The phrase "religious virtuosos" comes from Max Weber. In Christianity, it refers to all "religious", i.e. monks, nuns, hermits and hermitsesses, regular canons and canonesses, mendicants and mendicants. Being a religious is based on the common prerequisite that, in addition to the Praecepta, the precepts of God, which are a sufficient guideline for all Christians - laymen and clergy alike - they must also follow the so-called "evangelical counsels" laid down in the New Testament, i.e. live primarily in obedience, poverty and chastity.
Preliminary remarks
Since their beginnings in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts of late antiquity, religious communities have seen themselves as institutions between heaven and earth. But they were only able to open up heaven because they gave earthly life the form that offered the chance to actually open up heaven. Trained as "virtuosos" of faith and - to generalise - of world-rejecting asceticism, women and men who left the world in pursuit of self-sanctification and perfection of the soul in order to enter an ascetic community also represented an elite in dealing with the pragmatic things of life. For these formed the fundamental prerequisite for spiritual perfection. The essential needs of laical society could thus crystallise in the form of communal religious life: Monasteries provided a secure form of investment for both pious and secular economic and political endeavours. Although the organisational norms of religious communities were oriented towards alienatio a saeculo (alienation from the secular), they nevertheless regulated the earthly, material, humanly still imperfect side of spiritual perfection. "Le monastère est en même temps la cellule d'une cité terrestre", emphasised Marie-Dominique Chenu.
These preliminary considerations are appropriate, because the religious are not members of the church that can be categorised so clearly - especially in the context of the church reform of the time and the Investiture Controversy, i.e. with objectives that sought to bring about a fundamental improvement in the moral discipline of the clergy in particular, on the one hand, and the independence of the church from the laity, on the other.
As early as late antiquity, the Doctor of the Church, St Augustine, outlined a division of Christians into three groups, in which the religious occupied a separate position. Tria genera hominum (three kinds of people) were brought into the world by God's will, whereby typologically the clergy should be assigned to Noe, the laity to Job and finally the religious to Daniel, who, in contrast to the first two, did not enter into the turmoil but served God with inner peace and who - as the historian Otto von Freising was to say in the middle of the 12th century - "remained untouched by the turmoil". century - "remained untouched by the [...] miserable vicissitudes of the course of the world".
This was not about a difference from all those Christians who were not religious, but above all about differentiation from the clergy. This aspect was summarised in a rather combative treatise from the 12th century: There are three things - it said - that a person can give to God according to his status: something of his worldly possessions, something of himself and finally himself completely. Here the two models just mentioned are combined and the threefold is linked with the twofold: firstly the gift of the laity and secondly the gift of the clergy, since in both cases the commandments of God, the Praecepta Dei, are not exceeded, and finally the gift of the monk, who also observes the counsels, the Consilia, and who thereby achieves a complete turning (conversio) of the heart to God.
This apologetic shows that it was obviously not easy to harmonise Christian ideas of hierarchical functions and offices of the priesthood with a religiosity. A clerical-institutional church stood in opposition to a monastic-pneumatic church, which did not emphasise hierarchy, but brotherly love without restriction, which took the vow (votum) instead of ordination (consecration), the separation from the world instead of openness to the world, the institution of the "monastery" with the abbot as the representative of Christ - as expressly demanded in the Rule of Benedict - and not the institution of the "diocese" with a bishop as the successor to the apostles appointed by Christ. The fact that most monks had also been ordained priests since the Carolingian period did not detract from this, as this usually served the internal Servitium Dei, not pastoral care.
But it was precisely because of this separate position in the Church that religiosity, individual religious communities as well as larger organisations and orders spanning half of Europe played a very distinct role in the Roman Church's struggle for internal reform and external independence, which is the subject of this article. In previous centuries, the Church had sometimes bowed to the point of unrecognisability of its own identity under the competition of an equally sacredly understood secular rule, but now emerged like a phoenix from the ashes with the goal of libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church, which would shake off the clasp of secular power - even if it meant breaking with the essential lines of the established order and an almost experimental search for new mediations of faith.
In this process, religiosity and the official church entered into a mutually influencing relationship of fundamental importance - precisely because the latter was not fully absorbed into the hierarchical structure of the church. This involved three variants. Variant 1: traditional monasticism, which, where it was still in full bloom, had already achieved much of what the Church was trying to achieve. Variant 2: an eremitic religiosity that took on a new form and purpose, which in part separated itself from the traditional norms of the church, as a spiritual response to the uncertainties that the reform work of the time had caused. Variant 3: the religiosity of reformed clerics, i.e. the regular canons, who, with the help of the papacy and large parts of the episcopate, constituted themselves anew in order to form an effective force in the church's struggle for a new reputation.
