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The blessings of work: the cistercian view

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Christopher J. Holdsworth
Christopher J. Holdsworth*
Affiliation:
University College, university of London
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Extract

Around 1180 Conrad of Eberbach writing about the history of his own order, the cistercian, noticed that it had been founded the year before Jerusalem was freed from the saracens and close to the beginning of the Carthusian and premonstratensian orders. This seemed to him a significant cluster of events, for as the holy city was restored to the Christians, so the orders of monks, hermits and canons were being brought back to their old and proper ways of life by the new orders. Whilst today we may find Conrad’s chronology a little puzzling (La Grande Chartreuse and Prémontré were founded in 1084 and 1120, Cîteaux in 1098, whilst Jerusalem was freed in 1099), we can recognise that the first cistercians were aware that they were attempting a new thing; they called their first home at Cîteaux the New Monastery, thus distinguishing it from Molesmes, the old monastery from which they had come, and from the monastic world at large.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 10: Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World , 1973 , pp. 59 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1973

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References

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