James Augustus Cotter Morison, English essayist and historian,
was born in London on April 20, 1832, and was the son of the
inventor and proprietor of "Morison's Pills." His first years
were spent in Paris, where he laid the foundation of his
intimate knowledge of the French people. After graduating at
Oxford, he wrote for the "Saturday Review" and other papers,
and in 1863 brought out his "Life and Times of Saint Bernard."
His other chief work is entitled "The Service of Man: an Essay
towards the Religion of the Future," published in 1886. He had
projected an historical study of France under Louis XIV., but
never completed it. He died on February 26, 1888. Morison was
a Positivist, and had many friends in that group, and his rich
mind and genial temper endeared him to several of the leading
literary men of his time, such as George Meredith, Mark
Pattison and Matthew Arnold.
_I.--The Early Days of a Useful Life_
Saint Bernard was born in 1091, and died in 1153. His life thus almost
coincides with the central portion of the Middle Ages. He saw the First
and Second Crusades, the rising liberties of the communes, and the
beginnings of scholasticism under Abelard. A large Church reformation
and the noblest period of monasticism occurred in his day, and received
deep marks of his genius.
He was the son of Tesselin, a wealthy feudal baron of Burgundy,
remarkable for his courage, piety, justice and modesty. Alith, his
mother, was earnest, loving and devout, and full of humility and
charity. His earliest years were passed amid the European fervour of the
First Crusade; and as he grew from boyhood into youth--at which time his
mother died--he made choice of the monastic profession. His friends
vainly tried to tempt him aside into the pursuit of philosophy; but his
commanding personal ascendancy brought his brothers and friends to
follow him instead into the religious life. Having assembled a company
of about thirty chosen spirits, he retired into seclusion with them for
six months, and then, in 1113, at the age of twenty-two, led them within
the gates of Citeaux.
This community, founded fifteen years before, and now ruled by Stephen
Harding, an Englishman from Dorsetshire, was exceedingly austere,
keeping Saint Benedict's rule literally. Here Bernard's uncompromising
self-mortification, and his love of, and communion with, Nature, showed
themselves as the chief characteristics of his noble spirit. "Believe
me," he said to a pupil, "you will find something far greater in the
woods than you will in books; stones and trees will teach you that which
you will never learn from masters." The arrival of Bernard and his
companions was a turning-point in the history of Citeaux; and the
monastery had to send out two colonies, to La Ferté and Pontigny, and in
1115 a third, under Bernard himself, to Clairvaux. Here, in a deep
umbrageous valley, traversed by a limpid stream, the thirteen pioneers
built a house little better than a barn. Their privations were great.
Beech-nuts and roots were at first their main support; but soon the
sympathy of the surrounding country brought sufficiency for their frugal
needs. Bernard was consecrated Abbot of Clairvaux by the Bishop of
Chalons, the renowned William of Champeaux, with whom he established a
deep friendship.
His labours, anxieties and austerities had well-nigh brought Bernard to
the grave, when the good bishop, finding him inflexible, went to
Citeaux, and, prostrating himself before Stephen Harding, begged and
obtained leave to direct and manage Bernard for one year only. The young
abbot obeyed his new director absolutely, and lived in a cottage apart
from the monastery "at leisure for himself and God, and exulting, as it
were, in the delights of Paradise."
William of St. Thierry and other chroniclers, telling of Clairvaux at
this time, are fervid in their reverence and praise. "Methought I saw a
new heaven and a new earth" ... "the golden age seemed to have revisited
the world" ... "as you descended the hill you could see it was a temple
of God; the still, silent valley bespoke the unfeigned humility of
Christ's poor. In this valley full of men, where one and all were
occupied with their allotted tasks, a silence, deep as that of night,
prevailed. The sounds of labour, or the chants of the brethren in the
choral service, were the only exceptions. The order of this silence
struck such a reverence even into secular persons that they dreaded
breaking it even by pertinent remarks."
Saint Benedict's rule had reference only to a single religious house;
but Abbot Stephen of Citeaux united in one compact whole all the
monasteries which sprang from the parent stock of Citeaux, and
established an organised system of mutual supervision and control. A
general chapter was held annually in September, and every Cistercian
abbot whose monastery was in France, Italy or Germany was bound to
attend every year; those from Spain, every two years; those from
Ireland, Scotland, Sicily and Portugal, every four years; those from
Norway, every five years; and those from Syria and Palestine, every
seven years. The "Charter of Charity," promulgated by this chapter for
the guidance of the Cistercian Order, is a brief but pregnant document,
which quite explains its success.
