CELESTINES

This article appears in Volume V05, Page 601 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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CELESTINES , a religious order founded about r 26o by Peter of Morrone, afterwards Pope Celestine V. (1294). It was an attempt to unite the eremitical and cenobitical modes of life. Peter's first disciples lived as hermits on

Mount

MOUNT, WILLIAM SIDNEY (1807-1868)

Majella in the Abruzzi. The

Benedictine

BENEDICTINE

rule

RULE

was taken as the basis of the life, but was supplemented by regulations notably increasing the austerities practised. The form of government was borrowed largely from those prevailing in the mendicant orders. Indeed, though the Celestines are reckoned as a branch of the Benedictines, there is little in common between them. For all that, St Celestine, during his brief tenure of the papacy, tried to spread his ideas among the Benedictines, and induced the monks of Monte Cassino to adopt his idea of the monastic life instead of St Benedict's; for this purpose fifty Celestine monks were introduced into Monte Cassino, but on Celestine's abdication of the papacy the project fortunately was at once abandoned. During the founder's lifetime the order spread rapidly, and eventually
there were about 150 monasteries in Italy, and others in France, Bohemia and the Netherlands. The French houses, twenty-one in number, formed a separate congregation, the head-

house

HOUSE
HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
Gothic
- GOTHIC
it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)

being in Paris. The French Revolution and those of the 19th century destroyed their houses, and the Celestine order seems no longer to exist.
Peter of Morrone was in close contact with the Franciscan Spirituals of the extreme type (see FRANCISCANS), and he endeavoured to form an amalgamation between them and his hermits, under the title " Poor Hermits of Celestine." On his abdication the amalgamation was dissolved, and the Franciscan

element

ELEMENT (Lat. elementum)

fled to the

East

EAST
EAST, ALFRED (1849- )

and was finally suppressed by

Boniface

BONIFACE (Bonifacius)
BONIFACE, SAINT (680-754)

VIII. and compelled to re-enter the Franciscan order. The habit of the Celestines was black.
See

Helyot

HELYOT, PIERRE (1660-1716)

, Histoire des ordres religleux (1792), vi. c. 23; Max Heimbucher, Orden and Kongregationen (1896), i. 22, p. 134; the art. " Colestiner " in Wetzer and Welte, Kirchenlexicon (ed. 2), and

Herzog

HERZOG, HANS (1819–1894)
HERZOG, JOHANN JAKOB (1805-1882)

-Hauck, Realencyklopadie (ed. 3). (E. C. B.)

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