Closing the Gap between the Church and European Society in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

  In "Varieties of Religious Experience" Norman Cantor writes of the increasing demand on the Church to close the distance between itself and society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Religious orders were discovering the problems that resulted from living a secluded, contemplative life. They also had to acknowledge the growing need to cater to the individual, as the emerging urban European society was searching for a more personal type of religious experience. The conflict between monastic withdrawal and community involvement, then, could be seen as a representing a larger conflict between idealism and practicality. This signified a different idea of contact; not contact merely through written words or rites, but contact through direct communication (like sermons). The clergy was discovering that complete separation between Church and society was not working anymore; in fact it could damage religious orders. The Cisterians are proof that exposure to the ways of the world was necessary for the Church to survive with its surroundings; if they had learned how to navigate the system earlier, they would have been less susceptible to being overwhelmed by corruption. Cantor is more or less saying that if the Cisterians had learned about business from the beginning, they would have developed a type of tolerance to corruption, a better understanding of how to manage it, which would have prevented corruption from gradually overtaking them the way it did. Cantor sees the Church's forms of asceticism as ultimately incompatible with the demands of Urbanized Medieval Europe, "The failure of both puritanism in the eleventh-century and monastic withdrawal in the twelfth-century to achieve their aims encouraged the increasing prominence of a new kind of religious order that was a compromise between the two extreme variants of asceticism" (380).

The problem for Cantor, though, isn't that the Church did not know how to be savvy. The problem was in the Church's priorities. Cantor feels that, had the Church devoted more time to bridging that gap between the clergy and society, rather than concentrating on the crusading military, it could have had a more positive impact, "It would have been fortunate for the Church and for European civilization in several respects if some of the energy and wealth that were given to supporting the crusading military orders in the twelfth-century had been accorded instead to the regular canons" (382) Personally, I think Cantor could have followed up his statement with more details to strengthen his point (how specifically could the regular canons have benefited the public?), but I think he is right in that the Church viewed success more through power and control than through reaching people.