From Cistercian Europe, Architecture of Contemplation, Terryl N. Kinder, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.
Excerpts chosen by Thomas Falmagne.

The Opus Dei and the Cistercian Day

Just as the Rule of Saint Benedict was the basic document of the Cistercian reform, so did the horarium establish the basic measure of the monastic day. All activities were to take place between the rising and the setting of the sun, and since the sun set earlier in winter and later in summer, it follows that the daily horarium inevitably varied with the season.

The main activity of monks and nuns was the celebration of the Opus Dei, The” work of God”, of which the most obvious manifestation was the saying of the seven day hours and the night office.

In addition to these liturgical obligations, Cistercian religious were also required to assist in manual labor and to attend to their lectio divina, which, outside the church was the principal form of Cistercian devotion.

All these activities were carried out in winter and summer alike, and since the days were longer in summer, and as the agricultural work needed to sustain the abbeys increased with the increasing length of the days, more time was spent in manual labor in summer (nearly six hours) than in winter.

In winter there was, naturally, more time for sleep, nearly nine hours a night, but less for work and the balance of the monastic day had to be adjusted accordingly. The two daily meals of summer were reduced to one in winter, and the period for lectio divina was considerably extended, especially in the interval of nearly four and a half hours between Matins and Lauds.

The heart of the Opus Dei was the celebration of the Canonical Hours, seven times a day : Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. It had become customary however to add to these seven hours an additional night office.

The horarium of the lay brothers was quite different. They rose after the monks had finished the night office and spent most of the day in manual labor, saying their offices where they worked. Only on Sundays and feast days did their schedule approximate that of the monks.

Sign Language

The early fathers of monasticism all stressed that silence was essential in any attempt at overcoming sin. For Benedict, silence was an “instrument of good works” and almost all later rules reemphasize the necessity of silence as a fundamental principle of the religious life.

Nevertheless, the fact remained that the exigencies of daily monastic living demanded some means of communication, preferably one that did not disturb the silence of others, and systems of sign language appear to date from the earliest day of monasticism. The first clear evidence for a fixed system of visual signs emerges with the foundation of Cluny. Saint Odo of Cluny (879-942) required virtually all communication to be done by means of gestures.

From the eleventh century onward, as the influence of Cluny spread ever wider, the cluniac signs, or variants of them, were appropriated by both Cluniac and non-Cluniac houses in much of Europe.
The early Cistercian signs, like those of Cluny, were intended not for conversation, but for the communication of essential information.

In later centuries, with the Cistercians as with the Cluniacs, there was a relaxation of the requirement for strict silence, and as the rule was relaxed, so the need for a comprehensive system of signing faded away.

(To be continued, the remaining text will be translated shortly)