Cistercian sermons enjoyed a golden age as the Order expanded and flourished in the twelfth century. The sermon was the preferred literary genre for influential Cistercian commentary on the Song of Songs as well as other works of exegesis. Extant sermons are found as complete and polished literary works, reports, parables and sententiae – short summaries or outlines containing the major points of the sermon. These texts provide a guide to monastic spirituality and theology. Preaching, whether formal sermons or informal chapter talks, was centred in the liturgy of the community as described in the Rule of Benedict. Everyday preaching offers a glimpse of life within the monastery. Rarely did the preacher direct comments to life in the outside world. However, Cistercian preachers occasionally addressed audiences beyond the monastery, and even preached on crusade missions. The numerous editions of Cistercian sermons give testimony to the richness of medieval Cistercian preaching. Unfortunately, little evidence remains to elucidate the preaching done by medieval abbesses, with the exception of Innocent III’s letter concerning abbesses preaching in northern Spain in the late twelfth century.

Cistercian preaching and the liturgy

Preaching was central to the community liturgy, as Chrysogonus Waddell emphasises: the sermon preached in chapter ‘was itself a liturgical act, with the preacher breaking the bread received from Christ, ever present and acting through his word’. The Cistercian usages describe how the Rule of Benedict was to be read in chapter, which usually took place after Prime and was followed by a commentary by the abbot or another monk appointed by the abbot. A parallel chapter was held for the lay brothers each week; the abbot or a designated monk spoke there. Cistercians delivered formal sermons to the community on the major liturgical feasts of the First Sunday of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul and the Dedication as well as the Marian feasts of Purification, Annunciation, Nativity and Assumption. Most extant sermons by major Cistercian writers correspond to those feasts.

Previous chapters have centred on Cistercian preachers, legates, bishops, an archbishop, and a cardinal – the foremost ‘clerics of the crusade’, as the Dominican historian M.–H.Vicaire called them. The Cistercian role continued but diminished somewhat after the first decade or so of the crusade: Innocent III, who had urged the white monks toward action, died in 1216; Arnaud Amaury in 1225; Guy of les Vaux-de-Cernay in 1223. A few Cistercian legates were appointed after these men, but during the last years of the crusade, Romano of St Angelo served as legate and presided over the implementation of the 1229 treaty's provisions. Bishop Fulk of Toulouse still held his see but had spent at least fifteen years in exile, including the period 1217–29. As war drew to a close, the Cistercian abbot of Grandselve, Hélie Garin, helped the negotiations. Then, at the termination of hostilities, another Cistercian came to centre stage: Hélinand of Froidmont, a former trouvère from the abbey of Froidmont in Beauvais. Poet, monk, historian, encyclopaedist, preacher and social critic, Hélinand joined the Cistercian campaign against heresy at its end and played a crucial role at a decisive moment: the events surrounding the Treaty of Paris/Meaux, confirmed on 12 April 1229. Serving as neither military adviser nor legate nor bishop, Hélinand apparently came primarily to preach. He addressed two important assemblies in 1229, giving the inaugural sermon for the nascent university and delivering the opening and closing sermons for the synod that regulated the tenuous peace.

Another phase of the Cistercian drive against heresy opened in January 1198, when Innocent III became pope, and extended until 1208, when the murder of a Cistercian legate precipitated the advance toward armed intervention in Occitania. At the outset of his papacy, Innocent III undertook initiatives to effect a broad programme of reform, including a widespread crusade against the perceived enemies of Christendom. Although papal priorities stressed the crusade to the Holy Land, the fight against heresy intensified as well. In fact, the campaign against heretical Christians in Occitania reached for a time the status of the crusades to the Holy Land, with the awarding of plenary indulgences, the protection of crusaders, and various measures for recruiting and financing the expeditions. Innocent III appealed strongly to the Cistercian Order to place qualified monks at his service for preaching. His persuasion began with a letter to the 1198 General Chapter and the failed but dramatic appearance there of his legate Fulk of Neuilly seeking to recruit Cistercians for preaching the Eastern crusade. By the 1201 General Chapter, Fulk had papal authorization to designate three Cistercian abbots as his assistants. The same determination marked Innocent III's efforts to engage the Cistercians in preaching against heresy; his letters praise them and attempt to persuade them that the active life could be very profitable and useful. Cistercians, including a 1206 delegation of abbots and numerous other monks, involved themselves in public preaching as never before.

