| ### CHAPTER 7: THE AGE OF ST. BERNARD, 1123-1181 ###  |

| #### 1. ST. BERNARD |

| #### #### ABOVE the richly crowded pageant that filled the thirty years after the triumphant council of 1123, popes, emperors, crusaders, philosophers and theologians, one figure stands in solitary grandeur -- St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Nothing of importance passed in those years without his active, and often decisive, intervention. For a lifetime he dominated the whole Christian scene, and after seven hundred and fifty years his influence is still active wherever Christian men, even outside the Catholic Church, use in their relations with God the phrases of loving informal devotion. The first foundation of the power he exercised over his own time was the completeness of his own surrender to God, made through the austere dedication of the new order of Citeaux. Sense he so disciplined, that it might no longer disturb his soul’s converse with God, that for years he moved among men like a being from another world. He was known to all his contemporaries as the finest flower of a fine supernatural asceticism. #### The material thus perfected by the supernatural was in itself singularly rich. The natural man had all the fiery ardour of the French nobles of the First Crusade, and it burnt a hundredfold more brightly in the setting of his religious humility. He had the passionate heart of the poet, and, in addition to the poet's gift, a natural eloquence which made of him such an orator as the Church had not known since St. Ambrose. The vast amount of his writing that has come down shows the astonishing variety of his appeal. There are ascetical treatises for his monks, admonitions to popes, hundreds of the most marvellously moving sermons, often as effective to-day as when he delivered them, polemical works in which his poetic genius forges a terrible invective against the apparent enemies of the faith, stern denunciations of clerical negligence and avarice that still burn white-hot, and a vast correspondence that shows him the willing servant and counsellor of clients in every rank of the life of his time. #### He took the great congregation of Cluny to task for the degree in which, so it appeared to him, Cluny had developed away from St. Benedict's ideal. The disappearance of manual labour, the rich ceremonial, the studies, the dress, the food, all these are the subjects of a final devastating criticism. The papacy itself was not too high for his courage to admonish and warn it, particularly when that highest of dignities fell to one who, for a time, had been a monk of his own abbey of Clairvaux. It was then that he wrote, for the disciple's guidance in that high place where so easily a man might lose his soul, the De Consideratione ad Eugenium papam. It is a lengthy examination of conscience in which the pope is invited to consider how, almost necessarily, the new centralisation affords occasion for injustice and sin, with its legates, its reception of appeals, its exemptions. Eugene is to be pope, but never to cease to be, first, a father. One famous passage clamours for quotation, verbatim, for the light it throws, not only on St. Bernard's personal hardiness, but on the fierce directness that marks all the medieval saints when brought up against whatever may tarnish the beauty of God's Church. #### "Scio ubi habitas; increduli et subversores sunt tecum. Lupi non oves sunt: talium tamen tu es pastor. Utilis consideratio, qua forte inveneris, quomodo, si fieri possit, convertas eos, ne ipsi subvertant te. . . . Hic, hic, non parco tibi, ut parcat Deus. Pastorem te populo huic certe aut nega aut exhibe. Non negabis: ne cuius sedem tenes, te neget haeredem. Petrus hic est, qui nescitur processisse aliquando vel gemmis ornatus, vel sericis; non tectus auro, non vectus equo albo, nec stipatus milite, nec circumstrepentibus septus ministris. Absque his tamen credidit satis posse implere salutare mandatum: Si amas me, pasce oves meas. In his successisti non Petro, sed Constantino.” [ ] #### The sources of St. Bernard's prayer and theological exposition are not numerous. First of all there is the Bible, which indeed he must have known by heart, and especially -- besides the Gospels -- the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms. Of the earlier Catholic writers he uses very frequently St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, the latter very frequently indeed. Of the Greeks Origen only, and Origen simply for his exegesis. #### As a theologian St. Bernard is content to state the doctrine in the terms in which he finds it, or rather -- to express his mind here more adequately -- he criticises unsparingly the attempts of private enterprise further to explore the meaning of the traditional faith. Thus, to try and explain how the teaching that in God there are three Persons is not contrary to reason is an impiety that courts disaster. It is enough to know, on the authority of the infallible Church, that it is so. For the rest, man spends his time more profitably in veneration before the mystery than in trying to analyse its meaning #### But it is through the commentaries on Sacred Scripture and, above all, through the sermons that St. Bernard's originality, his undoubted genius, shows itself. In a new way that marks him as the founder of a new spirituality, he gives a place to the humanity of the human element in the mysteries of the life of Our Lord, of His mother and the saints. The considerations which are, if the word may be used, the commonplaces of the ordinary man's spirituality, and which have been so for centuries, the hardships of Mary and Joseph as, in the last hours before the Divine Child was born, they sought for a home, the mixed anguish and joy of the first Christmas, or the sorrows and agonies of the Passion, of Mary at the foot of the Cross and of Jesus looking down upon her suffering innocence -- these and a thousand like moving considerations, which, moving the will through an overwhelming stirring of the emotions, must be permanently effective when they are the means by which a whole-hearted devotion conveys itself from the preacher -- all this spirituality has in St. Bernard its first great founder. Inevitably he has been, above all others, the prayer writer of later generations, more quoted, ever since his time, than any other devotional writer, with the solitary exception of St. Augustine. He stands at the head of the particular tradition of sacred eloquence which, even to-day, is perhaps the most effective of all, and his apparently inexhaustible riches continue to be a source of spiritual life to millions. ####  |