Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard was born in 1090 near Dijon in Burgundy, the third of seven children to Tescelin le Roux, a knight in service to the Duke of Burgundy, and Aleth de Montbard, a woman whose piety would shape her son's earliest formation. The family moved in the circles of minor nobility, but Aleth's influence pointed Bernard toward the church from childhood. When she died in 1107, the seventeen-year-old Bernard experienced what his biographers describe as a profound spiritual crisis that clarified his calling. In 1112, he appeared at the gates of Cîteaux, the struggling mother house of the Cistercian reform movement, bringing with him thirty companions including four of his brothers and several uncles. The recruitment was so thorough that his sister-in-law supposedly complained he had "emptied the countryside."

The Cistercians represented a deliberate return to the original Rule of Saint Benedict, stripping away the accumulated wealth and political entanglements that had softened monastic life. At Cîteaux, under the guidance of Abbot Stephen Harding, Bernard embraced a discipline of manual labor, liturgical prayer, and contemplative study that would ground everything he later wrote. In 1115, just three years after his arrival, he was sent to establish a new foundation in the valley of Wormwood — a desolate place he renamed Clairvaux, "clear valley." He was twenty-five years old.

From Clairvaux, Bernard's influence spread across Europe through a network of daughter houses, correspondence, and personal intervention in the major controversies of his time. By his death in 1153, Clairvaux had founded sixty-eight monasteries. But Bernard was never content to remain within monastic walls. He corresponded with kings, popes, and bishops, wielding what contemporaries recognized as an almost unparalleled combination of spiritual authority and rhetorical power. His involvement in the papal schism of 1130, where he secured recognition for Innocent II over the rival claimant Anacletus II, demonstrated his capacity to shape church politics. His preaching of the Second Crusade in 1146, where crowds reportedly tore his habit into relics as he spoke, showed his ability to move popular religious sentiment. When the crusade failed catastrophically, Bernard accepted responsibility in a letter to Pope Eugenius III: "I opened my mouth; I spoke; and immediately the crusaders have multiplied to infinity."

The contradictions were real and costly. Bernard championed reform and contemplative withdrawal while exercising power that required constant political engagement. He preached the love of God while authorizing persecution of heretics and calling for the destruction of Muslim forces in the Holy Land. His attacks on Peter Abelard, the brilliant dialectician whose theological method Bernard saw as rationalistic pride, contributed to Abelard's condemnation at the Council of Sens in 1140. Bernard's own spiritual writings, however, reveal a man aware of his failures and the tension between his contemplative ideals and his public responsibilities.

His Writing and Its Influence

Bernard began writing in response to requests from his monastic community and correspondents seeking spiritual guidance. His earliest works included letters of direction to fellow abbots and treatises on specific aspects of monastic life. The treatise "On Loving God," written around 1126, established the framework that would govern all his subsequent spiritual teaching: the four degrees of love, beginning with love of self for self's sake and ascending to love of self for God's sake. This progression from cupiditas to caritas became foundational for medieval spiritual theology.

His masterwork, the "Sermons on the Song of Songs," occupied the last eighteen years of his life and remained unfinished at his death, ending at chapter three verse one. The eighty-six sermons transform the biblical love poetry into an elaborate exploration of the soul's relationship with God, drawing on both personal experience and the broader tradition of Christian mysticism. Bernard's allegorical method reads the bride and bridegroom as the soul and Christ, but his treatment is psychologically acute and experientially grounded in ways that distinguished it from purely academic exegesis. He writes not as a scholar explicating a text but as a spiritual master describing the actual stages of contemplative union.

Bernard's theological contributions centered on his synthesis of Augustinian psychology with Benedictine spirituality and his development of what became known as "affective mysticism" — an approach that emphasized the role of love and desire in the soul's ascent to God. Against the emerging scholastic method that privileged rational analysis, Bernard insisted that God is known through love rather than through dialectical reasoning. His famous phrase "Jesus, the very thought of thee" captures this emphasis on affective devotion that would influence the Franciscan tradition and later mystical writers including Bonaventure and the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing."

The manuscript tradition of Bernard's works reflects his immediate influence. His letters, numbering over five hundred, circulated widely during his lifetime. The "Sermons on the Song of Songs" exist in hundreds of medieval manuscripts, indicating sustained copying and study across Europe. His works were among the first to be printed when printing technology reached monastic houses, and they remained standard reading in seminaries and religious communities through the Counter-Reformation.

Bernard was canonized in 1174, just twenty-one years after his death, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830. Dante placed him in the highest circle of paradise as the guide who leads the pilgrim to the direct vision of God — a literary choice that reflects Bernard's reputation as the supreme mystical teacher of the medieval church. His influence on later spiritual writing extends through the Rhineland mystics, the devotio moderna movement, and the Spanish Carmelites. Even Protestant reformers, despite their rejection of medieval monasticism, found value in his scriptural commentaries and his emphasis on personal relationship with Christ.

Who should read Bernard of Clairvaux: Readers drawn to the mystical tradition who want to understand how the deepest contemplative experience connects to scriptural study and community life. He is essential for those interested in the development of medieval spirituality and the integration of Augustinian psychology with monastic practice. He is not for readers seeking quick spiritual techniques or those uncomfortable with allegorical biblical interpretation. His relevance extends to anyone wrestling with the tension between contemplative calling and active responsibility in the world — a tension Bernard never resolved but illuminated through his own costly experience.