BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX.
There is no lack of material for a copious account of Bernard of
Clairvaux. He was a man to become distinguished in any age of the world,
and he took and maintained the highest place of his time. His faults are
as patent as his virtues. But, if he had not these faults, he would
never have enjoyed certain kinds of success. His very austerity was a
merit when it held his keen intellect steadily to its mark. And his
intolerance, narrowness, ambition, and love of dialectics, were
themselves a part of the great demand which his generation made upon
him.
I shall be responsible here simply for a condensation and compilation of
facts, a very different proceeding from that which is usually needed. In
the case of almost all these hymn-writers the materials are so slight
and meagre as to require large research; in this case one is overwhelmed
with riches. I do not profess to say how many lives of Bernard have been
written, but I know of a goodly number; and no history of his time has
failed to give attention to so prominent a figure in religion and in
statecraft.
He was singularly situated in point of time and place. Born in Burgundy,
not far from Dijon, of a fighting family, who owned a castle and were
well represented in the wars, he saw the light in 1091. His father
Tesselin was a man who had learned in the school of Christ to be more
careful not to wrong his neighbor than not to be wronged by him. His
mother Alith was the model chatelaine of the times, full of kindness to
the poor and helpfulness to the needy. He was born at the _omphalos_ and
centre of the Middle Ages. Peter the Hermit whirled along his wild
battalions almost beside his very cradle. The little lad of four years
must have seen the strange excited throngs, with their red crosses and
their banners, and in the dust of their passing and in the chants of
their praise, he must have been conscious of a certain enthusiasm which
was to run throughout his life.
For several years this news was to men the staple of all conversation.
The body of their own duke was finally brought back from Palestine to
his ancient heritage, and laid, by his own desire, in the cemetery of
the poor monks of Citeaux. There, in this comparatively recent monastery
near Dijon, he had selected his last home, in preference to many more
opulent and renowned establishments. The son of Burgundy’s vassal
Tesselin beheld this and other incidents. His brothers went to the wars
with the next duke, but he himself grew less and less inclined toward
such pursuits. Books formed his world. His cell was afterward said to be
stored with them; and he obtained easily the credit of being the best
instructed person of his time in the Bible and in the works of the
fathers of the Church.
And already these tendencies were aroused in the youth of eighteen or
nineteen years who had begun the old-fashioned austerities on his own
account. We are not surprised to find him neck-deep in ice-water; stung
into intellectual vigor by the recent victory of Abelard over William of
Champeaux; aroused into an actual preaching fervor, in which he
denounces the sins of the age; continually mindful of his dead mother
Alith’s prayers, and finally resolved upon entering the monastic order
and upon carrying all his friends and relations with him.
That singular mastery of other minds, which was his at every period
henceforth, now displayed itself. It did not matter that his brother
Guido had a wife and family; nor that his brother Gerard loved to fight
a good deal better than he loved to pray. Into the cloister they must
go! Gerard indeed was something after the manner of Lot’s wife, disposed
to look back. But his brother touched him on the side, and by some
strange prescience or happy guess, predicted to him a spear-wound, which
actually happened. On being thus remarkably warned, the soldier relented
as they carried him wounded off the field, and cried, “I turn monk, monk
of Citeaux.” This was the Gerard over whom, long afterward, Bernard
delivered that touching sermon, where he branched out from the Song of
Solomon (1:5) to declare that this body “is not the mansion of the
citizen, nor the house of the native, but either the soldier’s tent or
the traveller’s inn;” and then poured forth his full heart in a tide of
uncontrollable and lofty grief.
So the youth marched into the poor monastery of Citeaux, where scanty
food, rough clothing, harsh surroundings and occasional epidemic
disorders had nearly disheartened and broken up the company of monks.
Stephen Harding, their English abbot, was proudly indifferent to all
patronage; but he was not so blind as not to perceive that Bernard, with
thirty captives of the bow and spear of his eloquence, was a valuable
addition to a depleted community.
These Cistercians, then and always, were rigidists. Up they got at two
in the morning to prayer and “matins;” and for full two hours were busy,
in a cold dark chapel, over them. Then, with the first dawn of light,
out again to “lauds.” Before this service, and after it, the monk’s time
was fairly his own; but at two o’clock he dined, at nightfall he had
“vespers,” and at six or eight (according to the season) came
“compline,” and then immediately the dormitory and bed. Such was the
life, with a little more of it on Sundays, and with sermons interspersed
at intervals. There is no mention of breakfast or supper!
And in such a life the ecstatic, mystical character of Bernard rose into
visions and prophecies. His body was nearly subjugated, and his taste,
and, indeed, all his senses, appeared to have deserted him. He watched,
he dug, he hewed and carried wood; he kept the very letter, and more
than the letter of his monastic rule. And yet, as Morison acutely
observes, this very abstraction from people and things gave him that
delight in nature from which, so often in the future, he was to catch
the illustration or the inspiration of his discourse. “Beeches and
oaks,” he said, “had ever been his best teachers in the Word of God.”
