Bernard de Clairvaux, Saint

born 1090, probably Fontaine-les-Dijons, near Dijon, Burgundy

died Aug. 20, 1153, Clairvaux, Champagne; canonized 1174; feast day August 20

French Cistercian monk, mystic, and doctor of the church.

Born into an aristocratic family near Dijon, he turned away from a literary education for the monastic life, entering the austere religious community at Cîteaux in 1112. As abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux, Champagne, which he founded in 1115, he helped establish the widespread popularity of the order. Between 1130 and 1145 he mediated civil and ecclesiastical councils and theological debates, and his support for Pope Innocent II helped secure the papacy during the schism with Anacletus. Bernard was the confidant of five popes and became perhaps the most renowned religious figure in Europe. He actively preached the Second Crusade and wrote a number of sermons on the Song of Solomon. He opposed the teachings of Peter Abelard and Henry of Lausanne and defended devotion to the Virgin Mary.

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▪ French abbot

Introduction

born 1090, probably Fontaine-les-Dijon, near Dijon, Burgundy

died Aug. 20, 1153, Clairvaux, Champagne; canonized Jan. 18, 1174; feast day August 20

  Cistercian monk and mystic, the founder and abbot of the abbey of Clairvaux and one of the most influential churchmen of his time.

Early life and career.

      Born of Burgundian landowning aristocracy, Bernard grew up in a family of five brothers and one sister. The familial atmosphere engendered in him a deep respect for mercy, justice, and loyal affection for others. Faith and morals were taken seriously, but without priggishness. Both his parents were exceptional models of virtue. It is said that his mother, Aleth, exerted a virtuous influence upon Bernard only second to what Monica had done for Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century. Her death, in 1107, so affected Bernard that he claimed that this is when his “long path to complete conversion” began. He turned away from his literary education, begun at the school at Châtillon-sur-Seine, and from ecclesiastical advancement, toward a life of renunciation and solitude.

      Bernard sought the counsel of the abbot of Cîteaux, Stephen Harding (Harding, Saint Stephen), and decided to enter this struggling, small, new community that had been established by Robert of Molesmes in 1098 as an effort to restore Benedictinism to a more primitive and austere pattern of life. Bernard took his time in terminating his domestic affairs and in persuading his brothers and some 25 companions to join him. He entered the Cîteaux community in 1112, and from then until 1115 he cultivated his spiritual and theological studies.

      Bernard's struggles with the flesh during this period may account for his early and rather consistent penchant for physical austerities. He was plagued most of his life by impaired health, which took the form of anemia, migraine, gastritis, hypertension, and an atrophied sense of taste.

Founder and abbot of Clairvaux.

      In 1115 Stephen Harding appointed him to lead a small group of monks to establish a monastery at Clairvaux, on the borders of Burgundy and Champagne. Four brothers, an uncle, two cousins, an architect, and two seasoned monks under the leadership of Bernard endured extreme deprivations for well over a decade before Clairvaux was self-sufficient. Meanwhile, as Bernard's health worsened, his spirituality deepened. Under pressure from his ecclesiastical superiors and his friends, notably the bishop and scholar William of Champeaux, he retired to a hut near the monastery and to the discipline of a quack physician. It was here that his first writings evolved. They are characterized by repetition of references to the Church Fathers and by the use of analogues, etymologies, alliterations, and biblical symbols, and they are imbued with resonance and poetic genius. It was here, also, that he produced a small but complete treatise on Mariology (study of doctrines and dogmas concerning the Virgin Mary), “Praises of the Virgin Mother.” Bernard was to become a major champion of a moderate cult of the Virgin, though he did not support the notion of Mary's immaculate conception.

      By 1119 the Cistercians had a charter approved by Pope Calixtus II for nine abbeys under the primacy of the abbot of Cîteaux. Bernard struggled and learned to live with the inevitable tension created by his desire to serve others in charity through obedience and his desire to cultivate his inner life by remaining in his monastic enclosure. His more than 300 letters and sermons manifest his quest to combine a mystical life of absorption in God with his friendship for those in misery and his concern for the faithful execution of responsibilities as a guardian of the life of the church.

      It was a time when Bernard was experiencing what he apprehended as the divine in a mystical and intuitive manner. He could claim a form of higher knowledge that is the complement and fruition of faith and that reaches completion in prayer and contemplation. He could also commune with nature and say:

Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.

      After writing a eulogy for the new military order of the Knights Templar he would write about the fundamentals of the Christian's spiritual life, namely, the contemplation and imitation of Christ, which he expressed in his sermons “The Steps of Humility” and “The Love of God.”

Pillar of the church.

