Bernard of Clairvaux

An Inner Life

Brian Patrick McGuire

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751547
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In this intimate portrait of one of the Middle Ages' most consequential men, Brian Patrick McGuire delves into the life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to offer a refreshing interpretation that finds within this grand historical figure a deeply spiritual human being who longed for the reflective quietude of the monastery even as he helped shape the destiny of a church and a continent. Heresy and crusade, politics and papacies, theology and disputation shaped this astonishing man's life, and McGuire presents it all in a deeply informed and clear-eyed biography.

Following Bernard from his birth in 1090 to his death in 1153 at the abbey he had founded four decades earlier, Bernard of Clairvaux reveals a life teeming with momentous events and spiritual contemplation, from Bernard's central roles in the first great medieval reformation of the Church and the Second Crusade, which he came to regret, to the crafting of his books, sermons, and letters. We see what brought Bernard to monastic life and how he founded Clairvaux Abbey, established a network of Cistercian monasteries across Europe, and helped his brethren monks and abbots in heresy trials, affairs of state, and the papal schism of the 1130s.

By reevaluating Bernard's life and legacy through his own words and those of the people closest to him, McGuire reveals how this often-challenging saint saw himself and conveyed his convictions to others. Above all, this fascinating biography depicts Saint Bernard of Clairvaux as a man guided by Christian revelation and open to the achievements of the human spirit.

Chapter 1

A Time of Hope and Change

The world into which Bernard was born in 1090 was full of hope and promise. From the ninth to the eleventh century, Western Europe had been the object of Viking plundering. Today, some Danish archaeologists claim that the Vikings were more traders than pirates, but monks along the coasts and rivers of Europe knew better. Nothing they had built was safe from these marauders. Nevertheless, the salvation for the West was the fact that sooner or later Vikings settled in some of the areas they had previously molested: Normandy, eastern England, Ireland, and Sicily.

Travel, once dangerous, became possible and even attractive. In the middle of the eleventh century a troubled young man, Anselm of Aosta, traveled north to Normandy, one of the regions that previously had been so unstable. There he found a teacher, Lanfranc, who had also come north from Italy and had joined a new monastery, Bec. Anselm sat at Lanfranc’s feet and experienced the joy of discovering the liberal arts and the way to Sacred Scripture, as the Bible then was called. In the 1060s, when Lanfranc joined his lord, Duke William of Normandy, in the conquest of England, Anselm remained behind and composed prayers and meditations redolent of a new spirit within the Christian religion.

What do Anselm and his life have to do with Bernard? When Anselm died in 1109, Bernard was nineteen and seemed destined for the life of a wandering scholar that had characterized Anselm’s first years. But in the years to come Bernard would profit from a new interiority that had been born in Normandy in the decades prior to his birth. Anselm was not the only monk who was writing prayers and spiritual reflections that gave Christian belief greater intensity. John, of a neighboring monastery at Fécamp, was also rethinking religious language. Bernard along with many others in the first decades of the twelfth century would benefit from a theological language that called upon God to be present and immediate. Bernard did not come to write prayers as Anselm did, yet prayers are lodged in the sermons that Bernard left behind for his monks.

For much of its first millenium Christianity had been a religion that concentrated on external manifestations of belief. In a turbulent world it was sufficient to care for the baptism of pagans. Once this was done, a superficially Christian population was left to attend to its inner life and thoughts. Besides baptism there was the crucifixion itself, but almost as meaningful was the division of a tunic in two for a beggar on a freezing winter’s day. The Roman soldier Martin who shared his clothing with a beggar became the first popular saint in Western Europe besides Mary, the apostles, and the martyrs. Martin’s act of charity imitated the selflessness of Jesus himself, and according to legend it was Jesus who appeared to Martin and told him that the beggar he clothed was indeed himself, the Lord.