But now Citeaux (suddenly become prosperous) must colonize; and who so
fit to lead the swarm from the gates and found the new hive as this same
Bernard? Into his hands Abbot Stephen puts the cross, and he and his
twelve companions march solemnly across the interdicted boundaries of
their little Cistercian home, and nearly a hundred miles to the
northward. There he chooses a place which exhibits, as Bernard’s actions
generally do, the far-sighted sagacity which takes mean and worthless
matters and makes them what, with right handling, they are able to
become. It is a valley—the “Valley of Wormwood.” It is grown up with
underbrush and is a haunt of robbers. But here, with the river Aube
winding down between the hills, with the hills themselves capable of
culture, and with the future of this little vale revealed to his
prophetic eye, he sets his cloister and calls it Clairvaux—“Fair
Valley,” or “Brightdale.”
I wish that I could quote the beautiful picture that Vaughan (_Hours
with the Mystics_, Book V., chap. 1) has given of this fine enterprise.
We should see Bernard and his monks chopping and binding fagots;
planting vines and trees of goodly fruit; rearing their cloistral
buildings, when the time arrived, out of the very materials about them,
and so steadily transforming purgatory into paradise. There should we
see the river bending its great shoulders to the wheels that drive
fulling-mill and grist-mill; or toiling for them in their tannery, or
filling their _caldarium_. We should see the monks at vintage or at
harvest; pressing the clusters from yonder hill, or gathering the hay
from yonder meadow. And everywhere throughout this busy, energetic life,
we should behold the wasted figure of their chief—austere, sincere,
severe. And we should feel that unaccountable personality—that
intrinsic, magnetic, controlling quality which made this the man above
all others to be the opposer of schismatics, the counsellor of kings,
the establisher of popes, and the preacher of the Second Crusade.
Clairvaux was his kingdom, and from Clairvaux he ruled the mediaeval
world.
His personal appearance was in keeping with this idea—it was the evident
cause of an evident effect. He was taller than the middle height and
exceedingly thin. His complexion was “clear, transparent,
red-and-white;” and always he had some color in his wasted face. His
beard was reddish, and—according to his ancestral derivation, called
_Sorus_ or “yellow-haired”—his own hair was light and perhaps tawny.
This beard grows whiter in the course of years, and these hollow cheeks
glow with the enthusiasm of the orator as he speaks. Then he is at his
best! He flings aside all feebleness; he disregards every consideration
except the truth; he flashes and glitters as the tremendous squadrons of
his brilliant logic, or still more brilliant exhortation, press down
upon the listening soul. He had indeed a perfect confidence in himself,
in his methods, and in his ultimate success. He was like a modern ocean
steamer, iron-hulled, steam-driven, sharp-prowed, cutting through all
storms without detention, and riding the wildest waves in his triumphant
course to victory.
There is in Bernard of Clairvaux a most singular combination of the
dreamer and the man of affairs. Vaughan has too admirably condensed the
story of these interruptions and occupations, for me to avoid quoting,
at least this much, from his capital monograph:
“Struggling Christendom,” he says, “sent incessant monks and priests,
couriers and men-at-arms to knock and blow horns at the gate of
Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight
that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival popes, and
cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone
is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back
turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of
Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians,
Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either
side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours
out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.”
Yet with all this he is a profound scholar, and his comments on
Scripture are of a mystical, and often of a serenely spiritual and
thoughtful kind, as though no intrusion could jar the harmony and poise
of his soul. His was that strange contradiction of nature which found
its calm in tumult and its ecstasy in conflict. Obstructions pass away.
Like that later mystic, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), there are no
hindrances in his communion with the unseen world; he could, perhaps, do
as Novalis did when Sophie Kühn died. For the poor fellow records in his
diary: “Much noise in the house. I went to her grave and had a few wild
moments of joy.” And of him also Just declares: “No spirit-dream was too
high, no business detail too low;” for Novalis in 1799 was “Assessor and
Law-adviser to the Salt Mines of Thuringia.” Pegasus in harness appears
no worse a contradiction than a mystic in a salt-pan, or a Bernard
epistolizing the Count of Champagne about a drove of stolen pigs.
