Robert of Molesme

Robert of Molesme was a French Benedictine abbot and one of the principal founders of the Cistercian Order. Traditional accounts place his birth in the early eleventh century, about 1028 or 1029, of noble parentage in Champagne, in the region of Troyes. At about the age of fifteen he entered the Benedictine abbey of Montier-la-Celle near Troyes, where he later served as prior. He was subsequently named abbot of Saint-Michel at Tonnerre, but the community there would not accept a strict interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict, and he withdrew. He afterward served as prior of Saint-Ayoul at Provins, a dependency of Montier-la-Celle. These early offices already show the pattern of his life: a search for regular observance and a willingness to leave houses that would not reform.

In the mid-1070s a group of hermits living in the forest of Collan sought a more stable monastic life and chose Robert as their superior. With the approval of Pope Gregory VII he established a new monastery at Molesme in Burgundy, commonly dated to about 1075, and became its first abbot. The foundation drew many vocations and substantial endowments from the Burgundian nobility, and for a time Molesme was known for austerity and fervor. As wealth and numbers grew, however, observance slackened. Robert and a minority of monks who wished to return to the letter of the Benedictine Rule found themselves opposed by brethren who preferred a milder, more conventional Benedictine life. Attempts at internal reform failed, and the tension between the two parties became the immediate background to the Cistercian foundation.

In 1098, with the authorization of Hugh of Die, Archbishop of Lyons and papal legate, Robert left Molesme together with Alberic, Stephen Harding, and some twenty other monks. They settled in a remote, poorly drained site called Cîteaux (Cistercium) in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône, on land associated with the lords of Beaune and with ducal Burgundy. There they began a life of poverty, manual labor, simplicity of liturgy and habit, and strict fidelity to the Rule, which became the origin of the Cistercian Order. The monks who remained at Molesme, troubled by the loss of their abbot and of so many of the more fervent brethren, appealed to the Holy See. Pope Urban II ordered Robert to return. In 1099 he obeyed, leaving Alberic as abbot of Cîteaux; Stephen Harding later succeeded Alberic and gave the new observance its constitutional form in the Carta Caritatis.

Robert spent his remaining years as abbot of Molesme, where he is reported to have restored a more regular discipline. He died at Molesme on 17 April 1111 and was buried in the abbey. Pope Honorius III authorized his cult in 1222, which later tradition treats as his canonization. He is commemorated on 17 April in the Roman Martyrology; Cistercian calendars have also kept his feast on 29 April. Together with Alberic and Stephen Harding he is honored as a founder of Cîteaux. The later expansion of the Cistercians, especially under Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, made that Burgundian reform one of the most influential monastic movements of the High Middle Ages, even though Robert himself ended his life not at Cîteaux but as abbot of the older house of Molesme.