For the first four or five centuries of Benedictine history there was no organic bond between any of the monasteries; each house formed an independent autonomous family, managing its own affairs and subject to no external authority or control except that of the bishop of the diocese. But the influence of Cluny, even on monasteries that did not enter into its organism, was enormous; many adopted Cluny customs and practices and moulded their life and spirit after the model it set; and many such monasteries became in turn centres of revival and reform in many lands, so that during the 10th and 11th centuries arose free unions of monasteries based on a common observance derived from a central abbey. Fleury and Hirsau are well-known examples. Basing themselves on St Gregory's counsel to St Augustine, Dunstan, Ethelwold and Oswald adopted from the observance of foreign monasteries, and notably Fleury and Ghent, what was suitable for the restoration of English monachism, and so produced the Concordia Regularis, interesting as the first serious attempt to bring about uniformity of observance among the monasteries of an entire nation. In the course of the 12th century sporadic and limited unions of Black Monk monasteries arose in different parts. But notwithstanding all these movements, the majority of the great Black Monk abbeys continued to the end of the 12th century in their primeval isolation. But in the year 1215, at the fourth Lateran council, were made regulations destined profoundly to modify Benedictine polity and history. It was decreed that the Benedictine houses of each ecclesiastical province should henceforth be federated for the purposes of mutual help and the maintenance of discipline, and that for these ends the abbots should every third year meet in a provincial chapter (or synod), in order to pass laws binding on all and to appoint visitors who, in addition to the bishops, should canonically visit the monasteries and report on their condition in spirituals and temporals to the ensuing chapter. The English monks took the lead in carrying out this legislation, and in 1218 the first chapter of the province of Canterbury was held at Oxford, and up to the dissolution under Henry VIII. the triennial chapters took place with wonderful regularity. Fitful attempts were made elsewhere to carry out the decrees, and in 1336 Benedict XII. by the bull Benedictina tried to give further development to the system and to secure its general observance. The organization of the Benedictine houses into provinces or chapters under this legislation interfered in the least possible degree with the Benedictine tradition of mutual independence of the houses; the provinces were loose federations of autonomous houses, the legislative power of the chapter and the canonical visitations being the only forms of external interference. The English Benedictines never advanced farther along the path of centralization; up to their destruction this polity remained in operation among them, and proved itself by its results to be well adapted to the conditions of the Benedictine Rule and life.
In other lands things did not on the whole go so well, and many causes at work during the later middle ages tended to bring about relaxation in the Benedictine houses; above all the vicious system of commendatory abbots, rife everywhere except in England. And so in the period of the reforming councils of Constance and Basel the state of the religious orders was seriously taken in hand, and in response to the public demand for reforming the Church "in head and members," reform movements were set on foot, as among others, so among the Benedictines of various parts of Europe. These movements issued in the congregational system which is the present polity among Benedictines. In the German lands, where the most typical congregation was the Bursfeld Union (1446), which finally embraced over loo monasteries throughout Germany, the system was kept on the lines of the Lateran decree and the bull Benedictina, and received only some further developments in the direction of greater organization; but in Italy the congregation of S. Justina at Padua (1421), afterwards called the Cassinese, departed altogether from the old lines, setting up a highly centralized government, after the model of the Italian republics, whereby the autonomy of the monasteries was destroyed, and they were subjected to the authority of a central governing board.
Continued on page four.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an encyclopedia, which is out of copyright here in the U.S. See the encyclopedia main page for disclaimer and copyright information.
