Monks in the city

A powerful image

Under a very neutral title — Cistercian Architecture and Medieval Society —, which is not accompanied by any precise chronological reference, Maximilian Sternberg attacks the legendary Cistercian architecture with determination and talent. His approach is first of all to analyze and deconstruct the modern fascination with Cistercian art and architecture. Monastic order founded at the very end of the XI^e century, but which owes its first reputation to Bernard de Clairvaux (1090-1153), the order of Cîteaux, originally constituted of the “ New Monastery » itself (Cîteaux) and four “ girls » (La Ferté-sur-Grosne, Pontigny, Clairvaux and Morimond), quickly spread to the dimensions of all Latin Christianity. The speed of this growth and the splendor of the first century of existence should not make us forget that this order has gone through the history of medieval and modern Christianity, at the cost of reforms (especially that of La Trappe in XVII^e century), that in the age of national Churches, there remains an international monastic order, and that in XIX^e century, he fully participated in the monastic restoration at the heart of post-revolutionary Christian reconstruction. We thus understand the power of the image of Cistercian monks so entwined with the history of Christianity: an image forged and maintained over the centuries by Cistercian historiography itself. ; an image amplified, refined and often distorted by other great myth-builders, architects, historians and art historians. Impossible to approach Cîteaux without pre-constructed frames, without escaping the legendary Wild stones by Fernand Pouillon, or one of Georges Duby’s great books on medieval art, Saint Bernard, Cistercian art. These inspired texts, carried by real art photos and suggestive illustrations taken from medieval manuscript production, have shaped the legend of an architecture of solitude, of a contemplative ideal requiring the most extreme decorative simplicity, of which the theory seems made in the famous letter from Bernard de Clairvaux to Guillaume de Saint-Thierry criticizing the excess of gold and grotesque forms which clutters the liturgies of Cluny and the first splendors of Gothic in Île-de-France (Saint-Denis). As Étienne Gilson, the great specialist in medieval philosophy, wrote in the 1950s, “ the Cistercians sacrificed everything except letters and style “.

Art of reform and art of rupture, Cistercian architecture and aesthetics must be treated over time if we want to understand its overall logic: its evolutions, its adaptations, and its complex relationships to the origins. It is the whole point of Sternberg’s book to open a number of files, in a broad chronological arc (from XII^e At XV^e century), which in turn allow us to address “ the horizon of reform » initial, the question of “ permeable borders » and, finally, the confrontation of the Cistercians with the city. Cistercian solitude and the architecture supposed to put it into space and form has good reasons to fascinate our post-modernity of queen individuality, but we must realize that this “ solitude » is socially constructed. Cîteaux is a product of medieval society. THE “ New monastery ” and his daughters are perfectly representative of a time in the history of medieval Christianity, when, to speak like Weber, the “ hierocracy » Roman integrates monks into its bureaucracy and makes them essential cogs in its action on the ground (starting with the field of the anti-heretic struggle in which Bernard of Clairvaux was deeply involved). In this system, the monks, who belong to the order of prayer, must live in withdrawal from the world, in a separating distance, between angels and men. The first Cistercians sought to take up residence far away or outside the world, but to better restore it from within. Many of its monks, purified by the cloister, return to manage the world, through preaching, through pastoral care, in investing in the highest offices of the Church (episcopate and even papacy). Under these conditions, we see the entire literary dimension of the theme of flight or contempt for the world. As a contemporary, Gautier Map (c. 1140-1209), said parodically, “ they chose a place suitable to be inhabited ; they chose it not uninhabitable but uninhabited (…) outside the world while being at the heart of the world, far from men but in the midst of men, because they wanted to be known to the world without knowing it… “.

The St. Gallen paradigm

Georges Duby once showed, in his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France, the strange paradox of the Cîteaux of the origins which isolates itself in the stripping, but which, in this very stripping, with a cutting-edge organization of work (a hand of work dedicated to God, the lay brothers), appropriate tools and methods (mastery of iron and hydraulics), produces wealth to be sold on local and regional markets close to the “ barns » Cistercians. Over the course of two generations, the Cistercians found themselves powerfully involved in the seigneurial order. These are “ holy entrepreneurs », part of the aristocracy which dominates the land and men. They even returned to their initial refusal of donations linked to the dead (donations of land in exchange for spiritual services: prayers and especially masses), thus integrating themselves deep into the aristocratic networks. From this point of view, Sternberg is right to bring the Cistercians back to what he calls the “ St. Gallen paradigm “. The name of this Carolingian monastery (in German Switzerland) is attached to what is considered the first architectural design known in the West, which ideally represents a monastic ensemble with all its functional spaces, including places of exchange with outside for the reception of lay people and education. At the very time when the plan of the three functional orders was being developed, which distributed complementary tasks within the ideal Christian society (praying, fighting, producing), this plan showed how a monastery was both outside the world and functionally in the world, separate but active in the overall functioning of the social order. It is in this logic, which responds as well to the Weberian ideal type of intra-worldly ascetic as to the notion of worldly individualism of Louis Dumont, that Sternberg can be interested in the “ permeability of borders “. Entrance, narthex or atrium, choir barrier, cloister: so many places of differentiation but also of interactions within the framework of exchanges which are not simply liturgical but involve the whole “ rituality » politics of feudal society.

