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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.
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