42 - The Institutionalization of Religious Orders (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)

Summary

Not least because of the shocks of the Investiture struggle and of the great reforms of the Church, from the second half of the twelfth century in Western Christendom there had emerged a general desire for an internalization of belief—one that from that time onward came increasingly to inspire an individual search for God, and that required both a stronger sense of self-responsibility and a more precise knowledge of self. These developments also led to a “crisis” of traditional monasticism, since the old communities had come more and more to be seen as rigid and lifeless. They lived, so it was said, like the Pharisees (more Pharasaico). They upheld the claustrales observantiae—that is, the common rituals, the liturgical rites, and traditional practices of prayer—only outwardly, while neglecting those true precepts of the Lord (praecepta Domini) that concerned the soul—humility, contrition, asceticism, contemplation.