Die 20 Augusti — III classis Missale Romanum 1962. Missa In medio Ecclesiae (Commune Doctorum).
I. Identitas et Origines
Bernard was born in the year 1090 at the castle of Fontaine-lès-Dijon in the Duchy of Burgundy, the third of seven children of Tescelin le Sor, a knight in the service of the Duke, and of Aleth of Montbard, a woman of noble lineage whose piety left a decisive mark upon her household. Of the seven children, six were sons, and all six would in time follow Bernard into the cloister; the one daughter, Humbeline, would enter religious life as a widow. Aleth died when Bernard was about seventeen, and the memory of her — austere, devout, dedicated to the poor — stands at the threshold of every early account of his vocation.
He was educated by the secular canons of Saint-Vorles at Châtillon-sur-Seine, where he acquired the Latin formation that would make him the most accomplished stylist of the twelfth century. The earliest biographers are unanimous that he showed no inclination toward the knightly career for which his birth had prepared him, and that his temperament from youth was marked by an interior recollection unusual in one of his station.
In 1112 (some reckon 1113) Bernard presented himself at the New Monastery of Cîteaux, then a struggling foundation of scarcely fifteen years under its third abbot, the Englishman Stephen Harding. He did not come alone. In the months before his entry he had persuaded some thirty of his kinsmen and companions — among them four of his brothers and his uncle Gaudry — to accompany him. It is a singular fact of Church history that a community on the verge of extinction for want of vocations received, in one day, the men who would carry its observance across Europe.
Our principal documentary witness for Bernard’s life is the Vita Prima, composed in five books by three men who knew him: William of Saint-Thierry, his intimate friend, who wrote Book I before Bernard’s death; Arnold of Bonneval, who continued with Book II; and Geoffrey of Auxerre, Bernard’s secretary, who completed Books III through V. This is a Tier 1 source in the sense that its authors were eyewitnesses or direct informants, though the reader must remember that it was written with an eye toward canonization and shaped accordingly. Bernard’s own enormous literary remains — letters, treatises, and sermons — constitute the second great primary witness, and on matters of his teaching they are without rival.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
Bernard embraced the Cistercian interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict with a severity that alarmed even his superiors. He ate little, slept less, and worked with his hands in the fields alongside the lay brothers. William of Saint-Thierry records that in his early years Bernard so mortified his senses that he passed a full year in the novitiate without noticing whether the ceiling of the dormitory was vaulted, and could not say how many windows the church possessed. The early biographers present this as evidence of recollection; a later age might add that it was the seedbed of the digestive ailment that tormented him for the remainder of his life and eventually obliged Stephen Harding, on the authority of William of Champeaux, to relieve him for a time from the full rigor of the common observance.
The virtues that the tradition attributes to Bernard are chiefly three. The first is humility, which he made the subject of his earliest treatise and which he understood not as low self-regard but as the virtue by which a man, in the truest self-knowledge, becomes contemptible in his own eyes. The second is charity, which in Bernard’s teaching is the form and end of the whole monastic life and the proper interpretive key to all of Scripture. The third is zeal — a word his contemporaries applied to him with both admiration and apprehension. Bernard’s zeal for the house of God made him the scourge of worldly prelates, the implacable opponent of Abelard and Arnold of Brescia, and the preacher who sent half of Europe to the Second Crusade. The same zeal, turned inward, made him a monk of the strictest observance. His friends never doubted that these were one quality, not two.
Bernard’s devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Christ and to the Blessed Virgin is the affective spine of his spirituality. He taught that the soul ascends to the love of God as pure spirit only by first loving Christ in His flesh, in the mysteries of the Nativity and Passion; devotion to the Verbum caro factum was for him not a concession to weakness but the divinely appointed path. His Marian teaching — that Mary is the aqueduct through which grace flows from the Head to the members, that no petition passes to the Son except through her, that in every peril the Christian should look upon the star and call upon Mary — became so thoroughly the common property of the Latin Church that its Bernardine origin is often forgotten.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
In 1115, after only three years at Cîteaux, Stephen Harding sent Bernard with twelve monks to found a daughter house in the valley of the Aube, in the diocese of Langres. The place was called the Valley of Wormwood; Bernard renamed it Clara Vallis, Clairvaux. He was twenty-five years old and would govern the house for thirty-eight years. Under his abbacy Clairvaux became the most fertile monastic foundation of the Middle Ages. Sixty-eight daughter houses were founded directly from it during his lifetime, and through them a further network that by his death numbered well over one hundred and fifty communities stretching from Sweden to Portugal and from Ireland to Poland. The Carta Caritatis of Stephen Harding gave the Order its constitutional form; Bernard gave it its soul and its expansion.
