Bernard of Clairvaux Biography and Books

Bernard of Clairvaux was the most powerful man in twelfth-century Europe who held no office worth having. He was an abbot, nothing more. He made popes, unmade theologians, rebuked kings by letter, and preached a crusade that ended in catastrophe. He also wrote, in the same years, some of the tenderest prose about the love of God in any language. Both are true at once, and a biography that keeps only the warm half is not telling you about Bernard.

He was born in 1090 at Fontaines, near Dijon, the third son of a Burgundian knight. His mother Aleth died when he was in his teens and he seems never quite to have recovered from it. In 1113, aged twenty-two, he presented himself at Cîteaux — a struggling new monastery whose reformed, deliberately austere version of the Benedictine life was close to collapse for want of recruits — and he did not come alone. He had spent months persuading his brothers, his uncle, and a crowd of friends, and he arrived with about thirty men. The story that mothers hid their sons when Bernard came to town is probably a later embellishment. It is the kind of embellishment he attracted.

Two years later the abbot sent him out with twelve monks to found a daughter house in a valley in Champagne. They called it Clairvaux. He was twenty-five, and he was its abbot for the remaining thirty-eight years of his life. When he arrived there was nothing there; when he died the Cistercian order had grown from a handful of houses to some three hundred and forty, of which sixty-eight were founded from Clairvaux itself.

On loving God

His short book on the love of God opens by refusing to be complicated. A cardinal had written to ask him why God should be loved and how much, and Bernard answers in the first two sentences:

You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer, the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love.

— Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God

Then, because he says he is debtor to the unwise also, he spends the rest of the book explaining it slowly. The famous part is his account of love arriving in four stages. A man begins by loving himself for his own sake, which is where everyone starts. Under pressure he learns to love God for what God gives him — a self-interested love, and Bernard does not despise it; he says plainly that this is how most people begin and that God is content to be approached this way. Then, having been carried long enough, he comes to love God for God's own sake. And then, rarely and briefly, there is a fourth:

How blessed is he who reaches the fourth degree of love, wherein one loves himself only in God! When shall my soul, rapt with divine love and altogether self-forgetting, yea, become like a broken vessel, yearn wholly for God?

— Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God

He is honest that he has not lived there. He calls it a rapture he would count a man blessed and holy to have known, and says that in this life it is momentary at best. A lesser writer would have implied he was describing his own address.

The public man

He should have been left in his valley, and he was not. From about 1130 the outside world took hold of him and would not let go. A disputed papal election split Europe, and Bernard's advocacy did more than anything else to make Innocent II pope. He was called to arbitrate quarrels, examine bishops, and settle disputes across France, Italy and Germany, and the letters — hundreds survive — show a man complaining bitterly about the traffic while continuing to direct it.

He pursued Peter Abelard, the age's most brilliant and most abrasive theologian, to condemnation at Sens in 1140. Bernard believed Abelard was dissolving the mysteries of the faith into logic-chopping; Abelard believed Bernard was substituting fervour for thought. Modern readers are generally on Abelard's side, and even those who are not tend to find Bernard's methods in that campaign hard to defend. He was capable of ferocity, and he did not always know when he was being ferocious in his own cause rather than God's.

Then, in 1146, at the command of Pope Eugenius III — who had been his own monk at Clairvaux before the papacy took him — he preached the Second Crusade. He was overwhelmingly persuasive: the crowds at Vézelay and through the Rhineland were enormous, and two kings took the cross. The expedition achieved nothing at vast human cost. He did not hide from it. In On Consideration, written afterwards for that same Eugenius, he faced the wreck directly rather than reaching for the easy explanation, and took the weight of it on himself. One of the things worth respecting about Bernard is that he wrote up his own worst failure and let it be published.

The Rhineland preaching had a second consequence that belongs in any honest account. A monk named Radulf had gone ahead of him whipping up massacres of Jewish communities in the Rhine cities, and Bernard travelled there to stop him — confronting him in person, sending him back to his monastery, and insisting in writing that the Jews were not to be touched. It worked, and contemporary Jewish chroniclers recorded their gratitude by name. It is also true that the crusade he had summoned created the conditions Radulf exploited. Both halves are his.

Writing to kings

Nothing shows the strangeness of his position better than the letters he sent to people who outranked him absolutely. Writing with the abbots of Cîteaux to Louis of France, who was persecuting the Bishop of Paris, he does not soften the address: With what confidence can we now presume to lift up our hands for you to the Spouse of the Church, while you so inconsiderately, and without the slightest cause, afflict the Church? Then, in the same breath, the reason he thinks he may say it — perhaps we have to say it with boldness, but at the same time in love.

That is the register of the whole correspondence. He is not a courtier and he is not a scold; he writes to a king exactly as he writes to a frightened novice, on the assumption that both are answerable to the same God and both can still change their minds. It made him enemies, and it made him, for thirty years, the person Europe wrote to when something had gone badly wrong.

He was not naive about what all this was doing to him. The letters return again and again to the same complaint: that he is dragged about, that his life has become other people's business, that a man who left the world at twenty-two has ended up managing it. The complaint recurs too often to be a pose, and the obvious question — whether he could have refused any of it — is one he never quite answers.

The Song of Songs

Through all of it he was preaching, in chapter at Clairvaux, a series of sermons on the Song of Songs. He gave eighty-six of them over eighteen years and reached the beginning of the third chapter of the book. They are the summit of his writing and of a whole tradition of reading that poem as the love between Christ and the soul — sensuous, exact, psychologically observant, and utterly unembarrassed. He was still working on them when he died.

He died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153, worn out at sixty-three, having outlived his own health by years of fasting he later admitted had been foolish and had damaged him permanently. Luther, who had little patience for medieval saints, made an exception for him. Calvin quoted him. Dante gave him the last word in the Paradiso, the prayer at the summit of heaven.

What is worth taking from Bernard is not the political triumphs, which mostly turned to dust, but the thing he kept saying in the middle of them. He had every reason to believe in his own effectiveness — he had more of it than any churchman of his century — and the books he wrote in those years argue relentlessly that effectiveness is not the point, that the self is not the point, and that the only proper measure of the love of God is that there isn't one.