I will now describe and analyse these three variants in more detail in order to shed light on the influence they had on the fact that this church reform actually became one of the decisive, perhaps even the decisive turning point of the Middle Ages.
Variant 1: Traditional monasticism
The roots of religiosity are known to lie with those hermits and hermitsesses who fled their communities in late antiquity in order to come closer to God in the solitude of the desert. Very soon - in the first quarter of the 4th century - the first monastic communities of men and women also emerged in the Orient under the aegis of Pachomius and then Basil. In North Africa, Augustine and his pupil Alypius united priests of their dioceses according to the model of the Jerusalem early church and gave them each a rule. This was also done for pious women. In Europe, however, a wealth of monastic rules sprouted up between the late 4th and 7th centuries. Cassian, Caesarius of Arles, Columban, Isidore of Seville, but also a Marcarius of Lérins, a Gregory of Tours, a Ferreolus of Uzés or a Fructuosus of Braga, to name but a few.
This circle also included the greatest and most effective of all monastic authors of rules: Benedict of Nursia, died around 547, initially forgotten, then rediscovered as a person by Gregory the Great, whereby his lost rule had to wait until around 625 to be in use again and then permanently. After a brief period of mixed rules (mainly consisting of those of Columban and Benedict), Benedict's rule gradually became established from the Carolingian period onwards until it had achieved the status of the only rule in Europe (apart from the Rule of St Basil in southern Italy and Sicily).
The 10th and 11th centuries were the high point of Benedictine monasticism. With its ultimately almost uncountable individual abbeys, including above all Montecassino, it was Cluny, with its ultimately hundreds of daughter monasteries, that developed into an ecclesia (a church), as it was called, which as a monastic church under its great abbots Odilo and Hugo then certainly had a self-confident status alongside the ecclesia romana of the clergy and the episcopate. The Benedictine monastery of Cluny (founded in 910) was then largely freed from entanglements by its noble founder William of Aquitaine. His founding charter stated that he had established the monastery out of love for God and to strengthen the existence and integrity of the Catholic religion. In the same breath as granting a future autocephalous abbatial election in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, he stipulated that the monastery was immediately free from the yoke of any secular power (cujuslibet terrenae potestatis jugo) - including that of his own family. At the same time, he handed over the new foundation with all its material accessories to the apostles Peter and Paul for their own rule (propria dominatio) and implored the Pope, as the future protector and defender (tutor et defensor) of the abbey, to use his canonical and apostolic authority to excommunicate anyone who encroached on Cluny's goods.
After Pope John XI had confirmed this transfer and the freedom from all secular rule in 931 and the monastery had also been removed from the bishop's power of control and jurisdiction (exemption), Cluny was able to unite houses that had been handed over to it or founded by itself into an association (with affiliations on the Iberian Peninsula, in France, England, Italy and in the western border regions of the German Empire) of abbeys and priories or filiation groups of priories. This association was under the monarchical direction of the Abbot of Cluny and could be understood as a "dislocated grand convent".
Cluny developed into the leading reform centre of monasticism, not least due to a lively export of its customs, i.e. its Consuetudines, which also had an impact on monasteries that did not belong to its association (e.g. Gorze, Farfa, Hirsau, etc.). Cluny also involved the nobility in a de facto role of protector and donor, while at the same time offering a comprehensive prayer memorial. Thanks to the reputation it had acquired in this way, it played a leading role in the peace of God movement and in securing the infrastructure for the pilgrimage to Santiago.
With the reduction of physical labour, it developed an increase and splendour in the liturgy and choral prayer for the glory of God that went far beyond the norm and was accompanied by the monumentality of the church building. Thus, during its heyday at the turn of the 11th century (under Abbot Odilo and Hugo I.), Cluny could see itself as an extremely self-confident monastic church (Cluniacensis ecclesia) within the universal church, which exemplified independent monasticism and thus radiated not only to the entire monastic world, but also to the great secular powers such as the imperial dynasties of the Ottonians and Salians or the French kingdom, whose representative Robert II had to experience Odilo being cynically labelled "rex Odilo".
The aforementioned Augustinian scheme of the three estates was still intact, and even more: it was brilliantly confirmed. However, this related more to the legal status and economic prosperity of the monasteries. In the case of the individual abbeys beyond the large organisations, this only applied to a very limited extent to spiritual intensity.
