Alberic of Cîteaux

Alberic of Cîteaux, known in French as Aubry, was a monk of Burgundy in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and one of the three founders of the Cistercian Order, together with Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding. Virtually nothing can be verified about his parentage, birthplace, or date of birth; he enters the sources as a member of a band of hermits in the forest of Collan, near Châtillon-sur-Seine. About 1075 that group, under Robert’s leadership, accepted a more regular monastic life and founded the abbey of Molesme, following the Rule of Saint Benedict. Alberic served as prior. Molesme soon became successful and comparatively wealthy, and with prosperity came a relaxation of observance that Alberic, Robert, and Stephen Harding found incompatible with their understanding of the Rule.

In 1098 the three men and about twenty companions, with the authorization of Hugh of Die, Archbishop of Lyons and legate of the Holy See, withdrew from Molesme and settled in a remote, marshy woodland called Cîteaux, in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône south of Dijon. The new monastery was intended to restore primitive Benedictine practice: strict enclosure, liturgical simplicity, economic self-sufficiency through the monks’ own labor, and refusal of the feudal incomes, tithes, and parish churches that supported many contemporary black-monk houses. Robert was the first abbot. The community left behind at Molesme obtained a papal order for his return, and in 1099 he went back. Alberic was then elected second abbot of Cîteaux and governed the house for the remaining decade of his life.

As abbot, Alberic worked to secure the canonical independence of the struggling foundation. In 1100 Pope Paschal II granted Cîteaux a privilege of protection, commonly known as the Roman Privilege, placing the abbey under the immediate guardianship of the Roman Church. Later Cistercian tradition credits Alberic with replacing the black Benedictine habit with an undyed white or grey tunic and cowl, a change explained as an act of devotion to the Virgin Mary, to whom the church of Cîteaux was dedicated and under whose patronage the order thereafter placed all its churches. The same tradition associates his abbacy with the first shaping of Cistercian customs, although the order’s constitutional charter, the Carta Caritatis, was the work of Stephen Harding after Alberic’s death. Vocations were few, the site was unhealthy, and the community remained poor and obscure throughout his government.

Alberic died at Cîteaux on 26 January 1109 and was buried at the abbey. Stephen Harding succeeded him as third abbot; only a few years later the arrival of Bernard of Clairvaux and his companions transformed Cîteaux from a fragile experiment into the mother house of a rapidly expanding order. Alberic has been honored as a saint since the Middle Ages, above all by Cistercians, who keep his feast on 26 January, frequently together with Robert and Stephen as founders. He was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the kind that became standard in later centuries. Knowledge of his life rests chiefly on early Cistercian narratives, especially the Exordium Parvum, written a generation after the foundation; historians therefore accept his offices at Molesme and Cîteaux and his role in the 1098 secession, while treating anecdotal and miraculous details with caution.