_II.--A Great Preacher and Essayist_
About 1119, Bernard, who had resumed the duties of abbot, began the
career of literary and ecclesiastical activity--the wide and impassioned
correspondence, the series of marvellous sermons--which have won for him
the title of the Last of the Fathers. His early essays are vigorous, but
lack judgement and skill; they are stiff and rhetorical, and far removed
from the tender poetry of his later writings. Three years later we find
Bernard credited with many miracles, narrated by William of St. Thierry,
who afterwards retired to become a monk at Signy, where he wrote his
record of the saint. It was then regarded as natural that a man of
eminent piety should work miracles; and we ought to accept these
stories, in their native crudity and simplicity, not as true, but as
significant. Belonging to the time, as much as feudal castles and mail
armour do, they form part of a picture of it.
With the exception of a visit to La Grande Chartreuse, and of another to
Paris, where he preached the "true philosophy" of poverty and contempt
of the world to the schools distracted by scholastic puzzles, Bernard
remained a secluded monk of a new and humble Order. But already, in his
thirty-fifth year, the foundations had been laid of that authority which
enabled him to quell a widespread schism, to oppose a formidable
heretic, and to give the strongest impulse to the Second Crusade. His
power was growing, chiefly by his voluminous correspondence. He wrote to
persons of all classes on all subjects; his letters afford to the
historian a wide repertory of indubitable facts, and show what was the
part played at that time by the spiritual power--that of a divine
morality and superior culture coming into conflict with, and strong
enough to withstand, a vigorous barbarism. These epistles are full of
commonsense and clear, practical advice, and often give us a glimpse of
the human, as distinct from the ascetic, element in monastic life. They
show how men could pass pleasant and thoughtful days amid the barbarism
of the time.
The feudal fighting, plundering and slaying seemed to spectators of that
time, and doubtless to Bernard also, as fixed and unalterable, part of
the nature of things. Louis VI., King of France, had spent his life in a
succession of sieges, forays and devastations, as one feudal lord among
others often more powerful than he. But generally he was in the right,
and his enemies in the wrong; he generally fought for justice and mercy,
and they for power and for plunder. The feudal aristocracy was now at
the zenith of its power, and the peasant was oppressed by injustice,
taxation and forced labour. Only the Church, and she only on grand
occasions, could stand up for the poor; but now the royal power made
common cause with Church and poor, and was rewarded by a gain in extent
and in influence. Yet even Louis, whose whole life showed respect for
the spiritual power, had some disagreement with the Bishop of Paris and
with the Archbishop of Sens, so that the two ecclesiastics placed the
kingdom under interdict, and fled to Citeaux. Thence Bernard, with an
astonishing tone of authority, called upon his king to do justice; and
Louis was on the point of restoring the stolen property. Pope Honorius,
however, sent letters to the king, raising the interdict, and thereupon
Bernard turned his fearless indignation upon the supreme pontiff
himself. "We speak with sadness; the honour of the Church has been not a
little blemished in the time of Honorius."
The same intrepidity is shown in Bernard's controversy with the monks of
Cluny, an abbey of pre-eminent power and moral authority, so that Louis
had called it the "noblest member of his kingdom." Pontius, its abbot,
having fallen into ways of pride and extortion, had been induced from
Rome to resign his abbacy, and to promise a pilgrimage to the Holy Land;
but soon afterwards he fell upon the monastery with an armed force, and
ruled there like a robber chieftain. This scandalous outrage was soon
reported at Rome, and the sacrilegious usurper was excommunicated and
banished. Bernard seized the moment when laxity of observance of the
rule had produced its bitterest fruit to break out in remonstrances and
warnings, as well to his own Cistercians as to the Cluniacs, on the
decline of the genuine monastic spirit. The invective of what he calls
his "Apology" spares neither the softness, nor the ostentation, nor the
avarice, of religious houses. It condemns even their stately
sanctuaries. "The walls of your church are resplendent, but the poor are
not there." It recalls the erring monasteries to real mortification. In
another early treatise, "The Degrees of Humility and of Pride," the
modes of pride are exhibited forcibly, and with not a little humour.
Curiosity, thoughtless mirth, mock humility, and other symptoms of the
protean vice are painted by a master.
But Bernard's period of retirement was drawing to a close; he was
becoming indispensable to his contemporaries. In 1128 he was called to
the Council of Troyes, at which the Order of Knights Templars was
founded, and wrote a treatise in praise of the "new warfare," called the
"Exhortation to the Knights of the Temple." He was brought, again, to
the council convened by Louis VI. at Étampes to decide between the
claims of the rival Popes in the Papal schism. The council opened by
unanimous consent that Bernard's judgement should decide their views;
and without hesitation he pronounced Innocent II. the lawful Pope, and
Peter Leonis, or Anacletus II., a vain pretender. He bore the same
testimony, in the presence of Innocent, before Henry I. of England, at
Chartres, and before Lotharius, the German Emperor, at Liège. The Pope
visited Clairvaux, where he was moved to tears at the sight of the
tattered flock of "Christ's poor," then presided at the Council of
Rheims, 1131, and continued his journey into Italy, still accompanied by
the Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard, convinced that the cause of Innocent
was the cause of justice and religion, set no bounds to his advocacy of
it in letters to kings, bishops and cities. Such was now the fame of his
sanctity that on his approach to Milan the whole population came out to
meet him.
