Our evidence that the early Cistercian monks considered the senses as a component of choir worship, or the impact of physical sensation on their experience of Scripture in the choir, is largely tangential. The depictions we have seen of figures eating, speaking, and listening to Scripture testify that the monks of the New Monastery valued the oral dimension of their spiritual practice. The efforts they made to collect and correct the appropriate texts and melodies for choir and refectory reading support this impression. Yet early Cistercian writers never said explicitly that the sense of sound mattered. Stephen Harding's argument in his Monitum, that the books of the Bible, as translated by Jerome, ought to “sound as one,” may come closest to a direct testimony that in the monastery's early years the founders cared about aural experience.

Traces of their attitudes to other senses are equally scanty. We have occasionally encountered the metaphorical and physical sense of taste because medieval writers often equated the salutary effects of speaking Scripture with imbibing the sweetness of spiritual nourishment, and warned of the potential sinfulness of savoring material food.