What mattered was to perform the external act, whether it was the pouring of water and invoking the Trinity in the sacrament of baptism or the division of one’s possessions. The Church rarely asked about motives, and so it was the dawn of a new age when monks like Anselm and John of Fécamp began questioning their own motivations. They spoke to God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints, telling them that they not only were in need of their help but felt driven to consider their inner lives. Anselm and his contemporaries cried out for the Lord. The language they used was derivative of what is found in the Psalms of David, the prophets of the Old Testament, and the Gospels, but they offered an immediacy and a personal element that represented a new form of Christian life.

This search for intimacy would come to characterize Bernard’s life and helps explain why he joined a monastery. At the same time, however, he benefited from other factors in creating his life. A few decades before Bernard was born, the Western Church had experienced the upheaval of what many history books call the Gregorian Reform, after Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), who is best known for defying the German king and Roman emperor Henry IV. I prefer to call this movement the first medieval reformation, for it brought about a genuine reformation or restructuring of the Christian Church. It meant that rich families no longer could buy church offices for their younger sons: the old sin of simony, which had been with Christianity since the Acts of the Apostles, was outlawed. Eventually this reformation brought about a new orientation of monastic life, which until then had been dominated by the care and upbringing of children.

From the time of Bernard onwards, children were excluded from monasteries, at least in the new reformed monasticism. Children had to grow up first and make their own choices, instead of being brought to the monastery at the age of six or seven when their parents chose to hand them over. Bernard came to the monastery as an adult, and the new monasticism that he joined insisted on individual choice. Once again, inner motivation and personal intention came to the fore, instead of exterior actions and choices made by others. In this sense Bernard and his contemporaries would discover the meaning of Christianity as manifested in the words of Jesus, emphasizing the consent that comes from the heart instead of the gesture’s symbolic assent.

The first reformation of the Church also brought conflict between kings and emperors, on the one hand, and popes and bishops, on the other. The secular arm, as it was called, was used to calling the shots, and certainly this arrangement seemed necessary at a time when society was fragile and the Church needed protection from all the diabolical forces at loose in society. But now it was a question of giving God what was rightly his, and the reform party in Rome, led by Gregory, insisted that their spiritual power was superior to the worldly power of kings. For a long time kings had in fact often thought of themselves as endowed with priestly authority, but Gregory insisted on an absolute separation between the secular and the sacerdotal. Bernard of Clairvaux would benefit from this new regime and would consider it to be a right of his to lecture kings on the limitations of their power. With him begins a new period in European history that sought a balance of power, an arrangement lost in the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant sovereigns took over the churches in their realms and tried to run them. Bernard and his contemporaries would have been horrified at this development, for they considered spiritual power far superior to temporal.

The first reformation of the medieval Church unleashed an almost limitless energy, for now popes, bishops, and abbots found it possible to turn to the laity, which until that time had been left to its own devices. The reform meant not only cleansing the Church but also preaching Christ in a new manner, as happened at Clermont-Ferrand in what today is central France. Here in 1095 Pope Urban II called upon the knights of the Christian world to take part in what was called an “armed pilgrimage” (peregrinatio armata) and to go the the Holy Land and deliver its sacred places from the Muslim peoples who were making it impossible for Christian pilgrims to pray and recall Christ’s life. What we call the First Crusade was then known as a pilgrimage, but a journey with the sword of vengeance, not the pilgrim’s staff.

The pope described the sufferings of pilgrims and called for a new kind of pilgrimage, one that would unite not only the crowned heads of Europe but also ordinary soldiers and knights. As a young abbot he felt called upon to criticize one of his fellow abbots for taking his monks to the Holy Land. Bernard rejected this form of monasticism, but he soon succumbed to a relative’s plans to form a new order of knight-monks. And later in life he found it necessary to preach what we call the Second Crusade, which, as we will see, turned into a fiasco with great loss of life.

