Reading Saving Paradise: St. Bernard

Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was the most sought-out preacher and religious advisor of his time.  As a young man he joined the Cistercians (a new, reforming Benedictine order), and was eventually chosen to be the first abbot of Clairvaux. 

Bernard’s core value was love. He described the monastic enclosure as a garden of love, where monks could seek a lover’s embrace with Christ; and he described the Cistercian life as a pilgrimage, lived in prayerful adoration of the crucified Christ. The spiritual practice of adoration would draw Jesus into one’s own heart.   

Bernard counseled his monks to follow a spiritual path that led to a mystical, deeply personal, and even erotic union with God.  He believed human beings had their origin in heaven, and longed to be reunited with their source.   When talking about the Incarnation, he described it as a kiss of the human and divine natures: 

A fertile kiss therefore… is the uniting of God with man.  Normally the touch of lip on lip is the sign of the loving embrace of hearts, but this conjoining of natures brings together the human and divine…. This was the kiss for which just men yearned … longing to taste that fullness of his.  (Bernard’s Commentary on the Song of Songs)

Bernard and pilgrimage

As the end of the first millennium approached, anxiety grew about the coming Last Judgment.  When Christ did not return as hoped, there was a growing desire to help God bring the end of time. The Crusades came to be seen as crucial to the attempt to bring a new heaven to earth.   

In 1146, news came from Edessa: the city and most of the surrounding countryside had fallen into the hands of the Turks.  Jerusalem and other Crusader states were threatened with similar disaster. Pope Eugene III commissioned Bernard to preach a Second Crusade.

Those who preached the Crusades, including Bernard, began to speak of a new dimension of love for God - seeking an ecstatic union with Christ’s sufferings.  This ecstatic union could be found in monasteries, but it could also be found on pilgrimages.  Many people went on local pilgrimages to nearby cathedrals, such as Canterbury, Chartres, or Rome; thousands of others went all the way to Jerusalem.  But when pilgrimages turned into  Crusades, violence was added to the mix of personal devotion and yearning for union with God. 

Bernard and violence 

Bernard’s sermons and writings lifted lay crusaders to the status of monks, but they also turned cloistered monks into warriors.  (The Cistercians even had their own order of fighting monks, the Knights Templar.)  Although the scriptures and long centuries of Christian tradition had forbidden homicide (killing another human being), Bernard claimed the Hebrew prophets had promised Jerusalem’s deliverance from her enemies, and foreshadowed the new knighthood which would free the ancient city.   Bernard coined the new term malecide (killing an evildoer) to describe the  holy violence of the Crusades.

At first, there was little popular enthusiasm for another Crusade.  But in March of 1146, in the presence of the French king, nobles, and bishops Bernard preached to an enormous crowd in a field at Vezelay.  In The Age of the Crusades, James Meeker Ludlow describes the scene:

A large platform was erected on a hill outside the city. King and monk stood together, representing the combined will of earth and heaven. The enthusiasm of the assembly of Clermont in 1095, when Peter the Hermit and Urban II launched the first crusade, was matched by the holy fervor inspired by Bernard as he cried, 

"O ye who listen to me! Hasten to appease the anger of heaven, but no longer implore its goodness by vain complaints. Clothe yourselves in sackcloth, but also cover yourselves with your impenetrable bucklers. The din of arms, the danger, the labors, the fatigues of war, are the penances that God now imposes upon you. Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance." 

As in the olden scene, the cry ‘Deus vult!  (God wills it!)’  rolled over the fields, and was echoed by the voice of the orator: "Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood."

When Bernard was finished his sermon, the crowd enlisted en masse; it is said they ran out of cloth to make crosses, and that Bernard gave his own outer garments to be cut up to make more. Unlike the First Crusade (the ‘People’s Crusade’) this new venture attracted royalty – kings, numerous other nobles and bishops, and even a queen. But an even greater show of support came from the common people. Bernard wrote to the pope a few days afterwards, "Cities and castles are now empty. There is not left one man to seven women, and everywhere there are widows to still-living husbands."

This Second Crusade would fail disastrously,  However, the call to ‘take the cross’ would continue, with hundreds joining subsequent Crusades and pouring their lives and resources into dying for love.  A century later, Ordo of Chateauroux would echo Bernard’s themes when he called Christians into another Crusade, saying:

… A man burns with love of God and zeal for God when he leaves country, possessions, house, children and wife, going overseas in the service of Jesus Christ… Whoever wishes to take and have Christ ought to follow Him: to follow Him to death.