"Bernard [1090-1153] was born at the close of the eleventh century of a noble Burgundian family...The decisive hour in Bernard's life struck shortly before Eater 1112, when he knocked on the door of the little monastery of Citeaux. Behind him stood thirty companions who all desired admission - an event that is surely unique in monastic annals. He did not seek to enter the wealthy Benedictine abbey of Cluny, as would have befitted a man of his rank, but deliberately begged to receive the monastic habit in the small, necessitous community of Citeaux..."
"Three years after entering Citeaux Bernard was sent away with several other monks to found a daughterhouse, of which he was to be the abbot. The little bank of thirteen set out to find a suitable site for the new monastery. And the spot they chose was certainly suitable by Cistercian standards - a wild and fearsome valley known as the 'valley of absinthe'. It has come down to us in history as Clairvaux - 'valley of light', for that is what Bernard and his companions made of it."

Bernard "neither preached the moderate Benedictine discipline nor practiced it himself; the new Cistercian abbot was the sternest ascetic of them all. As a young man, he treated himself with terrifying severity, subduing his body without mercy. He fasted so much that he ruined his health and acquired a permanent gastric disorder, and he even lost is sense of taste, so that he no longer noticed whether he was drinking water or oil. A miserable little cubicle beside the stairs, more like a closet than a room, served as the abbot's cell; he could not stand up in it without hitting his head against the ceiling beams, and the narrow window slit allowed very little light to penetrate into this dark chamber. Here he slept at night, with a straw-covered block of wood for a pillow. And thus he lived for thirty years, demanding the same ascetic discipline from his monks."
"Most of the young men who had joined him came from the noblest families of France. Bernard regarded the monastic state as one that demanded nobility, and he appealed only to great souls. Nevertheless, he conceived of aristocracy in terms of spirit, not of blood. for him, the monk was, above all, the knight of Christ, a concept already to be found in St. Benedict's rule, wherein the life of the monk is described as a bearing of spiritual arms in the service of Christ. This was the high ideal that Bernard held up before the eyes of his monks, inspiring them to almost superhuman endeavor."
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

"What, therefore, have the holy Apostles taught us, and what are they teaching us still? Not the art of fishing, not the art of tent-making...not how to read Plato or how to use with skill the Aristotelian syllogisms or how to be always learning and never arriving at the knowledge of truth. No what Peter and Paul have taught me is how I ought to live!"
     - St. Bernard, Sermons

"Bernard inclined toward the ascetic life, and sometimes his self-mortification seemed excessively severe to his associates...Influenced intellectually by St. Augustine, Bernard's interests nonetheless were not philosophical but existential. In the mystical experience, he held that the soul is emptied of self and lost wholly in God....With man's love flowing out to God and God's grace descending into the human soul, the two come together."
"Bernard combined intense mysticism with extraordinary powers of leadership and personal example. The forward advance of the Cistercian Order during the twelfth century was in large measure due to him. He was a strong defender of orthodoxy."
"Monks of both the Benedictine and Cistercian Orders lived by manual labor (indeed, the Cistercians were prominent in the opening up of uncultivated land in England and elsewhere)."
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

Bernard "threw himself into it [the mystical life] without reserve, experiencing ineffable ecstasy before his crucifix; one of his monks reported that he had seen Christ Himself detaching His pierced hands from the cross in order to embrace his servant Bernard."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

"Bernard's mysticism is a mysticism of love. There are four degrees of love: the love of self for self; the love of God for what He gives; the love of God for what He is; the love of self only for God's sake. The soul is the bride and God the husband. But the initiative is God's. He rapes the soul, obliterates its proud individuality and merges it with His own spirit. This is the ecstasy of pure love."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"You will ask, then, how...I could know that He was present? But He is living and full of energy, and as soon as He has entered into me He has quickened my sleeping soul, has aroused and softened and goaded my heart, which was in a state of torpor, and hard as a stone....Thus, then, the Bridegroom-Word, though He has several times entered into me, has never made His coming apparent to my sight, hearing, or touch. It was not by His motions that He was recognized by me, nor could I tell by any of my senses that He had penetrated to the depths of my being. It was, as I have already said, only by the revived activity of my heart that I was enabled to recognize His presence, and to know the power of His sacred presence by the sudden departure of vices and the strong restraint put upon carnal affections."
     - St. Bernard, Sermons on the Song of Solomon

"The essence of Bernard's mystical doctrine is expressed in the lovely image of the threefold kiss, which he borrowed from the opening words of the Song of Solomon: 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth'. This image he applies...to the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and we need only recall it to feel the warmth, the unconstrained ardor, the consuming fire of this man."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

"Happy the sign, wonderful and stupendous the condescension, in which, not lip is pressed to lip, but God is united to man. There, indeed, the pressure of the lip does signify the union of souls, but here a union of natures joins that which is divine and that which is human, and reconciles those things which are in earth and those in heaven."

