Conference "The Cistercians – Norms in Conflict", Stift Heiligenkreuz, September 25–26, 2025

The Cistercians – Norms in Conflict

In the 12th century, the Cistercian order revolutionised monastic life in Latin Europe. It challenged the previous form of monastic life, as well as common notions of monastic authority and the usual relationship between monasteries and external rulers. The ideas of traditional Benedictine monastic life were countered by a new ideal of an egalitarian, unified and externally demarcated community of brothers. This meant that the Cistercians placed the Benedictine Rule at the centre instead of the abbot, replaced the monarchical organisation of Benedictine monastic associations with the general chapter as a communal “abbots’ parliament” and sought to dissolve the traditional interdependence of Benedictine monasteries with the world and its rulers in favour of a radical detachment from the world.

Nevertheless, in everyday practice there was a need to constantly rebalance the relationship between the monks respectively monasteries with each other and the outside world, which meant that these ideals were repeatedly questioned and tested. In some cases, these processes led to a change in norms, which in turn could be scrutinised in later times as part of reform discourses. Previous research has usually analysed these processes from the perspective of the relationship between the norm and reality, often noting a discrepancy and sometimes even attesting decadence. This view assumes that the norms were coherent in themselves, but this was not always the case – for example, the ideals of poverty and self-sufficiency could be in conflict with each other. The emergence of concrete norms, e.g. in the form of general chapter resolutions, was therefore the result of a process of negotiation which, however, did not eliminate the fundamental conflict of norms and could lead to different results under different circumstances.

The conference is dedicated to this type of conflict of norms within the Cistercian order, which arose on the one hand within the brotherhood, which was understood as egalitarian, and on the other hand in its relationship with the outside world. It understands the emergence, implementation and modification of concrete norms as the result of sometimes conflict-laden negotiation processes and compromises that had to prove themselves time and again in everyday life. At the same time, it focusses on the interpretation of such negotiation processes within the order, as conflicts over the norms contradicted the ideal of a unanimous brotherhood. In this way, an even more differentiated picture of the normative development of the order than before is to be gained and analytical categories and interpretation schemes are to be developed that can also be transferred to analogous developments in other orders.

International conference, organised in cooperation between: Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Benedikt XVI. Heiligenkreuz, EUCist (Europainstitut für Cistercienserforschung); Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, France Stele Institute of Art History, Ljubljana; Technische Universität Dresden, Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte (FOVOG); University of Zagreb, Faculty of Croatian Studies

You can find the program here

You can find the conference flyer here