Bernard of Clairvaux

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Bernard of Clairvaux was a French Cistercian abbot, reformer, and theologian whose writings on the love between the soul and God became one of the central texts of Western mysticism. Born around 1090 at Fontaine-lès-Dijon, near Dijon, to minor Burgundian nobility, he entered the young and austere monastery of Cîteaux in 1112 or 1113 — the sources divide on the year — bringing some thirty kinsmen and companions with him. In 1115 the abbot of Cîteaux, Stephen Harding, sent him to found a new house at Clairvaux, which he governed until his death in 1153 and from which the Cistercian order spread across Europe; by his death its houses numbered in the hundreds.

He was, by every account, a man of contradictions held in one frame. The sermons describe a contemplative drawn to silence and the cloister; the record shows a public figure who championed Innocent II through the eight-year papal schism that opened in 1130, drove the condemnation of the philosopher Peter Abelard, preached the Second Crusade across France and the Rhineland in 1146–47, and wrote a stream of letters to kings and popes. The pull between withdrawal and the world’s demands runs through his own complaints about being torn from the quiet he wanted.

The Rhineland leg had a darker context. In 1146 a monk named Radulf, preaching the crusade along the Rhine without any commission, incited massacres of Jews in Cologne, Speyer, and Mainz. The archbishops appealed to Bernard, who wrote against the violence — declaring an attack on a Jew a sin of the same order as an attack on Jesus himself — then came to Germany in person, confronted Radulf, and sent him back to his monastery. The Jewish chroniclers of the period, who had no reason to flatter a crusade preacher, recorded the intervention and stressed that he sought nothing for it.

His enduring work is the long, unfinished cycle of sermons on the Song of Songs, begun late in life and broken off at his death. In them Bernard reads the biblical love-poem as a map of the soul’s ascent to God, its erotic language transposed into the language of mystical union: the soul as bride, Christ as bridegroom, the kiss as the moment the human spirit touches the divine. Alongside it stands the treatise On Loving God, which sets out degrees by which love climbs from love of self to a love of God for God’s own sake. The emphasis throughout falls on love and experience rather than on argument — knowledge of God reached, as he put it, more by longing than by reasoning. This affective, bridal current would shape Christian devotion for centuries and feed directly into the later mysticism of figures such as Julian of Norwich.

Eighty-six sermons never carried him past the first verse of the poem’s third chapter; the text was not being summarized but inhabited. He announces as much in the third sermon: the book to be studied that day, he tells his monks, is “the book of our own experience.” And for all the heat of the bridal imagery, what he teaches is exact. Union with God, in his account, is an embrace of wills — a sharing of likes and dislikes so complete it makes of two one spirit — between persons who remain unequal and distinct. On Loving God carries its ladder one rung past where most summaries stop: above loving God for God’s sake stands a fourth degree, in which even the self is loved only for God’s sake.

Two more episodes fix the public profile. Bernard took a leading part at the Council of Troyes in 1128/29, where the new order of the Knights Templar received its rule, and he later defended the experiment in the treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood — monks vowed to poverty and to war at once. And when Abelard sought a public disputation at Sens in 1140, the council condemned nineteen propositions drawn from his works before any debate could open; Abelard appealed to Rome, was ordered to silence, and died two years later under the protection of Peter the Venerable at Cluny — where, by the accounts that survive, the two men were reconciled.

Scholarship has long weighed the two Bernards against each other. The mystic of the sermons sits uneasily beside the man who hounded Abelard and summoned an army to the Holy Land — a crusade that ended in disaster and which Bernard afterward had to defend. Historians read him as the last great voice of the older monastic theology, rooted in scripture and prayer, just as the schools of Paris were turning theology toward the systematic method that Thomas Aquinas would later perfect. He drew his own theology above all from Augustine, whose account of love and the restless soul he carried into the cloister.

He was canonized in 1174, barely two decades after his death, and in 1830 the Catholic Church named him a Doctor of the Church. Later tradition gave him the title Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-sweet teacher, for the manner of his prose; Rome made the title formal in 1953, in an encyclical that called him the last of the Fathers. What he left was less a system than a temperature: a way of writing about God in which the decisive thing is not what the mind grasps but what the heart is drawn toward.

→ Related: Augustine Of Hippo · Hildegard Of Bingen · Thomas Aquinas · Julian Of Norwich · Catharism · Middle Ages · Song Of Songs · Crusades · Bride Of Christ