Cistercian Order

The Cistercian Order is presented through a defining contrast: its communities withdrew from ordinary careers and family life into disciplined prayer, yet their spiritual practice continued to shape the lives of people beyond the monastery. From the austere beginnings at Cîteaux and the foundation of Clairvaux Abbey to the twentieth-century community at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the account portrays Cistercian life as both a historical institution and a continuing example of contemplative practice.

Identity and Monastic Life

The evidence centers on particular monasteries and the people formed by them rather than on a comprehensive account of the Order’s rules or administration. Its clearest institutional expression is the monks’ shared life: a commitment to poverty, chastity, obedience, and prayer, set apart from family and career. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, this commitment could be encountered in a functioning twentieth-century community, while the story of Cîteaux and Clairvaux Abbey reveals the austere conditions associated with the tradition’s earlier formation.

The monastery’s daily worship is not presented as an ornamental ceremony. At Gethsemani, monks entered the church silently, took their places in the choir stalls, and sang the psalms in Latin to Gregorian chant. The patterned service gave visible and audible form to a life organized around prayer. For a visiting Protestant seminary student, the procession, singing, and silence disclosed a dimension of Christian life that study of medieval monasticism alone had not conveyed.

Cîteaux and the Foundation of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux’s entry into the Cistercian life gives the account its most concrete picture of the early community. Around 1113, rather than pursuing the prospects open to a well-educated young man, he entered the new monastery at Cîteaux, known for austerity and a difficult way of life. He reportedly arrived with thirty friends and relatives. Stephen Harding, an Englishman, was abbot at the time; the facilities were primitive, the land lonely, and the ascetic demands severe. The narrative emphasizes that this was a demanding communal undertaking, not a comfortable retreat.

Bernard completed his novice training and was soon sent from Cîteaux to establish a monastery at Clairvaux. The early work there is not described in detail, but the foundation marks an important development in the account: the austere life was carried into a new community. All four of Bernard’s brothers would eventually become monks as well. His family’s participation illustrates how the monastery could draw people into a shared vocation, although the evidence does not make that pattern a universal feature of Cistercian life.

Bernard’s Teaching and the Monastic Community

The Order’s contemplative life is conveyed especially through Bernard’s return to his monks after periods of activity outside the monastery. He was deeply involved in church and state affairs, and this work often took him away. The monks missed him, and he missed the community. When he returned, he was ready to guide them through the spiritual struggles of monastic life. His teaching was directed to listeners he regarded as spiritually mature: he contrasted the milk needed by people in the world with the solid food he would offer the monks.

That instruction took the form of eighty-six sermons on The Song of Songs, a work that became a major classic of Christian spirituality. Bernard began the series around 1135–36 and reached only the opening of chapter three before his death; Sermon 86 remained unfinished. His allegorical reading turned a biblical book into sustained devotional teaching for the community. The sermons thus connect monastic instruction with a text that the book treats as central to Christian mystical reflection.

Bernard’s writings also show that this life of prayer did not isolate him from public responsibilities. He wrote On Loving God and other works, and he intervened in ecclesiastical and political disputes. His public activity sometimes drew him away from the monastery, while his preaching brought him back to the spiritual formation of its monks. The account holds these roles together: the Cistercian setting is a place of disciplined communal life, but it also nurtures a teacher whose influence reaches well beyond its walls.

Prayer, Silence, and the Formation of Visitors

The modern encounter with the Cistercian community at Gethsemani begins in the late 1950s. Professor Bard Thompson took first-year students from Vanderbilt University Divinity School there as part of their study of medieval monasticism, wanting them to see that the institution remained alive and functioning. The day included the Divine Offices, meals in the guest house, a monastery tour, and a discussion with a monk about monastic life. Visitors were struck by both the silence of the place and the monks’ warmth.

The author had a car and drove on five visits. On two of them, Thomas Merton spent the afternoon with the students, patiently and good-humoredly answering their questions. The student did not yet know the full importance of Merton’s writing, but the meetings became part of a longer engagement with his work. More broadly, the visits unsettled a generation of ministry students who had made social action their primary concern. Seeing monks relinquish family and careers for prayer and a life of simplicity raised a question about what their own understanding of Christian vocation had left out. The encounter did not displace the author’s concern for social justice; it opened another dimension of Christian life alongside it.

One student asked a monk how to deepen a life of prayer. The answer was to pray the Psalms, a practice the author later adopted steadily, learning to attend more closely to the songs and poems. This exchange presents Cistercian influence not as an abstract theory but as a concrete, repeatable discipline. The community’s example and advice continued beyond the visit in the habits of someone who had come as an outsider.

Gethsemani and the Tradition’s Continuing Significance

The Abbey of Gethsemani changed over time: its facilities were remodeled and improved, its community became much smaller, and monks who had served as friends and mentors died. Yet it remained a place to which the author and his wife returned for an annual week-long retreat. They also attended a monthly Thomas Merton discussion group, often held in Merton’s hermitage. Signs throughout the guest house announced that silence was spoken there; the author describes that silence as refreshing and notes that Protestants, too, came to retreat in the Catholic setting.

These later visits give institutional continuity a personal measure. The monastery is no longer described by the roughly 250 monks present in the late 1950s, but its prayerful setting still gathers retreatants and sustains practices learned there. The author’s independent study with Thompson led to a lifelong interest in spirituality and mysticism, and to a particular interest in the Cistercian tradition, especially Bernard’s writings. Annual conferences on Cistercian history and occasional papers extended that interest beyond the original student visits. In this account, the Order’s significance lies both in its distinctive communal discipline and in the lasting attention it teaches others to give to prayer, silence, and the search for God.