So the youth marched into the poor monastery of Citeaux, where scanty food, rough clothing, harsh surroundings and occasional epidemic disorders had nearly disheartened and broken up the company of monks. Stephen Harding, their English abbot, was proudly indifferent to all patronage; but he was not so blind as not to perceive that Bernard, with thirty captives of the bow and spear of his eloquence, was a valuable addition to a depleted community.

These Cistercians, then and always, were rigidists. Up they got at two in the morning to prayer and “matins;” and for full two hours were busy, in a cold dark chapel, over them. Then, with the first dawn of light, out again to “lauds.” Before this service, and after it, the monk’s time was fairly his own; but at two o’clock he dined, at nightfall he had “vespers,” and at six or eight (according to the season) came “compline,” and then immediately the dormitory and bed. Such was the life, with a little more of it on Sundays, and with sermons interspersed at intervals. There is no mention of breakfast or supper!

And in such a life the ecstatic, mystical character of Bernard rose into visions and prophecies. His body was nearly subjugated, and his taste, and, indeed, all his senses, appeared to have deserted him. He watched, he dug, he hewed and carried wood; he kept the very letter, and more than the letter of his monastic rule. And yet, as Morison acutely observes, this very abstraction from people and things gave him that delight in nature from which, so often in the future, he was to catch the illustration or the inspiration of his discourse. “Beeches and oaks,” he said, “had ever been his best teachers in the Word of God.”

But now Citeaux (suddenly become prosperous) must colonize; and who so fit to lead the swarm from the gates and found the new hive as this same Bernard? Into his hands Abbot Stephen puts the cross, and he and his twelve companions march solemnly across the interdicted boundaries of their little Cistercian home, and nearly a hundred miles to the northward. There he chooses a place which exhibits, as Bernard’s actions generally do, the far-sighted sagacity which takes mean and worthless matters and makes them what, with right handling, they are able to become. It is a valley—the “Valley of Wormwood.” It is grown up with underbrush and is a haunt of robbers. But here, with the river Aube winding down between the hills, with the hills themselves capable of culture, and with the future of this little vale revealed to his prophetic eye, he sets his cloister and calls it Clairvaux—“Fair Valley,” or “Brightdale.”

I wish that I could quote the beautiful picture that Vaughan (Hours with the Mystics, Book V., chap. 1) has given of this fine enterprise. We should see Bernard and his monks chopping and binding fagots; planting vines and trees of goodly fruit; rearing their cloistral buildings, when the time arrived, out of the very materials about them, and so steadily transforming purgatory into paradise. There should we see the river bending its great shoulders to the wheels that drive fulling-mill and grist-mill; or toiling for them in their tannery, or filling their caldarium. We should see the monks at vintage or at harvest; pressing the clusters from yonder hill, or gathering the hay from yonder meadow. And everywhere throughout this busy, energetic life, we should behold the wasted figure of their chief—austere, sincere, severe. And we should feel that unaccountable personality—that intrinsic, magnetic, controlling quality which made this the man above all others to be the opposer of schismatics, the counsellor of kings, the establisher of popes, and the preacher of the Second Crusade. Clairvaux was his kingdom, and from Clairvaux he ruled the mediaeval world.

His personal appearance was in keeping with this idea—it was the evident cause of an evident effect. He was taller than the middle height and exceedingly thin. His complexion was “clear, transparent, red-and-white;” and always he had some color in his wasted face. His beard was reddish, and—according to his ancestral derivation, called Sorus or “yellow-haired”—his own hair was light and perhaps tawny. This beard grows whiter in the course of years, and these hollow cheeks glow with the enthusiasm of the orator as he speaks. Then he is at his best! He flings aside all feebleness; he disregards every consideration except the truth; he flashes and glitters as the tremendous squadrons of his brilliant logic, or still more brilliant exhortation, press down upon the listening soul. He had indeed a perfect confidence in himself, in his methods, and in his ultimate success. He was like a modern ocean steamer, iron-hulled, steam-driven, sharp-prowed, cutting through all storms without detention, and riding the wildest waves in his triumphant course to victory.

There is in Bernard of Clairvaux a most singular combination of the dreamer and the man of affairs. Vaughan has too admirably condensed the story of these interruptions and occupations, for me to avoid quoting, at least this much, from his capital monograph:

“Struggling Christendom,” he says, “sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms to knock and blow horns at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival popes, and cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.”

Yet with all this he is a profound scholar, and his comments on Scripture are of a mystical, and often of a serenely spiritual and thoughtful kind, as though no intrusion could jar the harmony and poise of his soul. His was that strange contradiction of nature which found its calm in tumult and its ecstasy in conflict. Obstructions pass away.

Like that later mystic, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), there are no hindrances in his communion with the unseen world; he could, perhaps, do as Novalis did when Sophie KÜhn died. For the poor fellow records in his diary: “Much noise in the house. I went to her grave and had a few wild moments of joy.” And of him also Just declares: “No spirit-dream was too high, no business detail too low;” for Novalis in 1799 was “Assessor and Law-adviser to the Salt Mines of Thuringia.” Pegasus in harness appears no worse a contradiction than a mystic in a salt-pan, or a Bernard epistolizing the Count of Champagne about a drove of stolen pigs.