"Let him [the sinner] not have the rashness to lift himself so high as to the lips of the divine Bridegroom, but let him, with holy fear, lie with me at the feet of that Lord so severe; let him, like the publican, tremble nor dare to life up his eyes unto heaven."
     - St. Bernard, Sermons on the Song of Solomon

"This prostration St. Bernard calls 'the kiss of the foot', and it forms the first rung of the ladder of perfection. Like the sinful woman in the gospel of St. Luke, the guilt-laden soul just approach the Lord with great humility and throw itself at His feet. The kiss of the foot represents penance, which St. Bernard believed must have its place in every Christian life. The soul just remain in this contrite position washing Christ's feet with its tears and covering them with kisses, till the divine Bridegroom at last speak those all-gladdening words: 'Thy sins are forgiven thee'."
The "second kiss, which the soul imprints on the hand of the Lord, represents its promise to persist henceforward in its conversion and in its faithful following of Christ.
"The final step is the ineffable kiss of the mouth, a gracious condescension of God which ravishes the soul. This kiss is the highest favor a human being can ask for, and represents that real mystical experience in which the soul is united to God. In the spiritual marriage - Bernard is one of the first to use the term - the soul loses all thought of itself. Such ecstasy, doubtless, is only a foretaste of eternal happiness; nevertheless, it gives the enraptured soul the highest degree of bliss which it is capable of sustaining."

"Bernard's mystical life caused him to experience the reality of Jesus with an intensity and in a manner altogether novel for his times. The early Middle Ages were still completely dominated by the early Christian conception of Christ in His eternal glory, and, awed by the majesty of the Divinity, men dared not approach the Humanity too closely. With Bernard, a profound change took place in the attitude to Christ's Humanity. Bernard himself was captivated by the lowliness the Savior. He beheld a real manger, in which there lay a real and helpless infant, uttering real and pitiful cries, and by this vision he restored reality to the miracle of Christmas. Similarly, Christ's passion was for him a real and wholly personal experience."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

"Behold Him! covered with rags, livid with stripes, defiled with spitting, pale with the pallor of death!"
     - St. Bernard, Sermons on the Song of Solomon

"Not that Bernard failed to identify the Man of Sorrows with the glorious Son of God, but that he also cherished a personal love for Jesus which was the effect of a new kind of experimental knowledge, so that the Lord became for him not a historical figure but a living and present power. Bernard was the first to present the Middle Ages with the picture of the suffering and dying savior, and he did so with such intensity that this conception has been an essential element of Christian piety ever since."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

Bernard's Political Actions

"The act of contemplation is like sleep in the arms of God, but the soul returns fired with a most vehement love of God, inflamed with zeal for righteousness, and filled with extreme fervor to all spiritual desires and duties."
     - St. Bernard, Canticles 4, 9, 4

"Bernard's political action was undertaken in direct response to the troubles of his times, as reflected in the state of the Church. He was deeply distressed by the situation, and he had no illusions as to it gravity: 'The plague of the Church is inward,' he cried out in one of is sermons, 'and it is incurable!' At another time, he spoke of the foul piss that was spreading through the whole body of the Church. It was thus no vain desire for personal glory that prompted Bernard's incessant journeyings all over Europe; by his own admission, only the great need of Christendom had induced him to leave his cloister and to take part in public affairs."

"Bernard's final intervention in politics took place in connection with the Second Crusade [1147-1149]. Here again he rushed into an arduous enterprise not out of personal enthusiasm, but in response to the urgings of the Pope and the King of France....He appears in his new role, as a prophet, a messenger of the Lord whom none could withstand. He burst upon his fellow men with the force of a meteor, dazzling them with his brightness. He became, too, a famous wonder-worker, healing the lame and the possessed as he rode from place to place on his humble little ass.
"The power of Bernard's exhortations to take part in the crusade bordered on the supernatural. His words had an irresistible emotional appeal, so that many of those who listened to him took the cross, often against their own better judgment. On one occasion, in the cathedral of Speyer, there took place what Bernard himself described as the miracle of miracles: the German king, Conrad III, scorning all counsels of prudence, himself took the cross, undeterred even by the knowledge of the Pope's disapproval. When where people did not understand a word of Bernard's language, they were powerless against the fire of his eloquence. this emaciated monk, who had renounced all earthly pleasures but who burned with a sacred fire, made an indelible impression upon his contemporaries. As though hypnotized, princes accepted his orders, bishops did his bidding. His journeys were a triumphal progress: people lined the streets cheering wildly, bells were rung, and the joy in men's hearts seemed to echo some far-off golden age upon the earth. The reverence that Bernard commanded bordered almost on idolatry."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

Bernard is perhaps best known for his patronage of the Knights Templar during this period.

"The crusade was launched with heroism and readiness for sacrifice, but with too little political or financial preparation. And when it collapsed in dismal failure, Bernard was regarded as a false prophet. The disappointed crowds were now as ready to stone him as they had been to cheer him in happier times. But Bernard bore his defeat with dignity, preferring that the blame should fall upon himself rather than that the people should despair of God."

Bernard died on August 20, 1153. "His reputation survived even the Reformation; Luther esteemed him higher 'than all monks and priests of the whole earth'...But Dante is perhaps our best guide in assessing Bernard. It is already a moot point whether Bernard should not rank with Virgil and Beatrice as a principal personage of the Divine Comedy. The poet had perceive the upward flight of the mystic, and in his allegory assigned to him the role of bringing Dante to the goal of his desire in heaven. In so doing, he revealed Bernard's true function. And Bernard's prayer to the Virgin Mary marks the final climax of the Divine Comedy."
     - Walter Nigg, The Warriors of God

Hyperlinks

·An Age of Persecution
·Dish of the Last Supper
·Egyptian and Pagan Themes in Christian Tradition
·Founding of the Knights Templar
·The Holy Grail - Chalice or Manna Machine?
·The Rosy Cross
·Trial by Blood and Fire