Variant 2: Eremitic religiosity
In the second half of the 11th century, a paradigm shift occurred in Western Christendom. The vehement, public discourse of the Gregorian church reform about the moral quality of the clergy, but also in part of monasticism, caused widespread uncertainty and doubt about the attainment of salvation through the existing institutions. The result was the call for a new, much more internalised religiousness, whose now rediscovered touchstone was the individual conscience and which also opened up a high degree of personal responsibility. Around the middle of the 11th century, the hermit and later Cardinal Peter Damiani was one of the first to outline the place of a true monastery, which was to be built in the individual soul - in the Pauline sense, the desired dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. A Benedictine abbot such as Guibert de Nogent, looking back on the 11th century, was one of the first to describe how the formerly so fruitful time of the monasteries was now often on the wane - to name just two famous authors who were able to get to the heart of the matter very early on.
An old, but now renewed, way of perfect religious life emerged - the vita eremitica - and it quickly swelled into a huge movement, especially in France and Italy. It no longer found its model in Benedictine monasticism, but in the life of the ancient desert fathers. However, this made the Augustinian scheme at least in need of expansion. For in the centuries immediately preceding it, hermitism was understood primarily in the sense of Benedict's Rule, chapters 1, 1-5, as the completion of the monastic schola. Now, however - as in the case of Stephen of Muret, the initiator of the Grandmontese, for example - all earlier rules were rejected and a life based exclusively on the Gospel was aspired to in the hidden forest wilderness. It was only after Stephen's death that his disciples began to write their own rules according to the norms of behaviour he had taught them and called them "Regula Stephani". The situation was similar in the early days of most eremitic groups. They had clear ideas of behaviour that could lead to religious perfection and whose elements were in almost all cases exemplified by a charismatic leader, but they initially lived without a written rule because the master's word and deed were valid and sufficient. It was only in a later phase that the codification of norms was sought. For example, Guigo, fifth prior of the Grande Chartreuse, wrote down the Consuetudines of the Carthusians in the form of statutes. The highly successful itinerant preacher Robert of Arbrissel did the same for his community in Fontevraud - to name just two examples. Adoption of the Benedictine Rule remained the exception. The difference between a religiously internalised life in the freedom of the Holy Spirit according to Paul, 2 Corinthians 3:17 "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom", as was repeatedly emphasised by the hermits in particular, and a monastic life with strict rituals and formal norms seemed too great. In addition, hermit communities were quite critical of Benedictine convents, as the aforementioned Guibert of Nogent reported, and Stephen of Muret, for example, warned his novices against the earthly interweaving of traditional monasteries, or how, for example, around 1100, the hermit Rainaldus reproached the Benedictines in De vita monachorum that they may fulfil the external claustrales observantiae (monastic habits), but they did not allow the actual commandments of the Lord to penetrate the interior of their souls.
It is not without good reason that we speak today of a "crisis of monasticism" at that time, when the monopoly of the Rule of St Benedict broke down and - to take up Augustine's allegorical image once again - other, now eremitic forms took root in the sector of Daniel, which understood cenobitism in a completely different way, namely more detached from the world, more contemplative and at the same time more spontaneous, more focussed on the inner being of man and thus also more authentic for many Christians who were seeking the true faith.
However, at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries and still in the midst of the Investiture Controversy and the as yet unresolved church reform, a decisive turning point in the history of the religious was already in the offing - and it would give particular significance to the problem of organisational freedom to a hitherto unimagined extent: With the Cistercians, who originally came from the new eremitical movement but insisted on strict, literal adherence to the Rule of Benedict, a completely new form of religiosity emerged at that time. In 1098, part of the eremitically founded convent of Molesme moved with their abbot Robert to a wasteland called Cistercium near Dijon and founded a monastery there with the programmatic name novum monasterium ("new monastery"). They invoked the freedom of the Holy Spirit - and they were not the first to do so at the time - in order to establish a monastery where they could fulfil their vow of strict poverty. Their hope, which ultimately did not fail them, was directed towards the foundation of further monasteries, which they wanted to treat as equals in a completely new way and be united in love in the future. Between 1115 and 1119, they wrote the first constitutional text of the Middle Ages, the Carta Caritatis, in which they laid down the new organisational structure. This was only possible because they introduced the form of a prospective law, a law with hypothetical-general legal principles, and thus created a system of norms that was open to interpretation. Here, too, they invoked the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit: "One must by no means believe that our holy order is an invention (adinventio) of men: it has truly been given to us by the instruction of the Holy Spirit", they said. Despite their flight from the monastery, despite their awareness of freedom, there was no deviation from the faith - on the contrary, they felt in conformity with the Holy Spirit, who allowed himself to be disregarded by current church law, but not by a thoroughly self-confident trust in God.
