Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/808

This page needs to be proofread.
794
CIT—CIT

found to work well, and the Cluniae rule made each daughter monastery to be subject to Cluny, and to receive its prior from his appointment. Such subordination tended to greater regularity of discipline, and greatly increased the power of the order, especially when abbeys were assailed by laymen or unduly harassed by bishops. The abbot of Cluny became a veritable prince with 314 monasteries sub ject to him, and with the right of coining money, which was accepted as readily as that of the king of France. But its concentration of power in a single hand involved the risk attendant upon all such despotisms ; and the Abbot Poutius, who had succeeded St Hugh about 1109 seems to have endangered the entire system by an extravagance which loaded Cluny with debt, and by his ambition in claiming the title of Abbot of Abbots, and in endeavouring to sway the oldest Benedictine house itself, the famous abbey of Monte Casino. St Stephen Harding framed a constitution for the Cistercians which aimed at combining the excellencies without the defects of the two systems. Although in his rule the abbot of Citeaux was to be recog nized as the Pater Universalis Ordinis, yet a system of reciprocal visitation was to be carried on, and the four earliest houses which derived their origin from Citeaux La Ferte , Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond governed the abbeys which had respectively sprung from them. The four abbots of these eldest daughters of Citeaux might even in an extreme case, with the consent of a general chapter, depose the head of the order, the abbot of Citeaux. This constitution, known as the Chart of Charity, exercised much influence upon other orders, and in some degree upon that of Cluny. But it gave rise to a claim which (though not intended by its author, and denounced by its greatest alumnus, St Bernard) was successfully urged in after years by the Cistercian, as well as by other orders, viz., an

exemption from episcopal superintendence.

With respect to intellectual culture and influence, the Cistercian order cannot claim a place in the front rank among the monastic bodies. Devoted to worship, to penance, to contemplation, and to culture of the soil, the order did not, like some others, admit the relaxation of scholastic disputations. No doubt it received learnsd men into its fold. It is also true that St Stephen Harding, with some of his brethren, undertook a revision of the Bible, that copies of many valuable works were made by the brethren (though, with less ornamentation than the illuminated MSS. of some other orders), and that St Bernard was solicitous to furnish all the monasteries founded by himself with good libraries. Nevertheless, as an order, the Cistercians have not achieved such triumphs of learning as the Benedictines, the Dominicans, or the Jesuits.

But no order springing out from the Benedictine proved so popular as the Cistercian. During the llth century its houses were multiplied in every direction. It touched both ends of the social scale. St Bernard and the thirty novices who joined with him were all of noble birth ; many similar accessions were made from time to time, and in the 12th century we read of fifteen young German princes entering the order. But a place was also found for the poor and uneducated. Such as could not be choir brethren, might be lay brethren and till the fields ; and the contrast between a labourer of this sort, partaking of the dignity of a great and powerful community, and the neighbouring husbandman, the serf of some feudal lord, was in the eyes of many all in favour of the monk. It may have tended towards that emancipation of the labourers so largely effected by the monastic orders and celebrated in a well- known sonnet by Wordsworth.

The order seems to have especially thriven in England. From Waverley in Surrey, the earliest Cistercian settle ment in the country, they spread over Britain, especially by the rivers of Yorkshire, and extended into Scotland.

The overthrow of the Cistercian houses at the time of the Reformation is a part of general monastic history. While some of the dissolutions were unjust, and the exe cution of abbots mere judicial murders, the luxury of the great Yorkshire houses seems quite undeniable, and per haps their overthrow may, on the whole, be thought to favour the dictum of Mr Carlyle, that nothing is crushed from without, until it is ripe to perish from within.


For authorities see the articles already referred to. See also Manriquez, Annalts Cistercienses, 4 vols. folio, Lyons, 1642, and the various biographies of St Bernard by Alban Butler, Neander, De Ratisbon, Morrison, and others ; and The Cis tercian Saints of England, especially St Stephen Harding, edited by John Henry Newman, London, 1844. Dean Milman cautions his readers against the love of legend displayed in these biographies, but praises "their research and exquisite charm of style," Lat. Christianity, bk. viii. chap. 4. See also Cheruel, Dictionnaire Historique, Paris, 1855 ; and for the artistic elements, so far as regards paintings, Mrs Jamieson s Legends of the Monastic Orders, London, 1850 ; also Cosmo Innes s Scotland in the Middle Ages, Edinburgh, 1860 ; Records of tJie Monastery of Kinloss, by John Stuart, LL. D., Edinburgh, 1872 ; and an article " Cistercian Abbeys in Yorkshire" in Fr user s Magazine for Sep tember 1876.

(j. g. c.)

CITEAUX, or Cisteaux, a village in France, in the department of Cote d Or, about 7 miles east of the town of Nuits, and 12 from Dijon. It is celebrated for the great abbey founded by Robert de Molesme in 1098, which became the head-quarters of the Cistercian order (see last article). The buildings are now occupied as a refor matory for juvenile criminals ; and in the neighbourhood is an extensive agricultural college.

CITHÆRON, or as it is now called from its pine forests, Elatea, a famous mountain, or rather mountain range, in the south of Bceotia, separating that state from Megaris and Attica. It was greatly celebrated in Grecian mythology, and is frequently mentioned by the great poets of Greece, especially by Sophocles. It was on Cithseron that Actason was changed into a stag, that Pentheus was torn to pieces by the Bacchantes whose orgies he had been watching, and that the infant (Edipus was exposed. This mountain, too, was the scene of the mystic rites of Dionysus ; and the festival of the Dsedala in honour of Juno was celebrated on its summit. The carriage road from Athens to Thebes crosses the range by a picturesque defile which has at one time been guarded on the Attic side by a strong fortress, the ruins of which are known as Ghyphto kastro or Gipsy Castle.

CITRIC ACID, or Oxytricarballylic Acid, C 6 H 8 O 7

or C 3 H 4 (OH)(CO.OH).j, a tetrahydric tribasic acid, first prepared in the solid state by Scheele, in 1784, from the juice of lemons, in which it exists in large quantity. It is present also in oranges, citrons, currants, gooseberries, and many other fruits, and in several bulbs and tubers. It is made on a large scale from lime or lemon juice, chiefly in the months of November and December. The juice is fermented for some time to free it from mucilage, then boiled and filtered, and neutralized with powdered chalk and a little milk of lime ; the precipitate of calcium citrate so obtained is decomposed with dilute sulphuric acid, and the resulting solution of citric acid is separated by filtration, evaporated to remove calcium sulphate, and concentrated. The concentration is best effected in vacuum pans. The acid is thus procured in colourless rhombic prisms of the composition C 6 H 8 O 7 + H 2 0. Crystals of a different form are deposited from a strong boiling solution of the acid. About 20 gallons of lemon juice should yield about 10 lb of crystallized citric acid. The acid may also be prepared from the juice of unripe gooseberries. Calcium citrate for

exportation in the place of lemon juice must be manu-