Stephen Harding, who proved to be the real organizer of the Cistercian rule and order. The new regulations demanded severe asceticism; they rejected all feudal revenues and reintroduced manual labour for monks,
and destructive cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find expression only among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist literature that the preaching of extremeasceticism, the practice of self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were all evidence of psychological ...