The Crusades promised salvation: the very act of going on crusade provided an indulgence that showed the way to the kingdom of God. But for the thousands of men and some women who went to the East, the Crusades brought death and destruction. Throughout the first decades of the twelfth century, after the remarkable conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, Bernard had to live with the attraction of the armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He had to tell his monks that it was better for them to remain in their monasteries seeking the heavenly Jerusalem than to head for the earthly Jerusalem. But, finally, in 1147 he preached the necessity of saving the earthly Jerusalem from those who threatened it. For Bernard and many other sincere monks of his time, it was a dilemma to seek to imitate Christ and encourage others to find him in what often turned out to be not salvation but perdition.

Over its history in the West, Christianity has attempted time and again to realize the challenge of the gospel by bringing men and women to a new awareness of the presence of God. In Bernard’s half century, this awareness could be achieved in one of two ways: by going on crusade or by going into a monastery. There were still traditional ways of seeking Christ: by going on a conventional pilgrimage to one of the holy places or simply by living a decent life as a peasant, merchant, or knight. Those men and women who entered the monastery of their own free will knew that the choice they made was for a lifetime and could not be undone, except in exceptional circumstances. In an earlier time, powerful relatives could intervene to reverse this choice, but in Bernard’s time, the monastic vow was forever.

We will never know why Bernard chose to become a monk, but that choice was much more “ordinary” in his time than in ours. He grew up in a family that was quite conventional for the knighthood of the time. Bernard’s brothers played knights as children and looked forward to following in the footsteps of their father. The fact that they did not do so was due to Bernard’s example, but they did not reject their original vocation because they came to question its worth. To be a knight was to be a member of Christ’s army, a miles Christi, and knights had every opportunity to achieve eternal salvation.

In our time there is still a deep-seated prejudice that sees medieval people as manipulated by the Church and forced to live in a certain way. But in point of fact many people of the twelfth century saw the Church as their mother, giving them access to God’s grace and looking after them in the drama of life, at birth with baptism, in adulthood with confirmation and marriage, and in sickness and death with the sacrament of the sick. The Church opened the way to Mary and the other saints, and the lives of peasants and knights could be happy and peaceful. There were exceptions, of course, but ordinary life in the medieval period was calm, after all the fear and disruption of the centuries when Western Europe had been under siege.

It is almost impossible for the historian of medieval Europe to penetrate the surface of everyday life of that time, for there is so much we do not know. But thanks to chronicles written at the time and to evidence found in excavations, it is possible to assert that the medieval period was a time of hope and change. The fear of losing everything as a result of Viking invasions was receding, and change was coming thanks to new methods of cultivating the land, improved types of plows, and the clearing of areas that for centuries had been left as marsh and forest. There is a sense in some written sources that things were improving, and the many parish churches and cathedrals built during this period attest to this. For merchants, whose lives depended on the presence of people in their towns, churches that attracted pilgrims helped guarantee prosperity. If nothing succeeds like success, then Europe was succeeding admirably in the twelfth century.

At the same time, however, Bernard’s Europe had a shadow side: there was no police force, no standing army, and only a rudimentary judicial system. In his time murders took place in Paris, the very heart of Christian Europe, and although Bernard and his contemporaries lamented this, they could not control events. Similarly, the French king could get away with invading the territory of his vassal, the Duke of Champagne, and with putting a torch to a whole town, which came to be called Vitry-le-Brulé. However much Bernard condemned such an action, he could not stop it. Naked force continued on its hideous way and led to loss of life. For all the good intentions of churchmen and knights, life could be sacrificed as the result of grudges and enmities.

Bernard did not join the monastery in order to quell such disputes, but in the course of his life he dealt with many such confrontations. We will see, ironically, how a man who sought contemplative distance from the world rather quickly became absorbed in the affairs of the world. In Bernard I find an example of a classic dilemma in Western Christianity: the choice between seeking peace and quiet and making a loud impact on his surroundings. For this reason Bernard has remained controversial, from his own lifetime to the present. Indeed, many of my medievalist colleagues have no love for Bernard. In what follows I will not present Bernard as someone who is easy to understand. Long ago I called him “the difficult saint.” He remains difficult to accept in all his pursuits, but this biography will attempt to show how his life developed and changed as he came to believe that he was called upon to influence and even shape his surroundings. [For more information about previous biographies of Bernard, see question 2 in the Fifteen Questions about Bernard: The Background for My Portrait section.]

