CISTERCIAN ORDER, The order of White Monks, so called from the mother house at Cîteaux, which was founded in 1098 by St Robert of Molesme and several other brethren, incl. St Stephen Harding, who sought to establish a form of Benedictinism stricter and more primitive than any then existing. After some precarious years Cîteaux rose rapidly to celebrity through its connection with its most famous son, St Bernard, who became a novice there in 1112. Its four eldest ‘daughters’ were founded in quick succession: la Ferté (1113), Pontigny (1114), Clairvaux, and Morimond (1115). In the following decades the order spread very rapidly to almost every part of Europe and the Latin East. By the death of St Bernard (1153) there were 345 houses; by the end of the 13th cent. the order reached its maximum of 740; and there were still some 700 on the eve of the Reformation. There were also many houses of Cistercian nuns. The first foundation in England was at Waverley, Surrey (1128–9), soon followed by Rievaulx (1131/2) and Fountains (1132).

The Cistercian life was to be one of secluded communal intercession and adoration. Houses were to be erected only in remote situations, while its churches were to be plain in character and their ornaments and vestments were not made from precious materials. Strict rules on diet and silence were laid down and manual labour given its primitive prominent position. The Cistercians thus became important agricultural pioneers, playing a notable part in English sheep farming, the care of their estates being for long undertaken by lay brothers who lived under somewhat less severe rules.

According to recent scholarship, the constitution of the Cistercian order developed gradually during the 12th cent., and its basic documents—the Carta caritatis, the Exordium parvum, and the Exordium Cistercii—also took shape gradually during this process. The detailed course of events remains a matter of controversy, but the order developed a constitution under which a founding abbey had permanent oversight of abbeys that it founded; this was achieved through visitation by the abbot, in principle annually but perhaps more often, to ensure observance and discipline. Daughter-abbeys could make foundations of their own; thus, lines of filiation quickly developed, often to four generations and more. Cîteaux itself was visited by the abbots of its eldest daughters (the ‘proto-abbots’). All Cistercian abbots were obliged to attend an annual General Chapter at Cîteaux; if inevitably hindered they had to send a deputy. In the General Chapter was vested legislative, executive, and judicial authority over the whole order. There was no scope for the abbot of Cîteaux to develop monarchical authority, and a body of Statutes of the General Chapters was built up. No other chapters of abbots were allowed to assemble. Cistercian observances powerfully influenced those of other medieval orders, notably certain congregations of regular canons, and after 1215 their scheme of periodic general chapters and visitations was made obligatory for other monastic orders. From the 13th cent., however, the fame of the order waned.

Starting with Castile in the 15th cent., more and more foreign houses formed national congregations, which developed outside the control of Cîteaux and the four proto-abbeys, while still remaining juridically part of the order. In France a particularly radical reform in the late 16th cent. gave rise first to a congregation and then an independent order of Feuillants. In the 17th cent. Cistercians, like most orders, were divided between reformers (the Strict Observance), trying to return to the spirit and practice of the founding fathers by rejecting all later mitigations of the Rule, and those, led by Cîteaux, who wanted a minimum of change (the Common Observance). The Strict Observance eventually controlled about a third of the French houses, but failed either to impose their reform on the whole order or to achieve the autonomy they sought. Those houses flourished most where austerity, as at la Trappe, went consistently beyond the average.

In the 18th cent. Cistercians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire survived the Josephine edicts only by undertaking major educational and pastoral responsibilities. Shortly afterwards the French Revolution destroyed not only all houses in France and neighbouring lands, but the very structure of central authority. Throughout the 19th cent. government hostility to monastic life led to massive closures and expulsions in Spain, Italy, Germany, and even Switzerland, and in the 20th cent. wars in Europe and Asia, totalitarian regimes and post-colonial turbulence have all violently, and often unpredictably, affected organisation and survival. It has been reaction to external events that has given the present Common Observance (properly the Sacred Order of Cîteaux, S. O. Cist.) its present shape, with an Abbot General and staff (finally established at Rome only in 1927), presiding over a union of about a dozen congregations, formed mainly on a national or linguistic basis. These differ widely in their pattern of life, some being responsible for high schools and universities, some in the mission field, often with parishes, and some (notably Lérins) primarily contemplative. The largest congregations are those in Austria, Italy, and the United States of America. The order has almost as many nuns as monks, organized in similar congregations.