Variant 3: The religiosity of reformed clerics
The official church needed those zealots who wanted to radically reform Christian life from below, as it were, because at that moment it was itself striving for radical reforms. The desire to see the charismatically led communities of hermits and itinerant preachers, who were in many respects on the verge of heterodoxy, reintegrated into the institutionalised church was based on this very need. But this is precisely where the benefits of the burgeoning movement of redefining clerics lay. They could become the outstanding instrument of church reform - which, however, did not come from below, but from above. It had already found its first planting ground in the monastery of Saint-Ruf near Avignon, which had been founded by clerics in 1039 out of a longing for an eremitic life.
However, as with the associations of hermits and itinerant preachers, such an option could only be initiated by not being afraid to take a polemical stance against the existing system. The Lateran Synod held by Pope Nicholas II in 1059, under the leadership of Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII, had already formulated harsh reproaches against the lax behaviour of clerical communities, but also of canonesses with private property and lavish lifestyles. The old regulations on canonical life passed by the Synod of Aachen (816-819) were sharply criticised. Clerics were called upon to form monastic communities that modelled themselves on the apostolic life of the early church in Jerusalem. We can read in the Acts of the Apostles (4:32) that they were "of one heart and one soul". The realisation of such guidelines was believed to create a renewed clergy whose integrity and piety also legitimised the church's striving for independence in its appearance.
This impetus was successful. Irrespective of the eremitic beginnings, which certainly had a long-lasting effect, the focus of the planting sites of the regulated canonry, the regular canons (as they were called), shifted to cathedral chapters and even more so to newly founded branches, which were "placed close to the people", as it was called, and were thus able to fulfil the apostolic mission in the form of pastoral care. They were promoted by bishops who locally supported the reform of the official church in the Roman sense. The impetus for foundations also came from the nobility, particularly in the German Empire, who sought independence and preferred to hand over their endowed houses to the Pope rather than the royal power. However, in the 11th century in particular, the initiative often came directly from clerics, of whom little has been handed down and who were not necessarily the great charismatics - such as Adam, for example, who otherwise remained virtually unknown, who founded a church south of Novara in northern Italy in the village of Mortara at the time and gathered a community of clerics around him. This laid the foundation for a large monastic organisation of regular canons, strongly supported by the papacy, which, like Cluny, called itself a "church", the ecclesia Mortariensis.
All over Europe, clerical communities formed that led a life that only monks had done in the past. Although they did not stand on the threshold between orthodoxy and heresy, they did stand between reactionary, anti-reform forces and the avant-garde of the new. Thus the clerical movement was also initially characterised by the search for the best way, by experimentation, which always carried the possibility of danger and a relapse into the old.
This can be clearly demonstrated by one of the spearheads of church reform, Bishop Altmann of Passau (1065-1091). He was a staunch supporter of the reforming papacy, a true follower of Gregory VII, whose diocesan clergy caused him a great deal of trouble by remaining opposed to the ban on priestly marriage. Altmann now dared to experiment: around 1067/73, he founded a monastic foundation near his episcopal city with the patronage of St Nicholas, which he staffed with regulated clerics. This laid the foundations for what was initially an extraordinary success story. In 1071, Altmann reformed his traditional monastery of Sankt Florian near Linz, and in 1073 he was involved in the foundation of Rottenbuch Abbey in the Pfaffenwinkel, which he staffed with canons from Sankt Nikola. Rottenbuch became the centre of his own reform circle and a refuge for many churchmen loyal to the Pope.
Ultimately, however, it was Pope Urban II who gave the young, weakly institutionalised movement of the regular canons a truly solid foundation. In 1092, he wrote in a (now quite famous) document for the Rottenbuch monastery in Upper Bavaria, which at the time was one of the most important centres of the regular canon movement in the south of the German Empire, the prohibition - as it literally read - "to leave this monastery without the permission of the rector and the entire convent under the incentive of an easier life or under the guise of a stricter way of life". Furthermore, such persons may not be admitted by any bishop or abbot. This fixed the regular canons between the secular clerics on the one hand and the monks on the other and at the same time secured them in this unassailable and independent position. This is probably the answer to the question I posed above regarding the break-up of the Augustinian scheme and thus also regarding the creation of a specific identity for the regular canons. The formulation of Urban II favoured such a construction of identity. It was applied by him in the form of a formula to houses of the regular canons throughout Europe (including, for example, the aforementioned Saint-Ruf) and even found its place in the leading legal collections of the time (Ivos of Chartres and then Gratian).