Deconstructing: close reading, rhetorical criticism, and historiography of persecution and heresy

The deconstruction of extant sources requires the discipline of close reading. Trained as a philologist, I retain the conviction that discourse in its written form must be scrutinized carefully in order to discover and uncover whatever historical reality it may contain. Discourse, as Emile Benveniste defined it, encompasses both an oral form and written manifestations which reproduce the oral. This definition suits the analysis of preaching and the sermon quite well, since we are dealing with written vestiges of an oral genre. It also supports the view that the text or speech act is inseparable from the speaker/author, the speaker's intent, and the audience: discourse belongs to a social universe that it reflects. Analysis of discourse entails asking fundamental questions about the text and rests on the close reading, which is often called the explication de texte.

Text and author

To search for the author's voice, the explication de texte provides a starting point: the in-depth analysis of a text directs the reader toward uncovering the writer's point of view, ideas, and intentions, and analysing how these are brought to light and emphasized. The methods of the explication de texte, like those of exegesis, generally employ contextual approaches of literary criticism which examine a passage with attention to its content, historical and literary context, genre, language, development and themes.

We have surveyed about eighty-five years of history pertaining to the Cistercian Order's preaching and other engagement against heresy in Occitania from 1145 to 1229. I first situated monastic preaching in the context of twelfth-century events and currents of thought and their impact on Cistercian thinking and action; and second, within the framework of monastic spirituality and literature. The vineyard image, appearing in a letter where Bernard of Clairvaux employs it to describe turning from the interior vineyard of the monastery to the exterior one of the Church and the world, serves as a unifying motif for the book's chapters.

This study has held to a twofold task: reconstructing the preaching of individual Cistercians and collaborative campaigns; and deconstructing the rhetoric of the same preaching to reveal the strategies that the monks utilized against their adversaries. Some attention is given as well to what can be learned about dissident beliefs and practices from the pens of their adversaries. Cistercian participation in anti-heretical campaigns differs in accordance with the agenda of individual preachers and prelates, and along a range from reluctant acceptance of papal commission, to ardent public preaching, to leading armies. Individual Cistercians varied in their stance along that spectrum, but the extant texts reveal hostile language that belongs to the rhetoric of persecution. The Conclusion reviews the history of Cistercian preaching against heresy in Occitania from 1145 to 1229, evaluates the order's involvement, reviews the book's reconstructive process as well as its deconstruction of rhetoric, and points to possibilities for future research on later Cistercians and on the evidence for voices of dissent within the order.

Cistercian preaching against heresy needs to be viewed within the general setting of twelfth-century France and the specific milieu of monastic culture. This chapter surveys several trends of the twelfth century that underlie the white monks' role as anti-heretical preachers in the Lord's vineyard. Chapter Two examines Cistercian writing and preaching against heresy as an out-growth of monastic life and literature, a product of the domestic vineyard.

A period of transition between the patristic and the scholastic, the monks and the friars, the twelfth century witnessed economic, social, and religious ferment. Lay literacy and spirituality crystallized at the same time that new religious houses covered the landscape. The crucial elements in the backdrop of Cistercian preaching against heresy in Occitania belong to five important currents. The Gregorian reform movement renewed and reformed religious and secular institutions, elevating monastic observance as the model for all Christians. Schools multiplied and Latin literary culture flourished, secular and monastic, alongside the first vernacular literature. Europe's economy underwent transformation, and economic and social change provoked complex reactions from laity and clergy. Clerical and lay ‘textual communities’ expanded, grounding their spirituality on the vita apostolica and a common interpretation of Scripture. However, growth and centralization brought forth negative offshoots as well, notably the development of a persecuting mentality. The nature of these trends and their significance for the Cistercians, heresy and Occitania are examined in more detail in the remainder of this chapter.

When the Cistercians stepped into the Lord's vineyard, they carried with them patterns of monastic thought, writing and preaching. Immersed in the Scriptures and the Rule of Benedict, the white monks viewed the surrounding world through the lens of the domestic vineyard, its spirituality and symbolist mentality. Imbued with reforming zeal, the Cistercians sought to bring dissident Christians into conformity with the monastic vision of the proper arrangement for society: to convert dwellers in the spiritual Babylon of the world into aspirants toward a heavenly Jerusalem where monks occupied the highest ranks.

Two types of sources inform our study of monastic spirituality: religious experience and written texts. One section of this chapter will be devoted to religious experience as prescribed in the Rule of Benedict, and two to dealing with written texts: first, exegesis, and second, other monastic literature. To comprehend monastic exegesis and literature, one must first understand the precepts of the Rule of Benedict, which represents the culmination of oral and written monastic tradition and provides the experiential program for the monastic life. From the experience prescribed in the Rule, we shall turn to the genres of monastic literature, inseparable from oral tradition and lived experience.