The urban turning point

By adopting a broad chronology of three centuries (XII^e–XV^e centuries), Sternberg can understand, on the basis of the immense existing bibliography and numerous case studies chosen mainly in Languedoc, that is to say at a good distance from the original Cistercian Burgundy, another Cistercian paradox: its adaptability to the spirit of the times and the constraints of the environment. Such an opening in time and space alone allows us to feel the extent to which the architectural themes of solitude and decorative simplicity, coherent in the context of propaganda and reform in the XII^e century, do not at all account for the evolving plasticity of Cistercian artistic practices. Moving from the rurality of the beginnings to the urbanity adopted by the Cistercians in XIII^e And XIV^e centuries, Sternberg tackles what has in recent years been an important theme of study among specialists in medieval monastic history: the phenomenon ofurbanization, integration in cities, in full demographic and economic development from the XII^e century — a phenomenon marked first by the emergence of new urban communities, born from the cities and adapted to the pastoral care of the cities, that are the mendicant orders (Dominicans and Franciscans), but also by the urban turn taken by former eremitic or semi-eremitic orders, such as the Camaldolese and the Cistercians. Now the world of cities, like Toulouse and Paris here, is that of the power of teachers, who after the time of the episcopal schools invest this new institution without which a city cannot be great, the University. One of the founding fathers of monastic history, Jean Leclercq, noted, a long time ago, the elective affinities and mutual influences between Cistercian spirituality and the theological thought of urban schools from the second half of the XII^e century. There is therefore no reason to lock ourselves into the confrontation that some would like to found between Bernard de Clairvaux, the conservative man of letters at the service of the ecclesial institution, and Abelard, the revolutionary of the habitus intellectuals, condemned for his innovations at the Council of Soissons (1121). Like all the old-fashioned contemplatives relating to the “ St. Gallen paradigm » (Clunisians and Benedictines of old obedience), the Cistercians are forced to adapt to the rules of studium, the world of masters trained in the arts, and the thousand and one practical questions posed by the world of cities and its new Christian practices (starting with the moral problems posed by the commercial economy). In the city (on the left bank, inside the enclosure built by Philippe Auguste at the extreme end of the XII^e century), but enclosed as monastic isolation requires, an urban intellectual center and celestial monastic city, the establishment of the Cistercians in Paris in 1245 at the college of the Bernardins allows the order and its network to have a studium while continuing to claim separation from the world. The reconstruction of the chapel, between 1338 and 1342, even allowed the order to impose its monumental presence in the Parisian landscape alongside Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle and the Royal Palace. As the Cistercians note in XV^e century, taking a retrospective look at their establishment in the city: the Bernardins are a sort of Trojan horse which allowed the contemplatives to be in the city to better absorb and transform it.

An architecture of solitude

Let us return finally to the theme of an architecture of solitude. If the Cistercian legend still enjoys such strength in the age of the patrimonialization of Christian places of worship and the cultural commodification of the supposed monastic ideals of the past (silence, self-emptying, withdrawal from the world and its hubbub), it is that it is carried by a whole efflorescence of places and spaces which shape Christian culture even in its post-modern secular productions. The coincidence of the editorial releases makes it possible to read at the same time the work of Sternberg, which has been reviewed here, and that of the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, Interior space. The monastery stripped » by Cîteaux finds its place perfectly in a history of Christian spatiality, which, since the first Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church, has produced a set of tropes of interiority having in common that they are architectural: the room of heart, the temple of the Spirit, the dwellings of the soul (house, castle, apartments), the whole question being who inhabits the architecture in question: God or the modern individual without transcendence. But whatever option is taken, the monastery of Cîteaux, the studiolo humanists or the back room of Montaigne, interior architecture is always a social construction, and Sternberg thus has good reasons to want to study Cistercian architecture in the mirror of medieval society.