Chapter 2

A Saint’s Origins

Fontaines-lès-Dijon

The site of Bernard’s birth is a hill on the outskirts of Dijon, the capital of Burgundy. In the twelfth century, Fontaines had a fortification that has long since disappeared, and today one finds a ninteenth-century chateau-like building there whose foundations may be much older. Nearby is a Gothic church. Bernard was the third of seven children born to Tescelin Sorus (“The Red”) and Aleth of Montbard. He got his name from Aleth’s father, Bernard of Montbard, a relation of the dukes of Burgundy. Aleth came from the high nobility, while her husband was of a humbler, though respectable, noble line. Tescelin’s parents are not known, but he was related to Josbert de la Ferté, vicomte of Dijon and seneschal of Count Hugh of Champagne. Josbert would play a central role in the foundation of Clairvaux.

Apparently Aleth had originally intended (or been intended by her parents) to become a nun, but when she was fifteen years old Tescelin appeared and asked for her hand in marriage. We gain this information from the Vita Quarta, probably thanks to Bernard’s cousin Robert. He is the very man who in youth created trouble for Bernard by abandoning Clairvaux for Cluny (as we shall see in looking at the first entry in Bernard’s letter collection). But the Vita Quarta shows how he turned out to be a loyal relative who late in life provided details about Bernard’s background that we otherwise would lack.

William of Saint-Thierry in the first book of the Vita Prima and the Vita Quarta are in agreement in describing Aleth’s home life as that of a nun, and we might wonder how a woman could have brought seven children into the world and at the same time lived like a virgin. Our problem, however, is not that of the medieval biographers. For them marriage was a necessary condition for most women, but it was best to keep a distance to its sexual side. For the devout woman genuine piety in itself created an atmosphere of purity. Aleth as she was remembered by Bernard and by Robert was an ascetic and pious person.

On the basis of what the Vita Prima says about Bernard’s brothers, his first years were spent in the company of youths who loved playing war. His brother Gerard, for example, is described as “a knight active in combat, prudent in counsel, and loved by all for his remarkable courtesy and kindness.” There is no hesitation here about a knight’s way of life. He loves to fight but can also show gentleness. The Latin term benignitas implies more than kindness. Gerard would have bent over backwards to help someone in need. His knightly virtues come close to the expression of Christian charity. We meet Gerard and his brothers only through the mirror of William of Saint-Thierry and Geoffrey of Auxerre, his first biographers, but for these monks, a knight’s life could be commendable.

Bernard’s father and brothers took their place in the world in order to serve secular lords, especially the Duke of Burgundy. Later in life Bernard seems to have shown no aversion to the military persuasion. As we shall see, he helped invent a way of life that combined monasticism and knighthood. Praying at night and fighting during the day became, thanks to Bernard, a commendable religious vocation. Bernard’s attachment to knights, in the hope of their becoming monks, is also shown in a story about how some young knights ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Bernard’s Life and Times
• Note to the Reader
• Maps
• Introduction: In Pursuit of a Difficult Saint
• 1. A Time of Hope and Change
• 2. A Saint’s Origins
• 3. From the New Monastery to the Valley of Light, 1115–1124
• 4. Monastic Commitment and Church Politics, 1124–1129
• 5. Toward Reformation of Church and Monastery
• 6. Healing a Divided Church, 1130–1135
• 7. Victory and Defeat: A Conflicted Church, 1136–1140
• 8. The World after the Schism: One Thing after Another, 1140–1145
• 9. Preaching a Crusade and Leaving Miracles Behind, 1146–1150
• 10. Business as Usual in Preparing for Death
• Fifteen Questions about Bernard: The Background for My Portrait
• Notes
• Sources and References
• Index