Monks and Friars

Waves of reform

A pattern repeats through medieval church history. A group of devout people founds a new community to live the gospel more fully. They are admired, and donors give them land and money. They grow rich and comfortable. Then a new group arises in protest, seeking the original simplicity, and the cycle begins again. Shelley and MacCulloch both trace this rhythm of decline and renewal. It is one reason the medieval church, for all its problems, kept producing saints.

Family tree of religious orders

Cluny: the glory of worship

In 910 Duke William of Aquitaine founded a monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. He did something unusual: he gave up all control over it, placing it directly under the pope's protection, free from local lords and bishops. Under a series of long-lived, able abbots, Cluny became the center of a vast network of hundreds of dependent monasteries across Europe, all answering to the abbot of Cluny.

Cluny's speciality was liturgy. Its monks spent most of the day in elaborate, continuous chanted worship, especially prayers for the dead. Its great abbey church, finished in the early 1100s, was the largest church in Christendom until St Peter's was rebuilt. Cluny supported the Gregorian Reform and supplied several popes, including Urban II. But its wealth and splendor drew criticism.

Back to basics: Cistercians and Carthusians

Around 1100 reformers sought a simpler, harder life closer to the original Rule of Benedict.

• In 1084 Bruno of Cologne founded the Carthusians at La Grande Chartreuse in the Alps. Monks lived as near-hermits in individual cells. The order was so strict it was said never to have needed reform.
• In 1098 Robert of Molesme and companions founded a new monastery at Cîteaux in Burgundy. Their monks, the Cistercians, wore undyed white wool (the "white monks," versus the black Benedictines). They built plain churches without decoration, settled in remote valleys, and did hard manual work alongside "lay brothers" drawn from the peasantry. They became pioneers of farming, sheep-raising and water engineering.

The Cistercians' star was Bernard of Clairvaux of Clairvaux (1090–1153). He arrived at Cîteaux in 1113 with thirty relatives and friends he had persuaded to join, and he became abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard was the most influential man in Europe in his day. He advised popes, preached the Second Crusade, attacked the theologian Abelard, and wrote mystical sermons on the Song of Songs, describing the soul's love for God as a romance. His devotion to the humanity of Jesus and to Mary shaped medieval piety. By his death there were more than 300 Cistercian houses.

The friars: Francis and Dominic

By 1200 Europe was changing. Towns and trade were growing, and money was becoming more important. A new urban population, merchants and craftsmen and poor laborers, was poorly served by rural monasteries and often by ignorant parish priests. New religious movements arose, preaching poverty and the simple gospel. The church's answer was the Friars (from Latin frater, "brother"). Unlike monks, friars did not stay behind cloister walls. They went into the towns, preached, begged for their living (hence the name "mendicant" orders, from the Latin for begging), and owned nothing.

Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226) was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi. He was a fun-loving young man who dreamed of knighthood. After a spell as a prisoner of war and an illness, he had a series of conversion experiences. He kissed a leper he had once found repulsive. Praying in the ruined chapel of San Damiano, he heard Christ on the crucifix say, "Francis, go and repair my house." When his furious father dragged him before the bishop to recover money Francis had given away, Francis stripped off his clothes, handed them back, and declared that from now on he would say only "Our Father who art in heaven."

Francis embraced "Lady Poverty." He lived with total simplicity, served lepers, preached repentance and peace, and delighted in creation. His Canticle of the Sun praises God for "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon." Stories tell of him preaching to birds and taming a wolf. He created the first Christmas crib (nativity scene) at Greccio in 1223. In 1224, praying on Mount La Verna, he received the stigmata, wounds like Christ's, the first person recorded to do so. He visited the Sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade (see The Crusades).

Followers flocked to him. In 1209 or 1210 Pope Innocent III approved his simple rule. By his death there were thousands of "Friars Minor" (lesser brothers). His friend Clare of Assisi of Assisi, a young noblewoman who ran away from home to join him, founded the "Poor Clares," an order of women living in strict poverty, though they were required to stay enclosed in their convents.

After Francis died, his order split bitterly over poverty. Could the order own buildings and books? The "Spirituals" insisted on absolute poverty, and some were burned as heretics. The tension between the ideal and the practical never fully went away.

Dominic and the Order of Preachers

Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–1221), a Spanish priest, traveled through southern France and saw how the Cathar heretics (see below) won people over through simple living and good preaching, while the church's official representatives traveled in luxury. He concluded that the church needed preachers who were as poor as the heretics but better educated. In 1216 the pope approved his Order of Preachers, the Dominicans or "Black Friars."

Dominicans emphasized study. Every house had a teacher, and they quickly established themselves in the new universities. The greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, was a Dominican (see Cathedrals, Universities and Scholastics). Because of their learning and loyalty, popes also used Dominicans (and Franciscans) to staff the Inquisition, set up in the 1230s to investigate heresy, a darker part of their legacy.

Heretics of poverty

Not all movements for gospel poverty stayed inside the church.

• The Waldensians: Around 1173, a rich merchant of Lyon named Valdes (Peter Waldo) (Peter Waldo) had the Gospels translated into the local language, gave away his wealth, and began preaching. His followers, the "Poor Men of Lyon," were forbidden to preach without permission, but they continued, and they were excommunicated in 1184. They survived persecution in the Alpine valleys, later joined the Reformation, and still exist today in Italy and South America.
• The Cathars (or Albigensians, after the town of Albi) of southern France and northern Italy held a dualist faith, perhaps influenced by older Eastern movements. It held that the material world was created by an evil power. Their leaders, the "Perfect," lived lives of rigorous fasting and celibacy, which impressed people. The church responded with preaching, then the brutal Albigensian Crusade, and finally the Inquisition.

Women's religious movements

The Middle Ages offered women few roles outside marriage. Religious life was one of the most important, giving them education, community, and sometimes real power.

• Hildegard of Bingen of Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess, was an astonishing polymath. She recorded visions, composed some of the most beautiful music of the Middle Ages, wrote on medicine and natural science, corresponded with popes and emperors, and went on preaching tours, very unusual for a woman. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012.
• Beguines were women in the towns of the Low Countries and Germany who lived together in communities of prayer, work and care for the sick, without taking permanent vows. Church authorities were often suspicious of them. One beguine, Marguerite Porete, was burned as a heretic in Paris in 1310 for her mystical book The Mirror of Simple Souls. Another, Mechthild of Magdeburg of Magdeburg, wrote vivid mystical poetry.
• Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–after 1416), an English anchoress walled into a cell beside a church, received visions during a severe illness in 1373. Her Revelations of Divine Love, probably the first book in English by a woman, speaks of God's tender love, even calling Christ "our Mother." She famously wrote that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
• Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), a Dominican laywoman, cared for plague victims and boldly urged the pope to return from Avignon to Rome. Bridget of Sweden of Sweden (c. 1303–1373), a widowed noblewoman, founded an order and also lobbied popes.

Mystics and the "modern devotion"

The later Middle Ages were a great age of Mysticism, the search for direct, inward union with God. The German Dominican Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) spoke daringly of the birth of God in the soul. Some of his statements were condemned after his death. In the Netherlands, a movement called the Devotio Moderna ("modern devotion") encouraged lay people to lead simple, disciplined, inward lives. Its classic text, The Imitation of Christ, attributed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1418–1427), became after the Bible perhaps the most widely read Christian book in history. Erasmus was educated by the Brethren of the Common Life who belonged to this movement.