At La Trappe, theological questions—such as grace and justification—could not be discussed; and there were discussions for all the strict conventual silence. Public Relations : De Rance was one of those Counter Reformation superiors like Ignatius Loyola or Teresa of Avila who appreciated the value of what we would call public relations.
Although de Rance himself lived to the ripe age of 74, he lived in an era of bad sanitation the palace of Versailles was a prime example , erratic diet and a psuedo-scientific medical practice that bordered on quackery.
Some of these monks had been courtiers and the tales of their sojourn at La Trappe formed a sensational contrast to the brilliance and extravagance of life at Court. Characteristically, de Rance enjoyed a warm rapport with the Carmelite nuns in Paris. This was a relatively new form of religious life in France, a reform of an older Order, lived with a fervor and lack of compromise attractive to the Cistercian reformer. And his friendship with this community reveals the personal charm of the man who could be so inhuman and alienating in printed polemic yet so edifying in his printed tributes to the dead.
Trappist Observance :Life at La Trappe was not actually extreme. De Rance wrote that the men of his day were not capable of the austerities of the Desert Fathers or the Twelfth Century Cistercians and he would not pursue that asceticism. After he restored the conventual buildings at La Trappe, providing each monk with his own modest room—as was the monastic custom of his day—subsequent reading revealed to him that the first Cistercians slept in an open dormitory.
De Rance would not give in to the enthusiasts in his community who wanted more primitive accommodations: the money had already been spent and they could be authentic monks in an unadorned room as well as in an open dormitory. The choir monks of his day performed only two hours of manual work a day, still a record for those who had been courtiers, but no real hardship. There was a certain balance to this simplicity and discipline. La Trappe thrived up until the French Revolution, a dramatic alternative to the life of the court or a career in the Church.
The Revolution successfully secularized or suppressed religious houses which did not contribute to society—through education or nursing the sick. But in France the secularization was radical and the great abbeys of the middle ages were leveled when they could be put to no other use and monks and nuns were expelled from their cloisters. It was not a question of re-utilizing the religious but of supressing religion that had been part of the social order that was being overthrown. This effectively destroyed the organization of the Cistercian Order with the destruction of Citeaux.
The Cistercian communities in eastern Europe organized themselves as a national congregation. Out of this dramatic situation emerged an equally dramatic protagonist, Augustin de Lestrange He had served as Novice Master at La Trappe and with last minute authorization from the Abbot General, the Abbot of Clairvaux and his own Abbot, he fled with the twenty-one monks of his community to Switzerland in They found refuge in an abandoned Carthusian monastery at Valsainte.
Both in a spirit of reparation and from lack of resources, he introduced extreme austerities as part of their regular life: a diet of bread and water with some boiled vegetables, no heat, sleeping on a straw pallet directly on the floor with only a single blanket, sleep itself reduced to six hours a night. To this de Lestrange even attempted to add laus perennis , uninterrupted services in church. This extreme form of life actually attracted vocations and in , de Lestrange was elected Abbot.
When the French army invaded Switzerland in , the community evaded dissolution by accepting the invitation of Tsar Paul I to find refuge in Russia. Restoration and Romanticism: To make a long story short, with the fall of Napoleon and the attempted restoration of the old monarchies, de Lestrange and his company made their way back to France founding Trappist communities in Germany, Holland and throughout France.
Such an austere life reduced the financial burden of making foundations and even the constraints imposed by a poor monastic economy could be chalked up to penance and reparation. The bold and ambitious character of de Lestrange impressed itself on the sensibilities of the Romantic age.
But it sold well and was widely read and the Trappist mystique became part of pop culture. Like so much of the Nineteenth Century monastic revival, romanticism and resistance to the challenges of modernity made quite an appeal to the declining Catholic population of Western Europe.
The Leonine Union and Beyond: It was not just secularization but centuries of history that left the religious Orders in disorder. Pope Leo XIII sought to re-organize the situation and in asked the various Cistercian congregations and observances to join together as one Order. However history, culture—especially national identity—and developing traditions rendered that ideal impractical. But a kind of solution emerged. Cistercian communities of a more abstinent observance were flocked together under the leadership of La Trappe.
The other branch of the Order, often with schools, missions, universities and parishes to support, became known as the Order of Citeaux O Cist. Moderation : From the start of the Twentieth century, and after union with other Cistercian reforms, the General Chapter was realizing that the extremes fostered by de Lestrange were not healthy.
They legislated for more sleep, improved celebration of the liturgy and moderation. Through it, he returned the Trappist reform to the contemplative orientation of the early Cistercians, arguing—with sound theology—that the contemplative life and mystical prayer are the normal outgrowth of the Christian life.
To his credit, emphasizing the contemplative orientation of the Order—and realizable by the rank-and-file nun or monk—would be a stimulus to monastic scholars to explore these same themes in the medieval monastic literature.
Monastic Studies: The Twentieth Century, from the period between the World Wars on, witnessed a flowering of monastic scholarship even from the lineage of de Rance. In the Rule of St. Benedict, in the Twelfth Century Cistercian authors, these scholars found a richly humanistic Christian culture that had little to do with rigorism or penitential athletics. If their investigations also generated heated debates, they were certainly not without their entertainment value; and without entertainment there will be no students.
Translation from Latin into French of the Cistercian Fathers in the pioneering Pain de Citeaux series would stimulate translations into English through Cistercian Studies. From the sources that are available, it seems some tension arose on account of the somewhat ambiguous relationship between the new monastery and the Benedictine house the monks had left. In order to preserve peace, after only a short time St.
For this reason in Cistercian iconography he is often pictured as a Benedictine monk wearing a black habit, instead of the traditional white-and-black habit of the Cistercian Order. Some monks decided to return with St. Robert was succeeded first by St.
Alberic and then by St. Stephen Harding; together these three men are celebrated as the Founders of the Cistercian Order with a solemn feast on January Under the guidance of St.
In some instances secular powers required the monks to take on active ministries, in others the monks did this on their own. There were repeated attempts at reform, most notably in the century after the Council of Trent. In Pope Alexander VII recognized within the Cistercian Order two observances, the Common and the Strict, sometimes called the "abstinents" for their fidelity to Benedict's prohibition of the use of flesh meat in the monastic diet. By the disposition of Divine Providence his was the one community that escaped complete destruction and dispersion at the hands of the French Revolution.
In the course of many and varied travels under the leadership of Augustine de Lestrange the community was able to establish foundations in Spain, Belgium, England, Italy and the United States. Monasteries of the Common Observance continued in eastern Europe in many cases operating schools and pastoring parishes. In Pope Leo sought to bring all the Cistercian houses back together into one order but pastoral responsibilities and national loyalties made it impossible for the Common Observance houses who were divided into many national congregations to unite with the Strict Observance who were at that time largely French and who had opted for the strict monastic heritage of the Cistercian founders.
The Order of Citeaux suffered greatly under the communist onslaught, not only in eastern Europe but also in Vietnam, where it had a congregation of five houses. On the other hand, the Strict Observance began to flower on the eve of the Second World War and continued to grow until it had over a hundred houses located on all six continents. Only in Yugoslavia and China did its houses suffer at the hands of communism.
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