cian abbey "two monasteries, one of the lay brethren, another of the clerics." The choir brethren were thus enabled always to work within a short distance of the abbey, and were strictly forbidden to remain a whole night in any of the granges, without pressing necessity. The relations between the choir and lay brethren were of the closest kind; instead of being treated as slaves, as they were by their feudal lords, these poor children of the soil, and artizans, were looked upon as brothers, and were by a special law of the order to partake in all spiritual advantages as though they were monks, which in fact they were, in all but the name, for they made their vows in the presence of the abbot, like the other brethren.

Politicians, who love equality and liberty, may thank the monks for placing on a level the nobleman and the villain, and for ennobling the cultivator of the soil by stooping down to his lowliness, and partaking of his labors. The world may thank Alberic for this scheme, by which the choir brother imparted his spiritual goods to the poor lay brother, who in turn by his labor gave him time for singing the praises of God during the night, and for medi­tating on his glories continually.

The disciples of Alberic and Stephen in after time followed their steps; and Alanus, one of the greatest of the schoolmen, finished his life in the rough and lowly labors of a lay brother of Citeaux, and was represented in a recumbent figure on his tomb, in their habit, holding a rosary in his hand. There are few more touching pictures in the annals of Citeaux, than the story of the poor lay brother sitting to watch by night in the lonely grange, thinking of his brethren in the abbey, while they celebrated the feast of the Assumption, and repeating over and over again the angelic salutation with such devotion, that the angels brought news of it to St. Bernard, then preaching on the subject of the feast-day at Clairvaux.

 

THE TIMES OF ALBERIC.