The Order of St. Stephen

In 1076, St. Étienne of Muret founded a own hermitage in the wasteland that was Muret, France. He gathered a following, which relocated to a new location in 1150, set up a proper priory, and became known as the Grandmontines after it. It was like nothing else at the time - and after 1185, when for the first time (but not the last) its members overthrow their prior, it more or less ran out of steam and got supplanted by the rise of 13th-century mendicancy. The Grandmontines puttered along, tiny and marginal, until the French Revolution finally put them out of their misery and ended their unique spiritual tradition forever.

IRL, anyways. In Andalusada, their name's changed - they are the Order of Saint Stephen (O.S.S., Ordo sancti Stephani), or Stephanines for short. And I have some very lofty plans for that ascetic movement from northern France - because a movement whose founding document baldly states "Our rule is the Gospel of Christ" is too good to pass up.

Grandmontine Stephanine spirituality 101

Let's start with the most basic thing: the Stephanines have their own rule. The Rule of St. Stephen, written down by the fourth head of the Order in 1124. In Andalusada the words will understandably be somewhat different, but in spirit with the original (excerpted from here):

• Prologue: "The one primary and fundamental Rule of Rules for our salvation and all others derive from [the Gospel]. We are all Christians, living the Rule of the Gospel, which is the root of all Rules."
• Ch. 39: "We forbid you absolutely to receive women into your observance."
• Ch. 54: "The better part which the Lord praised so highly in Mary, we impose upon the clercs [sic] alone.... [w]e entrust the temporal care of the monastery to the convers alone; in matters worldly and all other business, they are to command the other brethen, both clercs and convers..."

After that my sources (namely Wikipedia and Philip Sheldrake) give me very conflicting details about the Order, which is fine with me. There were arguments over whether the IRL Grandmontines were more Benedictine or Augustinian in their rule (it varied with time, apparently...), because they didn't see themselves as monks or hermits or canons regular, but as all three. (What tore them apart IRL was probably differing takes on how to actually be that.)

The other thing to note about the Stephanines is the fact that they had a mind-bogglingly democratic structure from the outset. Traditionally both the monks and the conversi (lay brothers) were counted as absolutely equal, and would share common living quarters. (Traditionally, the lay brothers were supposed to outnumber the monks by 2:1; that probably influenced the power struggles too.) It took papal intervention to organize them into a more normal monastic hierarchy.

The Stephanines and Gonzalans

So why did I devote an entire post to an obscure monastic order? Two words: Saint Gonzalo. Saint Gonzalo, and my needs as an author.

One of the nagging things about Saint Dominic is how transparent he is. The Franciscan experience is indelibly and obviously shaped by the personality of St. Francis himself; Dominican spirituality, not so much. Domingo's personality has been lost behind the Dominican role in the Inquisition; he's been turned into the Good Friar to Francesco's Bad Friar, moieties of a common praxis. I need Gonzalo to be different from that - because in fiction, it's hard to tell a low-key personality from authorial laziness, especially in a work spanning eight and a half centuries. And one of the ways he does that is by the Gonzalan intersection with the Stephanines, mediated through Matilde.

Gonzalo, meanwhile, adopts the Rule of St. Stephen, albeit with a rather Augustinian slant on it - that's a radical and profound difference, right there, because the Stephanine Rule is as direct a challenge to the medieval church as anything Assisi could produce of its own. A few centuries down the road, when a Gonzalan friar shakes up his own order and Western history is changed forever, he will not be rejecting his spiritual past, but taking it to its logical conclusion.

Relations between the Stephanines and Gonzalans are... complicated.

• When Gonzalo adopted the Rule of St. Stephen, the Muretins lost 60+% of its membership within the year. Vast numbers of conversi, seeing in Gonzalo a new and less fratricidal form of the life religious, simply walked away - and since Gonzalo's rule had vindicated some of the most militant dissenters, it prompted some of the more conservative choir-monks to leave for the Cistercians. By 1250, the very survival of the Stephanines seemed to be in doubt.
• Conversely, St. Gonzalo was the best recruiter that the Stephanines ever had: by adopting their rule, no matter how bastardized, he took what had been a central-French phenomenon and took it worldwide. While the Stephanines are still second-tier relative to their less dramatic contemporaries (say, the Carthusians), they've piggybacked on Gonzalan growth for nearly 700 years. No other monastic order in Catholicism is quite so widespread.

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.

Works cited
Sheldrake, Philip, "Grandmontine Spirituality." in Sheldrake, Philip, The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality.