St. Bernard of Clairvaux

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was a French Cistercian monk, born at Fontaines near Dijon in 1090 and died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153. He entered the new and severe monastery of Cîteaux in 1113 with a group of relatives and friends, was sent two years later to found the abbey of Clairvaux, and governed it for thirty-eight years while becoming the most listened-to man in Europe. He wrote the Sermons on the Song of Songs, On Loving God and On Consideration, arbitrated a papal schism, and preached the Second Crusade, which failed.

Pope Alexander III canonised him in 1174, and Pope Pius VIII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1830. He is called the Mellifluous Doctor. His feast day is 20 August.

The Mellifluous Doctor

St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was a Cistercian monk and one of the most influential men of the 12th century. He is called the "Mellifluous Doctor" (honey-sweet) because his eloquence was so persuasive that mothers would hide their sons when he came to town, fearing they would run off to join his monastery.

When he joined the harsh, new Cistercian order at age 22, he brought 30 noblemen (including his brothers) with him. He founded the monastery of Clairvaux, which became a powerhouse of spiritual renewal.

The title Doctor Mellifluus is medieval and was taken up officially by Pope Pius XII in an encyclical of 1953 marking the eight hundredth anniversary of his death. The story about mothers hiding their sons is a medieval anecdote rather than a documented event, and it survives because it captures something the records do show: the arrival of thirty young noblemen at the gate of Cîteaux in 1113, and the speed with which Clairvaux filled.

Preacher of Love

Bernard was a mystic who wrote extensively on the love of God. His commentary on the Song of Songs interprets the biblical love poem as an allegory of the soul's union with God. He emphasized that God is love, and the path to Him runs through love rather than dry intellect.

He was also a man of action, called upon to settle schisms, advise popes (one of his former monks became Pope Eugene III), and preach the Second Crusade.

The Sermons on the Song of Songs run to eighty-six pieces delivered to his monks over roughly eighteen years, and they were unfinished when he died; he had reached only the third chapter of a short book. The pace is the point. He was reading a few words at a time with men who had given up everything else, and asking what it means to be loved by God and to want him.

The Memorare and Mary

Bernard had a tender devotion to the Virgin Mary. He is often credited with the Memorare prayer (though its current form is later), and he wrote movingly about her role as the "Star of the Sea" who guides us to safe harbor. Dante chose St. Bernard as his final guide in the Divine Comedy to lead him to the vision of Mary and the Trinity.

The Star of the Sea passage is from his homilies in praise of the Virgin Mother, and it is the source of the lines quoted at the end of this page. Dante's choice of Bernard for the last three cantos of the Paradiso tells you how the later Middle Ages read him: the man who takes the pilgrim the last stretch, past the reach of philosophy, by prayer.

Quotable Wisdom

"God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is Love."

"Look to the star, call upon Mary... If she holds you, you fall not; if she protects you, you fear not."

Both are given in the forms in which they circulate rather than as strict translations. The second condenses a longer passage from the second homily on the Gospel text about the angel sent to Mary, in which Bernard tells a soul tossed by storms to keep its eyes on the star and call on the name of Mary. The thought behind the first is the New Testament's: we love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).

His Life in Order

Bernard was born in 1090 at Fontaines, just outside Dijon in Burgundy, the third of seven children of a knight named Tescelin and his wife Aleth of Montbard. The family was minor nobility with land and connections, and Bernard was educated well enough to write Latin of unusual quality for his time.

His mother died when he was in his teens, and by his early twenties he had decided on monastic life. In 1113, at twenty-two or twenty-three, he arrived at Cîteaux with about thirty companions, among them several of his brothers and an uncle. The recruiting had been done by Bernard.

In 1115 the abbot of Cîteaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, sent him with twelve monks to found a new house in a valley in Champagne. They called it Clairvaux. Bernard was its abbot for thirty-eight years, until his death on 20 August 1153, and he was buried there. The abbey was suppressed during the French Revolution.

The rest of his biography is a list of things a monk should not have had time for: preaching tours across France and Germany, letters to popes, kings and abbots by the hundred, councils, arbitrations, and the supervision of an order that was multiplying faster than anyone could count. He complained about it repeatedly and kept doing it.

Cîteaux and the Cistercian Reform

Cîteaux had been founded in 1098 by monks who wanted the Rule of St. Benedict kept literally. Their complaint was against Cluny, the great Burgundian abbey whose liturgy had grown so long and whose estates had grown so large that the manual labour the Rule prescribes had effectively disappeared. The Cistercians went back to plain buildings, undyed wool habits, a simplified liturgy, remote sites and work in the fields.

When Bernard arrived the experiment was nearly dead. When he died, the order had spread across Europe, with Clairvaux alone the mother of dozens of daughter houses and those in turn founding others. Cistercian abbeys became the most efficient agricultural enterprises in Europe, which produced within a century exactly the wealth the founders had fled.

Bernard's own writing on this is sharper than any outsider's. His Apologia, addressed to his friend William of Saint-Thierry, attacks monastic luxury and includes a famous complaint about the grotesque carvings in cloisters, which he says the monks read instead of their books. He is also careful to say that what is appropriate to a bishop's church is not appropriate to a monk's. Our page on St. Benedict and his Rule covers the tradition he was trying to recover.

What He Actually Wrote

Sermons on the Song of Songs. Eighty-six sermons to his community, unfinished. The central Christian tradition of reading the Song as the love of God for the soul and for the Church runs through Origen and Gregory the Great, and Bernard is its high point.

On Loving God. A short treatise answering two questions: why God is to be loved, and in what measure. His answer to the first is that the reason for loving God is God, and to the second that the measure of loving God is to love him without measure.

On Consideration. Written for Pope Eugene III, a former monk of Clairvaux, and one of the more startling documents a pope has ever received. Bernard warns him about the crush of business, the flatterers, the appeals, the litigation, and tells him to reserve time to consider himself. It was read by later popes and is still quoted at them.

On Grace and Free Choice. His treatment of how grace and human freedom work together, which is more careful and more Augustinian than his reputation as an anti-intellectual suggests.

In Praise of the New Knighthood. Written for Hugh de Payens, the founder of the Knights Templar, defending the idea of a religious order of fighting monks.

Letters. Over five hundred survive, and they are the best single source for European affairs in the middle of the twelfth century.

The Four Degrees of Love

The most useful single thing Bernard wrote is the account of four degrees of love in On Loving God. He presents them as the ordinary path a person actually travels rather than as levels to be graded against.

The first degree is love of self for one's own sake. Everyone begins here, and Bernard treats it as natural rather than wicked; a person feeds himself before he feeds anyone.

The second is love of God for one's own sake. A person in trouble discovers that God helps, and loves him for the help. Bernard is unembarrassed about this. It is a real beginning.

The third is love of God for God's own sake. Having dealt with God often enough, the person begins to love him for what he is rather than for what he supplies. This is where Bernard says most Christians who persevere arrive.

The fourth is love of self for God's sake, in which a person loves even himself only for God. Bernard doubts whether anyone reaches it fully in this life, and says that if it happens it is a moment rather than a state.

The scheme is honest about motives in a way devotional writing usually is not. It assumes you started with yourself, and it does not require you to pretend otherwise.

The Public Career: Schism, Templars and Abelard

The schism of 1130. A disputed papal election produced two claimants, Innocent II and Anacletus II. Bernard threw his weight behind Innocent, travelled Europe arguing his case, and brought the kings of France, England and Germany with him. The schism lasted eight years and Innocent won. Whatever one makes of the merits, a provincial abbot deciding a papal election by force of argument is a remarkable fact about the twelfth century.

The Templars. Bernard supported the recognition of the Knights Templar at the Council of Troyes in 1129, helped shape their rule, and wrote a treatise in their defence. The idea of a monk who fights was new and contested, and his advocacy carried it.

Abelard. Bernard's conflict with Peter Abelard, the most brilliant logician of the age, ended at the Council of Sens in 1140 with propositions drawn from Abelard's work condemned. Bernard organised the case against him beforehand and left him little room to argue. Abelard appealed to Rome, fell ill on the journey, was taken in by Peter the Venerable at Cluny, and reconciled with Bernard before his death in 1142.

The Abelard affair is the place where Bernard's temperament is least attractive, and a page that admires him should say so. He treated a theological disagreement as a threat to be crushed, and his letters about Abelard are merciless. The Church has canonised him without canonising his methods.

The Second Crusade and What Followed

In 1144 the crusader county of Edessa fell. Pope Eugene III called for a new expedition and asked Bernard to preach it. He did so at Vézelay in 1146 before an enormous crowd, and the response was overwhelming: Louis VII of France took the cross, and Conrad III of Germany followed after Bernard preached to him.

The Second Crusade, from 1147 to 1149, was a disaster. The armies were destroyed piecemeal in Asia Minor, the attack on Damascus failed within days, and nothing was recovered. The blame fell heavily on Bernard, who had preached it as God's work. His response, in the second book of On Consideration, is anguished rather than evasive: he does not deny the failure and does not claim to understand it.

One episode from the preaching deserves to be much better known. During the recruitment a monk named Radulf went through the Rhineland preaching that the campaign should begin with the Jews at home, and massacres followed in several German cities. Bernard travelled to Germany, confronted Radulf directly, ordered him back to his monastery, and preached and wrote against the killings, insisting that the Jews were not to be harmed. Jewish chroniclers of the period recorded his intervention and credited him with saving lives.

Both things are true of the same man in the same two years. Our page on the Crusades and what actually happened in them sets out the wider history.

Mary, the Memorare and the Immaculate Conception

Bernard's Marian writing shaped Western devotion for centuries. He preached her as the aqueduct through which grace reaches us, as the star to be looked at in a storm, and as the one whose intercession no one need hesitate to ask for. Medieval art produced the legend of the lactation of St. Bernard, in which the Virgin nourishes him with milk from her breast; it is a legend of that period and not an event he reports.

The Memorare is universally attached to his name, and the attribution is not historical. The prayer in its present form dates from the seventeenth century and was spread by a French priest named Claude Bernard, which is very likely how the confusion started. The sentiments in it are entirely Bernardine, which is why the misattribution stuck.

One honest complication belongs here. Bernard opposed the celebration of the feast of the Conception of Mary when the canons of Lyon introduced it, and wrote a letter arguing against the new observance. His objection was to the manner of it: the feast was being introduced without authority and the theology behind it had not been worked out. He preached Mary's holiness constantly. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854, seven centuries later, after the theological work he said was missing had been done. A Doctor of the Church can be on the losing side of a development and remain a Doctor of the Church.

Doctor of the Church, Feast Day and Devotion

Bernard was canonised in 1174 by Pope Alexander III, twenty-one years after his death, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830 by Pope Pius VIII. Pope Pius XII devoted an encyclical to him in 1953, Doctor Mellifluus, on the eight hundredth anniversary of his death.

His feast day is 20 August. He is regarded as the last of the Fathers, a title given him because his theology belongs to the older monastic tradition of Scripture and prayer rather than to the scholastic method that took over the universities in the following century.

He is invoked as a patron of Cistercians, of beekeepers and candlemakers, which follows from the honey-sweet epithet, and of Gibraltar. Devotion to him is strongest in the Cistercian and Trappist houses that trace their life to Clairvaux.

Why the Church Holds Him Up

The Church holds up Bernard for putting love at the centre of theology without making it vague.

His question in On Loving God is not whether to love God but in what order and to what degree, and his answer is worked out with the precision of a lawyer. That is the combination the Church wants: affection that has been thought about. The twelfth century was producing both an increasingly technical theology in the schools and an increasingly emotional popular piety, and Bernard held the two together in one person.

He is also held up as a monk who was dragged into public life and did not stop being a monk. He wrote his sermons on the Song of Songs during the same years he was crossing Europe on ecclesiastical business, and he told the pope to reserve time for consideration because he knew what happens to a man who does not.

And he is held up honestly. The Second Crusade failed, the treatment of Abelard was harsh, and the judgment about the feast of Mary's conception was wrong. The Church proposes his sanctity and has never proposed his infallibility, and the Catechism is clear that the saints are held up as models and intercessors rather than as men without error (CCC 828).

What to Take From St. Bernard

Start where you actually are. The four degrees of love assume you began by loving God for what he does for you. That is a real beginning, and pretending to be further along than you are stops the progress.

Read slowly. Eighty-six sermons on three chapters. Most people's Scripture reading fails because of speed rather than difficulty.

Reserve time to consider. His advice to a pope buried in business applies to anyone whose calendar is full: keep some of yourself for yourself and for God, or the work will take all of it.

Speak up when the mob turns. The Rhineland intervention of 1146 is the best thing he ever did, and it was done against the current of an enthusiasm he himself had started.

Be careful how you fight. Bernard was right about a great deal and cruel in the way he pursued it. Being right does not license the method.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Bernard of Clairvaux?

St. Bernard was a French Cistercian monk, born at Fontaines near Dijon in 1090 and died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153. He entered Cîteaux in 1113 with about thirty companions, founded the abbey of Clairvaux in 1115 and led it for thirty-eight years, and became the most influential churchman in Europe. He was canonised in 1174 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

Did St. Bernard write the Memorare?

No. The Memorare in its present form dates from the seventeenth century and was popularised by a French priest named Claude Bernard, which is probably how the attribution to Bernard of Clairvaux arose. The thoughts in it match his Marian preaching closely, which is why the misattribution has lasted, but he did not write it.

Did St. Bernard preach the Second Crusade?

Yes. At the request of Pope Eugene III he preached it at Vézelay in 1146, and Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany took the cross. The crusade of 1147 to 1149 failed completely and Bernard was widely blamed. During the same preaching campaign he travelled to the Rhineland to stop a monk named Radulf who was inciting massacres of Jews, and Jewish chroniclers credited him with saving lives.

Why is St. Bernard called the Mellifluous Doctor?

The title means honey-flowing and refers to the sweetness of his Latin style and his preaching. It is medieval in origin and was taken up officially by Pope Pius XII in his 1953 encyclical Doctor Mellifluus, issued for the eight hundredth anniversary of Bernard's death. He is also called the last of the Fathers, because his theology belongs to the older monastic tradition rather than to scholasticism.

Did St. Bernard oppose the Immaculate Conception?

He opposed the introduction of the feast of the Conception of Mary by the canons of Lyon, on the grounds that it was being introduced without authority and that the theology had not been worked out. He was not denying Mary's holiness, which he preached constantly. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854, long after the theological development he said was missing had occurred.

When is St. Bernard's feast day?

His feast day is 20 August, the day he died at Clairvaux in 1153. He is invoked as a patron of Cistercians, of beekeepers and candlemakers, which follows from the honey-sweet epithet, and of Gibraltar. Devotion to him is strongest in the Cistercian and Trappist communities that trace their life to Clairvaux.