Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard was born in 1090 at Fontaine-lès-Dijon in Burgundy, the third son of a knight. His mother died when he was seventeen and it broke something open in him. In 1113, aged twenty-two, he presented himself at the gate of Cîteaux, a struggling new monastery whose monks were trying to keep the Benedictine rule literally, without the wealth and decoration the great abbeys had accumulated.

He did not come alone. He brought about thirty men with him: four of his brothers, an uncle, cousins, friends. He had spent months talking them into it. Cîteaux had been close to dying out; his arrival saved it.

Three years later he was sent to found a daughter house in a wild valley in Champagne. They called it Clairvaux. He was abbot there for thirty-eight years, and by the time he died the Cistercian order had grown from a handful of houses to some three hundred and forty, sixty-odd of them founded directly from Clairvaux. He wrecked his health early with fasting and never fully recovered.

And then, though he never wanted to leave the cloister, he ended up running Europe from it. When the papal election of 1130 produced two claimants, the kings of France, England, and Germany waited to see which one Bernard would back, and followed him. He preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay in 1146 to a crowd so large the platform had to be moved outdoors, and when the crusade collapsed in disaster he wrote publicly that the fault was his to bear.

He prosecuted Peter Abelard at Sens in 1140 and won, and the way he did it does him no credit; it was a rout, not a debate. He intervened to stop massacres of Jews in the Rhineland preached up by a monk named Radulf, riding into Germany personally to shut him down.

His writing is the part that has lasted best. The eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs, unfinished at his death, are the summit of medieval devotional prose, a slow, burning meditation on the love between Christ and the soul. On Loving God asks why we should love God and answers: because he is God, and the measure of loving him is to love without measure. On Consideration, written for a former monk of his who had become pope, tells him bluntly what power does to a man.

The hymns Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee and O Sacred Head, Now Wounded come down to us through the medieval poems associated with his name and Neale's and Caswall's translations.

He died on 20 August 1153 at Clairvaux. Luther, who had little use for medieval saints, said Bernard was the best monk who ever lived.

Sources: Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, On Loving God, and On Consideration; William of Saint-Thierry et al., Vita prima Bernardi; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. V; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).