      The mature and most active phase of Bernard's career occurred between 1130 and 1145. In these years both Clairvaux and Rome, the centre of gravity of medieval Christendom, focussed upon Bernard. Mediator and counsellor for several civil and ecclesiastical councils and for theological debates during seven years of papal disunity, he nevertheless found time to produce an extensive number of sermons on the Song of Solomon. As the confidant of five popes, he considered it his role to assist in healing the church of wounds inflicted by the antipopes (those elected pope contrary to prevailing clerical procedures), to oppose the rationalistic influence of the greatest and most popular dialectician of the age, Peter Abelard, and to cultivate the friendship of the greatest churchmen of the time. He could also rebuke a pope, as he did in his letter to Innocent II: (Innocent II)

There is but one opinion among all the faithful shepherds among us, namely, that justice is vanishing in the Church, that the power of the keys is gone, that episcopal authority is altogether turning rotten while not a bishop is able to avenge the wrongs done to God, nor is allowed to punish any misdeeds whatever, not even in his own diocese (parochia). And the cause of this they put down to you and the Roman Court.

      Bernard's confrontations with Abelard (Abelard, Peter) ended in inevitable opposition because of their significant differences of temperament and attitudes. In contrast with the tradition of “silent opposition” by those of the school of monastic spirituality, Bernard vigorously denounced dialectical Scholasticism as degrading God's mysteries, as one technique among others, though tending to exalt itself above the alleged limits of faith. One seeks God by learning to live in a school of charity and not through “scandalous curiosity,” he held. “We search in a worthier manner, we discover with greater facility through prayer than through disputation.” Possession of love is the first condition of the knowledge of God. However, Bernard finally claimed a victory over Abelard, not because of skill or cogency in argument but because of his homiletical denunciation and his favoured position with the bishops and the papacy.

      Pope Eugenius III (Eugenius III, Blessed) and King Louis VII of France induced Bernard to promote the cause of a Second Crusade (Crusades) (1147–49) to quell the prospect of a great Muslim surge engulfing both Latin and Greek Orthodox Christians. The crusade ended in failure because of Bernard's inability to account for the quarrelsome nature of politics, peoples, dynasties, and adventurers. He was an idealist with the ascetic ideals of Cîteaux grafted upon those of his father's knightly tradition and his mother's piety, who read into the hearts of the crusaders—many of whom were bloodthirsty fanatics—his own integrity of motive.

      In his remaining years he participated in the condemnation of Gilbert de La Porrée—a scholarly dialectician and bishop of Poitiers who held that Christ's divine nature was only a human concept. He exhorted Pope Eugenius to stress his role as spiritual leader of the church over his role as leader of a great temporal power, and he was a major figure in church councils. His greatest literary endeavour, “Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles,” was written during this active time. It revealed his teaching, often described as “sweet as honey,” as in his later title doctor mellifluus. It was a love song supreme: “The Father is never fully known if He is not loved perfectly.” Add to this one of Bernard's favourite prayers, “Whence arises the love of God? From God. And what is the measure of this love? To love without measure,” and one has a key to his doctrine.

      St. Bernard was declared a doctor of the church in 1830 and was extolled in 1953 as doctor mellifluus in an encyclical of Pius XII.

John Richard Meyer

Additional Reading

Works.

The Works (of St. Bernard of Clairvaux), trans. by a Priest of Mount Melleray, 6 vol. (1920–25); and The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, “Cistercian Fathers Series” (1970– ), two English-language collections; Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. by J. Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, and H.M. Rochais, 6 vol. (1957– ), the best critical text.

Works on St. Bernard.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Story of His Life As Recorded in the Vita Prima Bernardi . . . , trans. by G. Webb and Adrian Walker (1960), a chief biographical source by several contemporaries of Bernard, which therefore must be read with reserve as it presents a different type of historical biography; E. Vacandard, Vie de saint Bernard, abbé de Clairvaux, 2 vol. (1895), was the definitive chronology and remains quite authoritative; I. Vallery-Radot, Bernard de Fontaines: Abbé de Clairvaux, 2 vol. (1963–69), highly definitive as a chronological study as well as reviewing all contributions since the 19th century; Watkins Williams, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1935), concentrates upon Bernard's political activity. E.C. Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Saints Augustine, Gregory and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life (1922), on the mystical doctrine of Bernard; Henri Daniel-Rops, Saint Bernard et ses fils (1962; Bernard of Clairvaux, 1964), a popular biography and description of the historical development of the Cistercian order; Étienne Gilson, La Théologie mystique de Saint Bernard (1934; The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, 1940), on the mystical doctrine of Bernard and his contemporaries; Bruno Scott James, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1957), a personality study; Jean Leclercq, L'Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (1957; The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 1961), indispensable for an adequate and appreciative understanding of the entire cultural context of Bernard; Denis Meadows, A Saint and a Half: A New Interpretation of Abelard and St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1963), a quite thorough and readable treatment of the controversy and personalities involved; Thomas Merton, The Last of the Fathers: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the Encyclical Letter, Doctor Mellifluus (1954); and Albert Victor Murray, Abelard and St. Bernard: A Study in Twelfth-Century Modernism (1967), a technical and scholarly approach to the issue.

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