Background
St. Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 in Fontaine-lès-Dijon, France.
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St. Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 in Fontaine-lès-Dijon, France.
Bernard studied at Châtillon-sur-Seine school run by the secular canons of Saint-Vorles. Bernard loved literature and devoted himself for some time to poetry. He was admired by his teachers. He wanted to excel in literature in order to take up the study of the Bible.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Bernard's name is sometimes associated with the "two swords theory," whereby both the spiritual and temporal swords belonged to the pope and the Church-the temporal sword being used by the prince at the request of the Church. Bernard expressed this idea in his De consideratione and in a letter to Eugenius III. In each case, however, he recommended it to the time. Others expanded Bernard's statements into a general theory.
Quotations:
“Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just.”
“So far from being able to answer for my sins, I cannot even answer for my righteousness!”
“The more I contemplate God, the more God looks on me. The more I pray to him, the more he thinks of me too.”
“Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a sceptre but a hoe.”
“You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.”
“To have a restful or peaceful life in God is good; to bear a life of pain in patience is better; but to have peace in the midst of pain is the best of all.”
Bernard's ascetic practices ruined his health, and he was often sick.
A prolific writer, Bernard composed treatises on asceticism, polemical works, commentaries on the Bible, and innumerable sermons. His originality is best seen in his biblical commentaries and sermons. Bernard's emphasis was constantly on love; his genius lay in his talent for communicating his musical teaching to others.
Physical Characteristics: Bernard was a tall, handsome, slender youth endowed with great charm.