He returned to Clairvaux in 1135, where he found the community all
living in Christian amity, and again retired to a cottage in the
neighbourhood for rest and reflection. "Bernard was in the heavens,"
says Arnold of Bonnevaux; "but they compelled him to come down and
listen to their sublunary business." The buildings were too small for
their constantly growing numbers, and a convenient site had been found
in an open plain farther down the valley. Bishops, barons and merchants
came to the help of the good work; and the new abbey and church rose
quickly.
To Bernard's forty-fifth year belong the "Sermons on the Canticles." In
the auditorium, or talking-room of the monastery, the abbot, surrounded
by his white-cowled monks, delivered his spiritual discourses. A strange
company it was: the old, stooping monk and the young beginner, the lord
and the peasant, listening together to the man whose message they
believed came from another world.
_III.--St. Bernard and the Second Crusade_
In the meanwhile, the affairs of the Papacy had not improved--Innocent
was still an exile from his see. Worst of all, the monastery of Monte
Casino, the head and type of Western monarchism, had declared for
Anacletus, the anti-Pope; and in 1137 Bernard set out for Italy, visited
Innocent at Viterbo, and proceeded to Rome. As he advanced, Anacletus
was rapidly deserted by his supporters, and shortly afterwards solved
the difficulty by his death. So ended the schism; and Bernard left Rome
within five days after finishing his work. With broken health and
depressed spirits he returned to Clairvaux. His brother Gerard, who had
shared his journey, died soon after they reached home; and Bernard's
discourse on that event is one of the most remarkable funeral sermons on
record. The monk had not ceased to be a loving and impassioned man.
Towards the end of 1139, the heresies of Peter Abelard, brought to his
notice by William of St. Thierry, called the Abbot of Clairvaux again
into public controversy. He implored Pope and cardinals to stay the
progress of a second Arius. Abelard was at this time sixty-one years
old, Bernard's senior by twelve years, and was without a rival in the
schools. The two men were such that they could not but oppose one
another; they looked at the shield from opposite sides; reconciliation,
however desirable, could be only superficial. Bernard met Abelard, and
"admonished him secretly." He well knew to what epoch this subtle mind,
with its "human and philosophic reasons," was about to lead; his quick
ear caught the distant thunder-roll of free inquiry. The heresies of
Peter de Bruis and the rebellion of Arnold of Brescia had already marked
the beginning of the great change. At last Bernard unwillingly yielded
to Abelard's challenge to a public dispute at Sens; but his speech had
hardly begun when Abelard rose in his place, refused to hear more, and
appealed to Rome. He never reached Rome, but remained a penitent monk at
Cluny, reconciled to his great antagonist.
Bernard was fifty-five years of age, and old for his years, when the
Pope delegated to him the office of preaching the Second Crusade. Pale
and attenuated to a degree which seemed almost supernatural, his
contemporaries discovered something in the mere glance of his eyes which
filled them with wonder and awe. When his words of love, aspiration and
sublime self-sacrifice reached their ears, they were no longer masters
of themselves or of their feelings. A great meeting had been convened by
Pope and king at Vézelay, on Easter, 1146. Bernard, attended by the
king, spoke from a platform erected on a hill; there was a shout of
"Crosses! Crosses!" and the preacher scattered a sheaf of these badges
among the people. The spiritual mind of Europe had spoken through
Bernard, and now the military mind spoke through Louis VII. He called
upon France to destroy the enemies of God. Then Bernard preached the
Crusade through France and Germany, welcomed everywhere by almost
unparalleled enthusiasm and attended by miraculous signs.
Bernard was shortly to die; but he had first to bear the trial of being
reviled as the author of the calamities which had overtaken the Crusade.
Why had he preached it and prophesied success if this was to be the
event? A murmur of wrath against him was heard from the broad population
of Europe. It was during this dark time that he began his largest
literary work, the five books "De Consideratione," addressed to his
disciple, Eugenius III., a powerful and elaborate plea against the
excessive centralization of all administration and decisions into the
hands of the Papal Court. Bernard called this period "the season of
calamities." He discovered that his secretary had been forging his name
and used his authority to recommend men and causes most unworthy of his
patronage. His health was such that he could take no solid food; sleep
had left him; his debility was extreme. Pope Eugenius died in July,
1153; and Bernard had no wish to stay behind. "I am no longer of this
world," he said; and on August 20 he passed away.
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