His public career began in 1128 at the Council of Troyes, where he assisted in drafting the Rule of the Knights Templar and, in his treatise De laude novae militiae, articulated the theology of a religious military order. The decisive moment came in 1130. The death of Pope Honorius II produced a double election: the majority of cardinals elected Cardinal Pierleoni as Anacletus II, a minority elected Cardinal Gregory Papareschi as Innocent II. Innocent fled to France. At the Council of Étampes the French episcopate, uncertain how to proceed, deferred to the judgment of the Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard declared for Innocent, arguing not from the arithmetic of the electors but from the manifest sanctity of the man and the regularity of the proceedings, and for the next eight years he labored across France, Germany, and Italy to secure Innocent’s universal recognition. Kings Louis VI of France, Henry I of England, and the Emperor Lothair III were in turn brought into obedience. The schism ended with Anacletus’s death in 1138. Bernard’s intervention had preserved the unity of the Latin Church, and it established him as the single most influential ecclesiastical figure of his generation.
His dispute with Peter Abelard culminated at the Council of Sens in 1140 (or 1141, according to some reckonings). Bernard’s letters to the Roman Curia and his Tractatus de erroribus Abaelardi charged the master with subjecting the mysteries of the Trinity and the Redemption to the measure of dialectic, and with teaching a doctrine of the Atonement that evacuated the objective efficacy of the Cross. Abelard, rather than debate, appealed to Rome; Innocent II confirmed the condemnation. The modern reader who finds Bernard harsh should consider that the issue was not speculative theology as such — Bernard had no quarrel with the schools in principle — but whether the content of revealed faith was to be received on the authority of God revealing or reconstructed by the autonomy of reason. That question has not become less urgent.
In 1145 Bernard’s former monk Bernardo Pignatelli was elected pope as Eugenius III. To this disciple Bernard addressed his final great treatise, De consideratione, a meditation on the duties and temptations of the papal office that Popes from Eugenius to John XXIII are recorded as having kept for personal reading. The following year, at the request of Eugenius and King Louis VII, Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay. His eloquence was overwhelming; the crusade was a military disaster, and Bernard spent his last years defending himself against the charge that he had sent men to their deaths on a false promise. His answer, in the second book of De consideratione, is that the preacher is bound to the command he received and not to the outcome, and that the failure lay in the sins of the army. He refused the bishoprics of Genoa, Milan, Langres, and Reims, and the archbishopric of Châlons. He accepted nothing beyond the abbacy of Clairvaux.
IV. Mors et Cultus
Bernard died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153, at about sixty-three years of age, surrounded by his monks and worn to exhaustion by the illness of a lifetime and the labors of his final mission to Metz, where he had reconciled the warring parties of Lorraine. He was buried before the altar of the Blessed Virgin in the abbey church. Pope Alexander III canonized him on 18 January 1174, scarcely twenty years after his death — a remarkable rapidity that reflects both the universality of his reputation and the vigor of the Cistercian Order in promoting his cause.
His feast was received into the Roman calendar and celebrated on 20 August, the day of his death. Pius VIII in 1830 declared him a Doctor of the Universal Church, and the title Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing Doctor, already current in the Middle Ages for the sweetness of his style and the Scriptural saturation of his thought, was confirmed in the liturgical usage. On the eighth centenary of his death, Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Doctor Mellifluus (24 May 1953), which remains the most authoritative magisterial portrait of his doctrine and presents him as a model of the union of learning and sanctity against the divorce of the two that the Pope discerned in his own age.
The abbey of Clairvaux was suppressed at the French Revolution and its church destroyed; the buildings have served as a prison since 1808. Bernard’s relics were dispersed at that time. His head is venerated in the cathedral of Troyes; other portions are preserved at Ville-sous-la-Ferté near the abbey site and in various Cistercian houses.
The iconography of Bernard includes several motifs that belong to traditio pia rather than to the documentary record. The Lactatio Bernardi — the Virgin nourishing Bernard with milk from her breast as he prayed before her image — is attested in art and devotional literature from the late thirteenth century and has no foundation in the Vita Prima or in Bernard’s own writings; it is a pictorial allegory of the sweetness of his Marian doctrine. The Amplexus Bernardi — Christ loosing His arms from the Cross to embrace the kneeling saint — appears first in the Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach around 1200, a generation after the canonization, and is similarly to be received as devotional imagery expressing the affective Christocentrism of his teaching. Neither is to be confused with the Christmas vision of the Infant Christ which the Vita Prima itself records from Bernard’s boyhood, and which has a stronger claim upon the reader’s credence.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Bernard’s literary output is vast: some five hundred letters, about a dozen treatises, and more than three hundred sermons, the whole critically edited in the eight volumes of the Sancti Bernardi Opera (Rome, 1957–1977). Pius XII called him the last of the Fathers, and the description is just: he wrote in the monastic-patristic register, not the scholastic, and his thought proceeds by the exposition of Scripture rather than by disputed question.
The Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, eighty-six sermons delivered to his monks over eighteen years and left unfinished at his death, are the summit of his work. Their subject is the mystical marriage of the Word with the soul, and they contain his mature teaching on the degrees of love, on the visitation of the Word in contemplation, and on the necessity of humility as the ground of all ascent. Bernard distinguishes the kiss of the feet (penance), the kiss of the hand (the active life of virtue), and the kiss of the mouth (contemplative union), and insists that the soul may not presume to the third before it has labored in the first two.