Prose and poetry, poetry and prose! And yet the brain and soul that can do good work in the one are by no means disqualified for the other; and your truest mystics are not likely to wear long hair and talk raving nonsense among impractical neologists. For Bernard, even though he made converts wherever he went, and drew increasing numbers into cloister walls, exerted a potent and prevalent influence upon his time. He is one of the lighthouses, as we sail down the coast of the Middle Ages; and not until we pass him and his compeers, do the real darkness and the dull ignorance, the shoals and the unmarked rocks appear, ready to wreck the ventures of the mind. How gladly one would linger over these fascinating incidents in this remarkable career! The man’s life was expressed in some of his own aphorisms. They are such as these:

“There is no truer wretchedness than a false joy.” “He does not please who pleases not himself.” “You will give to your voice the voice of virtue if you have first persuaded yourself of what you would persuade others.” “Hold the middle line unless you wish to miss the true method.”

These are the maxims of an orator as well as of a statesman. And the junction of imagination, analysis, logic, fervor, and faith, made this man what he was. Already he had tried his wings in preaching to his own monks at morning and evening; and they had listened to him as though he had come from another world. He dealt with the great and vital questions of the moral nature. Like the best of our modern preachers, he aimed to sustain the soul, to arouse and to cheer it, and to bid it press forward to a victory which he himself foresaw. He might have said of such aspiring saints as surrounded him what Roscoe says:

He felt, with Lacordaire, that the Gospel had a new meaning, when he discovered that it was intended for the comfort of the human heart. He was at one with his monks; and as he reached out toward the social life about him, and toward the turbid torrents of politics and ecclesiasticism over which he must throw the bridge of charity or of faith, he simply transferred the Clairvaux method into the affairs of men.

It was an age of destruction, and into it he was casting the salt of the Gospel, hoping at least to make it salvable. Around his life needless legends and superstitious traditions have combined to cluster, but the real Bernard is distinct from both. He never relaxed his grip upon himself or upon others. And while this is not yet the place to speak of the famous controversy with Abelard, it may be properly said that Bernard saw tendencies in that philosophy which were genuinely dangerous; and that he defeated them because truth (however narrow and selfishly employed) is always stronger than error. Such was also his power in preaching the crusade in 1145, when he was about fifty-five years of age. It sprang from the quenchless fire of his zeal, as when at Vezelai, standing by the side of Louis VII., he caused such enthusiasm in the crowd beneath, that he did nothing so long as he remained in the town but make crosses for them to wear in sign of their holy purpose.

He had lived to see the Knights Templars, which had received his own especial approval, become one of the most famous orders on the globe. The Knights Hospitallers had been incorporated in 1113, and the Templars were founded in 1118 by Hugo de Paganis and others. But in 1128, at the Council of Troyes, there were but nine of them, all told, to keep their vow of “chastity, obedience, and poverty,” to “guard the passes and roads against robbers,” and to “watch over the safety of pilgrims.” Hugo then appealed to Bernard, and by his influence the council recognized this weak thing, destined so soon to be a mighty force, and which combined two of the strongest of our instincts—that to fight and that to pray. And now as in his old age he saw the corruption which was creeping into it and into other agencies on which his heart had been set, he relaxed no atom of his vigilance. He had seen the failure of his crusade, but it did not much affect him. His thoughts were now of heaven, and his watching was that he might be prepared to enter its gates. His principal friends had all died; Suger, in 1150, Theobald of Champagne, in 1152, and Pope Eugenius, his loved disciple, in 1153.

It was in this year that Bernard also made himself ready to go. On January 12th he said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, raising up what his admirers were wont to call his “dove-like” eyes, he prayed that God’s will might be done. And so, quietly and peacefully, he passed away. He has left behind him much as an ecclesiast, but more as a poet. I hold Bernard to be the real author of the modern hymn—the hymn of faith and worship. The poetry of Faber, which is now so near to the heart of the Church, is peculiarly in this key. The Salve Caput cruentatum came to us through Paul Gerhardt, and has become (through the translation of Dr. J. W. Alexander, a man of kindred spirit with Bernard) our

Gerhardt’s own hymn-writing—the most efficient, except Luther’s, in the German tongue—is wonderfully affected by Bernard. The Jesu dulcis memoria was rendered by Count Zinzendorf and became famous among those spiritual souls, the Moravians. And Edward Caswell’s translations—as I have already noticed—are supremely fine in spirit and in expression. I shall not attempt here what has been so capitally done already. The Church universal has made Bernard her own; and the very translations of his verses have been half-inspired. And while we sing,

we shall sing “with the spirit and with the understanding,” the very strain that the Abbot of Clairvaux was sent on earth to teach! They canonized him in 1174—but it is better to have written a song for all saints than to be found in any breviary.