The Rule of Benedict

The Rule of Benedict, attributed to Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 550), came to dominate Western monasticism during the Carolingian era. The Cistercian Order aspired to return to the purity of Benedict's Rule, which they felt had been lost with the growth of Cluniac monasticism. The twelfth-century Dialogue between a Cluniac and a Cistercian reflects the white monks' reproaches of their Benedictine brothers' indulgence in practices from fine eating to teaching poetry. The Rule draws a theology and spirituality from the Bible and prescribes a way of life rooted in a simple reading of the Scriptures. In that sense, the Rule grounds a lived exegesis, that is, the integration of the Bible's meaning into every possible aspect of daily life. The Rule also rests on the writings of the early monastic Fathers5 and so reflects the patristic tradition.

At the opening of his Sermon 65 On the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux explains to his audience that it is necessary for him to preach a third sermon on Song of Songs 2. 15: ‘Seize for us the little foxes that are destroying the vineyard’. His first sermons, he explains, gave sufficient warning to his brothers so that they could guard against the three sorts of foxes who might ravage their vineyard, interpreted as the vices that could lead them astray on their spiritual journey in the monastic life. However, the abbot expresses his anxiety about the Lord's vineyard and its vines, which are not so secure. He feels that he must turn from inside to outside, away from domestic monastic matters in order to be of use in affairs of general concern.

Bernard of Clairvaux's use of the vineyard image to describe his turning from the monastery to the Church and the world inspired the organization of this book and its treatment of Cistercian preaching against heresy. While antiheretical preaching constitutes the book's primary topic, it cannot be understood without an appreciation of monastic life and its inward-looking literature, more representative of the whole of monastic writing.

In the spring of 1995, I discovered the vineyard image in one of Bernard's letters while preparing an article on the abbot's preaching, but the initial research for this book dates back to the mid-1980s, after I began working on Hélinand of Froidmont's sermons. Hélinand's sermons represented a bridge for me to cross from the study of vernacular literature into the field of medieval Latin sermon studies. I discovered that Hélinand, the writer I first knew for his Old French poetry, had composed numerous Latin sermons, largely unexamined by scholars. I began to read them, to investigate the field of sermon studies, and to move, like Hélinand, from Old French poetry to Latin sermons. My first research explored the contemplative side of monastic literature with its richly imaged symbolism and experiential spirituality, a feature that still attracts me. As I explored these generally calm and meditative texts, I was jarred from time to time by the vehemence of the language used when monastic enemies came into play.

Henry – abbot of Hautecombe (1160–76) and then of Clairvaux (1176–79), named cardinal bishop of Albano in 1179 and papal legate in 1181 – did not have the same reservations about leading troops as did his predecessor Bernard of Clairvaux. Under Henry's leadership, the Cistercian posture in Occitania shifted radically and set an unfortunate pattern. Bernard's sixth successor as abbot of Clairvaux was deliberately trying to avoid the failure that his predecessor encountered. Furthermore, Henry extended Bernard's justification of using force in Jerusalem to the campaign against heretics in Occitania. As Yves Congar concluded: ‘La croisade s'est transposée en guerre sainte contre les hérétiques.’ He placed the blame squarely on Henry of Clairvaux and the evolution of his thinking during the two years preceding the Third Lateran Council. Accepting that conclusion, we shall extend it by examining more sources, looking for evidence of Henry's preaching, and analysing his language with a view to the rhetorical patterns of demonizing heretics and evoking pollution, threat to the social order, and apocalypticism.

A short overview of events in the 1150s and 1160s in France, the Rhineland and England will chart the heightening sense of alarm over heresy during the years that preceded and coincided with the beginnings of Henry of Clairvaux/Albano's involvement as a leader in the affairs of the Cistercian Order and the Church.

From 1145 to 1229 Cistercian monks, respected as twelfth-century Europe's holiest and brightest men, embarked on preaching missions against dissident Christians in southern France. The twelfth century witnessed a remarkable upsurge of religious dissent, and preaching offered the medieval Church its most potent instrument of propaganda. Monastic preachers aspired to quell the opposition with words alone, but their sermons also roused recruits for the holy war of crusading on domestic soil as well as abroad. Public preaching was not at all customary for monks: in fact, ecclesiastical tradition and legislation prohibited it. Preaching was reserved instead to the secular clergy – the bishops and priests who espoused the active life in engagement with the world. In contrast, the monastic rule imposed a vow of stability, permanence within the monastery, as part of its design for a life centred on contemplation. Moreover, the Cistercian order established itself on a principle of withdrawal from the world and creation of a model Christian community isolated from the wickedness of society. Despite all this, some Cistercians served as itinerant preachers traversing city and countryside in anti-heretical campaigns. Others plunged even more deeply into the confrontation, accepting posts as bishops and papal legates who aided and even directed the Albigensian Crusade, one of the cruellest medieval wars, and who contributed to establishing procedures of inquisition, codified and expanded in the 1230s. Scholarship on the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) and the development of the Inquisition has not yet centred on the crucial role of Cistercian prelates and preachers.