The treatise De diligendo Deo asks why and how God is to be loved, and answers that the cause of loving God is God Himself and the measure is to love without measure. It then traces four degrees: man loves himself for his own sake; man loves God for his own sake; man loves God for God’s sake; man loves himself only for God’s sake. The fourth degree Bernard describes as scarcely attainable in this life and proper to the resurrection, when the body too will be drawn into the soul’s love.
The De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, his first treatise, sets out the twelve degrees of humility from the seventh chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict, and then, with a satirist’s eye, the twelve corresponding degrees of pride by which the monk descends from curiosity to the habit of sin. The De gratia et libero arbitrio, written against an Augustinian misreading that threatened to abolish human freedom, teaches that grace and free will cooperate in the single work of salvation, grace being the whole cause and free will the whole instrument, so that the work is entirely God’s and entirely man’s. The Apologia ad Guillelmum is the classic Cistercian protest against the artistic and dietary luxury of Cluny, and the locus of his famous strictures on the carved monsters of Romanesque cloisters.
His four homilies In laudibus Virginis Matris, commonly called the Missus est homilies on the Annunciation Gospel, contain the passage that every Christian of the Latin West once knew by heart: that whoever is tossed by the storms of this life should look to the star and call upon Mary, and that following her one does not go astray, praying to her one does not despair, thinking of her one does not err. The Sermo de aquaeductu for the Nativity of the Virgin gives the image of Mary as the channel through which the fullness of grace descends. His Letter 174 to the canons of Lyon, in which he objects to their introduction of a feast of the Virgin’s Conception without Roman authorization, is often misread as a denial of the Immaculate Conception; it is in fact a protest against liturgical innovation without the Apostolic See, and an argument within a theological framework that had not yet distinguished active from passive conception. The Church’s later definition does not contradict the substance of his Marian doctrine, which is at every point the highest that his age permitted.
Two widely circulated texts are not his. The Memorare, though it breathes his spirit, is a seventeenth-century composition popularized by the French priest Claude Bernard; the hymn Jesu dulcis memoria, sometimes called the Jubilus of St. Bernard, is Cistercian and of his century but not by his hand.
VI. Oratio
Collecta — Missale Romanum 1962
Deus, qui pópulo tuo ætérnæ salútis beátum Bernárdum minístrum tribuísti: præsta, quǽsumus; ut, quem Doctórem vitæ habúimus in terris, intercessórem habére mereámur in cælis. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
O God, who didst give blessed Bernard to Thy people as a minister of eternal salvation: grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have had him as a teacher of life on earth may deserve to have him as an intercessor in heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
The Collect names the two offices in which the Church honors him: Doctor vitae, teacher of life, and intercessor — the one on earth and finished, the other in heaven and continuing. It is notable that the prayer calls him teacher not of doctrine but of life, for Bernard’s whole theology is ordered to the soul’s ascent and never separates what is to be known from what is to be loved.
VII. Aspiratio
Respice stellam, voca Mariam. Look upon the star; call upon Mary.
Or, with the Doctor himself on the measure of charity: Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est; modus, sine modo diligere. The cause of loving God is God; the measure is to love without measure.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Primary sources. Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, H. M. Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977) is the critical edition and supersedes Patrologia Latina 182–185. English readers have the Cistercian Fathers Series (Cistercian Publications), which has translated the sermons on the Song of Songs (4 vols.), the treatises, the Missus est homilies, and a large selection of the letters. Bruno Scott James’s The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1953; reprinted Cistercian Publications, 1998) remains the fullest English collection of the correspondence.
The earliest life. The Vita Prima Sancti Bernardi is available in a critical edition by Paul Verdeyen in Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 89B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), and in English translation as The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Hilary Costello (Cistercian Publications, 2015).
Magisterial. Pius XII, encyclical Doctor Mellifluus, 24 May 1953 (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 45 [1953]). This should be read before any modern study.
Studies. Étienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (1940; Cistercian Publications reprint), remains the indispensable doctrinal exposition. Jean Leclercq, Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Spirit (Cistercian Publications, 1976), and the same author’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (Fordham, 1961), situate Bernard within the monastic theology of his age. Adriaan Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History (Eerdmans, 1996), is a critical examination of the Vita Prima and the canonization process, valuable for understanding how the sources were shaped. Thomas Merton’s The Last of the Fathers (1954) is a readable introduction built around the text of Doctor Mellifluus.
For the reader who wishes to begin with Bernard himself: read De diligendo Deo in one sitting, then the first four sermons on the Song of Songs, then the Missus est homilies. These three texts contain the whole of his doctrine in seed.
Learning path continuation: this entry belongs to the Lives of the Saints path. Those following the Spiritual Practices path will find in De diligendo Deo a foundational text on the degrees of charity; those following Theology and Doctrine may wish to take up the relation of grace and free will in De gratia et libero arbitrio alongside Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 109–114.