What was particularly striking in this context was that the newly formed communities of regular canons, as well as most of the eremitic groups, were still living without a written rule until the early years of the 12th century. Although there was often talk of a regula beati Augustini, according to which they supposedly lived, any text of Augustine's rules had been lost for centuries. It was not until 1107/1108 that evidence of the actual use of an Augustinian rule text can be found for the first time - namely in the monasteries of Springiersbach, Hamersleben (near Halberstadt) and Saint-Victor in Paris. However, it was not the case that the regular canons, like many hermits, generally believed that they had no need of a rule; rather, they understood - again analogous to the hermits - how to initially live with just an idea and to treat it like a rule in the ideal sense. In their case, it was Augustine's well-known statements about the apostolic community, combined with the text of the biblical Acts of the Apostles, whose central statement was the commitment to "being one heart and one soul" in the lived form of a vita comunis, where all goods should be common to all members.
Such an adaptation of norms, which were textually reduced only to their guiding ideas, offered hardly any orientation in detail compared to the elaborate Rule of Benedict and therefore required intensive exegesis through a reflected practice of life. However, it could only be achieved - as we have already seen with the hermits - through the strength of an individually internalised faith, whether supported by a charismatic or not. The importance of this aspect is evidenced by the abundance of paraenetic texts that sought to create a kind of continuous conversio in individuals - generally without reference to a specific rule. They were first produced in this period and circulated widely, especially in canonical and eremitical communities, including Cistercian ones.
Summary
The structure of these demarcation conflicts, which began as early as the 11th century and continued well into the 12th century, is strikingly similar to that which - as we have seen - also widely characterised the relationship between hermits and monks. Both here and there, albeit from different directions, it was a question of penetrating the monastic sector and challenging the monopoly position of the Benedictines (with the exception of the Cistercians). It was a confrontation between the old, the ingrained, and the new, the rooted, to use the metaphorical expression from the literature of the time. For in the late 11th century, unstable conditions still prevailed in both hermitism and the vita canonica, and there were still large sections of unstable identities that were more in flux than in a state of institutional perseverance. This was recognisable in some places, for example, by an initial vacillation between eremitical or canonical life or by attempts to combine the two after leaving the forums of the world and withdrawing to a place of solitary seclusion. The initial communities of Saint-Ruf or, for example, Springiersbach in the Palatinate could be cited as significant cases among many. Another indication of the still unstable picture of external affiliations, which observant contemporaries were not yet able to clearly determine, is the urgent warning by Ordericus Vitalis, a Benedictine who carefully observed his time, of the large number of religious hypocrites who were difficult to expose far and wide.
In this very turbulent era of religiosity, we were nevertheless able to focus on three forms: the classical monks in Cluniac form, the "new" hermits and the regular canons. All three were in fact in a very specific interrelationship with the church reform of the time.
The Cluniac monks presented a monastic church of the highest renown, which was still strong in itself and also provided the papacy with reliable support in the investiture dispute with the emperor, who was Abbot Hugh's godson. The presence of its Abbot Hugh in Canossa speaks for itself. Above all, however, Cluny demonstrated a freedom that could serve as a model for the Roman reformers. However, Cluny was not a concrete model for reform; at best, the experience of freedom conveyed by Cluny had a lasting effect on some of the reformers' biographies. It should also not be overlooked that Cluny was ultimately one of the losers of the upheavals in Western Christendom. Cluny needed harmony between secular and spiritual power as a foundation of divine order. After the death of Hugo - despite the great Petrus Venerabilis - the slow transition to a "Cluny après Cluny" began.
The hermits were the real winners. According to their own conviction, they were inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus on the path of freedom both towards God and towards themselves. Although they emerged from a deep insecurity, they founded a new and strong religiosity entirely from within their souls, from a claustrum animae, which created innovative, even experimental forms of religious life, whose rationality ensured its continuity and could even lead to the reform of traditional monasticism. The "Cluny après Cluny" then also adopted the essential organisational elements of the Cistercians. The hermits were both the beneficiaries of the church reform and in many ways also its spiritual driving force.
The regular canons met an urgent need for church reform. They represented the new clergy personnel that met the religious and moral criteria. 'Monasticised' clergy was a stupendous solution, which was further sublimated by the fact that the beginnings of the church community were associated with it and a salvation-historical legitimation was gained. The fact that it did not bring total success overall was perhaps due to the realistic strength of the Augustinian tripartite scheme, which had established a strict separation of clericus and monachus.
All in all, however, it is fair to say that the history of church reform cannot be reconstructed without the involvement of the religious.
