CISTERCIAN LOVE The Conversion of Love, or the Love of Converts: Caritas and Amor in the Cistercian Charism Thomas Banbury As the Cistercian order expanded out of Burgundy and into much of western Christendom through the middle of the twelfth century, and particularly with their programme of institutional consolidation in the 1160s, the writings of its brothers formed a distinctive genre in the canon of theological and pastoral texts in the high middle ages.1 In work as stylistically diverse as Bernard of Clairvaux’s (1090-1153) letters and sermons, Walter Daniel’s Vita Ailredi, and the ‘primitive’ statues of the Cistercian order, the Carta Caritatis, the multivalent theme of ‘love’, variously expressed and defined is often identified as the key thematic link of Cistercian thought.2 Perhaps the abundance of ‘love’, for God and one’s neighbour, should hardly be surprising in Christian writings; after all, ‘Deus caritas est’ - declares John’s first epistle – ‘God is love’. Consideration of the na-
ture of holy love was not limited to Cistercian circles either, as the work of the Benedictine contemporary of Bernard, William of Saint Thierry, demonstrates. However, the roots of Cistercian discourses on love go deeper than New Testament maxims or a rejection of pagan doctrines of love. Drawing on provocative new images and stylistic topoi which blurred the sexual/chaste and male/female divides, as well as older models of Christian love derived from Saint Augustine and other Church Fathers, Bernard and his brother-monks delineated a new praxis of Christian life for twelfth-century Europe. Beginning with the Carta Caritatis, we will see Cistercian emphasis on love as part of a conscious self-fashioning closely related to the context of their development out of the Cluniac confraternity and the wider Benedictine community, even considering the doubts about
1 C. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 2000),
p. 46. 2 G. Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard Of Clairvaux (Oxford, 1983), p. 119; Geoffrey Webb, “The Cistercian Memoria: William Of Saint Thierry”, New Blackfriars, 47/547 (1966), p. 210.