Prose and poetry, poetry and prose! And yet the brain and soul that can
do good work in the one are by no means disqualified for the other; and
your truest mystics are not likely to wear long hair and talk raving
nonsense among impractical neologists. For Bernard, even though he made
converts wherever he went, and drew increasing numbers into cloister
walls, exerted a potent and prevalent influence upon his time. He is one
of the lighthouses, as we sail down the coast of the Middle Ages; and
not until we pass him and his compeers, do the real darkness and the
dull ignorance, the shoals and the unmarked rocks appear, ready to wreck
the ventures of the mind. How gladly one would linger over these
fascinating incidents in this remarkable career! The man’s life was
expressed in some of his own aphorisms. They are such as these:
“There is no truer wretchedness than a false joy.” “He does not please
who pleases not himself.” “You will give to your voice the voice of
virtue if you have first persuaded yourself of what you would persuade
others.” “Hold the middle line unless you wish to miss the true method.”
These are the maxims of an orator as well as of a statesman. And the
junction of imagination, analysis, logic, fervor, and faith, made this
man what he was. Already he had tried his wings in preaching to his own
monks at morning and evening; and they had listened to him as though he
had come from another world. He dealt with the great and vital questions
of the moral nature. Like the best of our modern preachers, he aimed to
sustain the soul, to arouse and to cheer it, and to bid it press forward
to a victory which he himself foresaw. He might have said of such
aspiring saints as surrounded him what Roscoe says:
“I see, or the glory blinds me
Of a soul divinely fair,
Peace after great tribulation
And victory hung in the air.”
He felt, with Lacordaire, that the Gospel had a new meaning, when he
discovered that it was intended for the comfort of the human heart. He
was at one with his monks; and as he reached out toward the social life
about him, and toward the turbid torrents of politics and
ecclesiasticism over which he must throw the bridge of charity or of
faith, he simply transferred the Clairvaux method into the affairs of
men.
It was an age of destruction, and into it he was casting the salt of the
Gospel, hoping at least to make it salvable. Around his life needless
legends and superstitious traditions have combined to cluster, but the
real Bernard is distinct from both. He never relaxed his grip upon
himself or upon others. And while this is not yet the place to speak of
the famous controversy with Abelard, it may be properly said that
Bernard saw tendencies in that philosophy which were genuinely
dangerous; and that he defeated them because truth (however narrow and
selfishly employed) is always stronger than error. Such was also his
power in preaching the crusade in 1145, when he was about fifty-five
years of age. It sprang from the quenchless fire of his zeal, as when at
Vezelai, standing by the side of Louis VII., he caused such enthusiasm
in the crowd beneath, that he did nothing so long as he remained in the
town but make crosses for them to wear in sign of their holy purpose.
He had lived to see the Knights Templars, which had received his own
especial approval, become one of the most famous orders on the globe.
The Knights Hospitallers had been incorporated in 1113, and the Templars
were founded in 1118 by Hugo de Paganis and others. But in 1128, at the
Council of Troyes, there were but nine of them, all told, to keep their
vow of “chastity, obedience, and poverty,” to “guard the passes and
roads against robbers,” and to “watch over the safety of pilgrims.” Hugo
then appealed to Bernard, and by his influence the council recognized
this weak thing, destined so soon to be a mighty force, and which
combined two of the strongest of our instincts—that to fight and that to
pray. And now as in his old age he saw the corruption which was creeping
into it and into other agencies on which his heart had been set, he
relaxed no atom of his vigilance. He had seen the failure of his
crusade, but it did not much affect him. His thoughts were now of
heaven, and his watching was that he might be prepared to enter its
gates. His principal friends had all died; Suger, in 1150, Theobald of
Champagne, in 1152, and Pope Eugenius, his loved disciple, in 1153.
It was in this year that Bernard also made himself ready to go. On
January 12th he said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, raising up what his
admirers were wont to call his “dove-like” eyes, he prayed that God’s
will might be done. And so, quietly and peacefully, he passed away. He
has left behind him much as an ecclesiast, but more as a poet. I hold
Bernard to be the real author of the modern hymn—the hymn of faith and
worship. The poetry of Faber, which is now so near to the heart of the
Church, is peculiarly in this key. The _Salve Caput cruentatum_ came to
us through Paul Gerhardt, and has become (through the translation of Dr.
J. W. Alexander, a man of kindred spirit with Bernard) our
“O sacred head, now wounded.”
Gerhardt’s own hymn-writing—the most efficient, except Luther’s, in the
German tongue—is wonderfully affected by Bernard. The _Jesu dulcis
memoria_ was rendered by Count Zinzendorf and became famous among those
spiritual souls, the Moravians. And Edward Caswell’s translations—as I
have already noticed—are supremely fine in spirit and in expression. I
shall not attempt here what has been so capitally done already. The
Church universal has made Bernard her own; and the very translations of
his verses have been half-inspired. And while we sing,
“Jesus, the very thought of thee
With sweetness fills my breast,”
we shall sing “with the spirit and with the understanding,” the very
strain that the Abbot of Clairvaux was sent on earth to teach! They
canonized him in 1174—but it is better to have written a song for all
saints than to be found in any breviary.