The extinction of Cîteaux and the proto-abbeys in 1790/1 left la Trappe as the only French community of any male order to survive. Under the leadership of Augustin de Lestrange (elected Abbot in 1794), 24 volunteers fled to Switzerland; they soon attracted hundreds of recruits (many from other orders) and founded communities in various countries. Wartime conditions obliged Lestrange to draft regulations of excessive rigour which were only partly relaxed when peace permitted Trappists to re-establish monastic life in France; other houses, and their daughter foundations, preferred to follow A.-J. le B. de Rancé’s original reform. A fundamentally penitential view of monastic life, expressed in a uniformly strict observance, was the common aim of all the Trappist houses. It was not, however, until 1892 that the three Trappist congregations achieved union and were recognized in 1893 as a new independent order; in 1902, after the recovery of Cîteaux, which became the mother house, it was designated as the Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO) or Reformed Cistercians (OCR). This order is not the continuation of the Strict Observance destroyed in 1791, but the lineal descendant of Rancé’s reform of 1664 at la Trappe. Vast expansion worldwide has strained the practice of uniformity, and, with the abolition of the category of lay brothers (and sisters) after the Second Vatican Council, major changes were initiated, culminating in new Constitutions which were finally approved in 1990. The explicit aim is now unity, not uniformity, expressed through a pluralism which recognises cultural and regional differences. Abbots (including the Abbot General) are no longer automatically elected for life; regional conferences have much wider powers (though the General Chapter remains supreme); the Divine Office has been simplified (but Vigils, the Night Office, is retained); abstention from meat is normally recommended, but detailed dietary prescriptions have been omitted; silence is normally absolute only in prescribed places and at night; contacts with family, and the outside world, are easier; and study is actively encouraged. A major change has been a much greater degree of self-government for the nuns, whose General Chapter was for the first time in 1990 given equality with that of the monks in electing the new Abbot General. There are about 80 houses of men and rather fewer of women.

Though there are now two quite separate Cistercian Orders, close and fraternal co-operation between them, at a local and also wider level, is constant.

J.-M. Canivez, OCR (ed.), Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis (8 vols., Bibliothèque de la Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, fascs. 9–14 B; 1933–41). C. Waddell, OCSO (ed.), Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux (Cîteaux, Commentarii Cisterciences, Studia et Documenta, 9; 1999), incl. Eng. tr., and introd. A. Manrique, O. Cist., Annales Cistercienses (4 vols., Lyons, 1642–59; repr., Farnborough, 1970). B. Tissier, O. Cist. (ed.), Bibliotheca Patrum Cisterciensium, id est Operum Abbatum et Monachorum Ordinis Cisterciensis qui saeculo S. Bernardi aut paulo post eius obitum floruerunt (8 vols., bound in 3, Bonnefontaine and Paris, 1660–9). On the problems presented by the early Cistercian docs. see [M.] D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (1963), pp. 198–222; K. Hallinger, ‘Die Anfänge von Cîteaux’, in Aus Kirche und Reich. …: Festschrift für Friedrich Kempf zu seinem 75. Geburtstag und 50. Doktorjubiläum, ed. H. Mordek (1983), pp. 225–235. J.-B. Auberger, OFM, L’Unanimité cistercienne primitive: mythe ou réalité? (Cîteaux, Studia et Documenta, 3; Achel, 1986). P. Le Nain, O. Cist., Essai de l’histoire de l’ordre de Citeaux (9 vols., 1695–7). L. J. Lekai, O. Cist., The White Monks: A History of the Cistercian Order (Okauchee, Wis., 1953); id., The Rise of the Cistercian Strict Observance in Seventeenth Century France (Washington, DC, 1968). A Schneider, O. Cist., and others (eds.), Die Cisterciense Geschichte, Geist, Kunst (Cologne, 1974). M. Pacaut, Les moines blancs: Histoire de l’ordre de Cîteaux [1993]. C. H. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, Pa. [2000]). I. Eberl, Die Zisterzienser; Geschichte eines europäischen Ordens (Stuttgart [2002]).

L. Pressouyre and T. N. Kinder (eds.), Saint Bernard et le monde cistercien: Exposition presentée par la Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites à la Conciergerie de Paris du 18 décembre 1990 au 28 février 1991 (1990). L. Bouyer, Cong. Orat., La Spiritualité de Cîteaux (1955; Eng. tr., 1958). J. B. Mahn, L’Ordre cistercien et son gouvernement, des origines au milieu du XIII^e siècle, 1098–1265 (Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 116; 1945). A. A. King, Cîteaux and her Elder Daughters (1954), pp. 1–105. [M.] D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge, 1940; 2nd edn., 1967), pp. 208–66, 346–62, and 632–48. J. F. O’Sullivan, Cistercian Settlements in Wales and Monmouthshire, 1140–1540 (Fordham University Studies, History Series, 2; New York, 1947). B. D. Hill, English Cistercian Monasteries and their Patrons in the Twelfth Century (1968). Y. Zaluska, L’Enluminure et le Scriptorium de Cîteaux au XII^e siècle (Cîteaux, Commentarii Cistercienses, Studia et documenta, 4; Cîteaux, 1989). J.-B. Lefèvre and J.-J. Bolly, ‘Monastères Bénédictins et Cisterciens dans les Albums de Croÿ (1596–1611). Histoire et Institutions des Abbayes Cisterciennes (XII^e–XVII^e siècles)’, R. Bén. 100 (1990), pp. 109–238.

A. Le Bail, OSB, L’Ordre de Cîteaux: ‘La Trappe’ (Les Ordres religieux, 1924); C. Grolleau–G. Chastel, L’Ordre de Cîteaux: La Trappe (Les Grands Ordres monastiques et instituts religieux, 1932). Y. Estienne, Les Trappistines: Cisterciennes de la stricte observance (1937). M. T. Kervingant, OCSO, Des moniales face à la Révolution française: Aux origines des Cisterciennes-Trappistines (1989). Life in a Trappist monastery in the USA before the Second Vatican Council is depicted in the autobiography of T. Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York [1948]), pub. in England as Elected Silence (London, 1949), and other works of this author.

The Cistercienser-Chronik ed. by the Cistercians of Mehrerau (1889 ff.); Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis (Rome, 1945–64; called Analecta Cisterciensia, 1965 ff.); Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum (Rome and Westmalle, 1934–64; called Collectanea Cisterciensia, 1965 ff.). L. J. Lekai, O. Cist., in DIP 2 (1975), cols. 1058–98, s.v. ‘Cistercensi’; É. Mikkers, OCR, in Dict. Sp. 13 (1988), cols. 738–814, s.v. ‘Robert (12) de Molesmes’, 2: ‘La Spiritualité Cistercienne’. L. J. Lekai, O. Cist., and others in NCE (2nd edn.), 3 (2003), pp. 746–9, s.v.; M. R. Flanagan, OCSO, and M. B. Pennington, OCSO, ibid. 14 (2003), pp. 160–62, s.v. ‘Trappists’.

R. de Vaux, OP, Les Institutions de l’Ancien Testament, 1 (1958; 4th edn., 1982), pp. 247–50; Eng. tr., Ancient Israel (2nd edn., 1965), pp. 160–3.

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