Pre-Reformation Theology

Bernard of Clairvaux: The Honey-Tongued Doctor of Grace

Bernard of Clairvaux was, by nearly every contemporary account, the most powerful man in twelfth-century Europe who never held a throne. He was not a pope, though popes sought his counsel. He was not a king, though kings trembled at his letters. He was simply a monk, abbot of a small and struggling monastery in the Burgundian wilderness, and yet for the better part of thirty years he set the moral and spiritual agenda for all of Latin Christendom. His life is worth studying not because he was flawless — he was not — but because he shows what happens when a man takes the claims of the gospel with total, unembarrassed seriousness and then insists that everyone around him do the same.

Bernard was born around 1090 near Dijon, into a family of minor Burgundian nobility. He was a bright, sensitive, and by his own admission rather vain young man, drawn early to literature and to the company of women. Then, in his early twenties, something broke him open. He experienced a conversion so total that he not only entered the newly founded and severely austere monastery of Citeaux, but talked some thirty of his relatives and friends into coming with him — including several of his brothers, and eventually, in old age, his own father. This was the first demonstration of a gift that would define his entire career: Bernard could talk almost anyone into anything, provided the thing he was asking for was total self-surrender to Christ.

Within a few years he was sent out to found a daughter house of Citeaux in a desolate valley that the monks grimly nicknamed the Valley of Wormwood. Bernard renamed it Clairvaux — the clear valley — and built it, quite literally with his own hands, into the mother house of one of the great monastic movements in Christian history. By the time he died in 1153, Clairvaux alone had spawned dozens of daughter abbeys across Europe, and the wider Cistercian order that Bernard did more than anyone to popularize numbered in the hundreds of houses. This is the man behind the movement, and it is worth pausing on just how strange and demanding that movement was. Cistercian life meant manual labor, a diet stripped to its essentials, long hours of silence, and a liturgical schedule that woke men in the dead of night to sing psalms. Bernard did not soften this. If anything, in his early years he pushed his own body so hard in the name of ascetic discipline that his health never fully recovered, and older, wiser monks eventually had to rein him in for his own good.

It was this same intensity, aimed outward rather than inward, that gave Bernard his most famous nickname: the Doctor Mellifluus, the "honey-tongued doctor." The title was meant as a compliment to the sweetness and persuasive power of his preaching and his prose, and later ages would apply it to his theological writing generally. But in his own day the honey had a sharper edge to it. Bernard's preaching on the monastic vocation was so effective, so relentless, and so emotionally overwhelming that it became something of a local hazard. Chroniclers report that when word went out that Bernard was coming to a town, mothers hid their sons and wives hid their husbands, for fear that a single sermon from this thin, pale, hypnotic monk would be enough to talk a man out of his marriage, his inheritance, and his whole life as they had known it, in favor of the tonsure and the monastery gate. This was not mere legend. Young noblemen genuinely did abandon betrothals and family estates after hearing him preach, and Bernard's own family had already provided the first proof of concept. There is something almost unsettling about a man whose words could dissolve household after household, and a modern reader is right to ask hard questions about the human cost of that kind of zeal — the wives left behind, the family lines broken, the sheer force applied to young men who may not always have been thinking clearly in the afterglow of a sermon. But it is also worth remembering what Bernard believed was at stake. He was not selling a lifestyle. He believed, with everything in him, that he was offering men the one thing worth having, and that anything held back from Christ for the sake of comfort or family pride was a poor trade. Whether or not one agrees with the monastic ideal itself, there is no denying that Bernard's eloquence was in service of a conviction, not a con.

That same conviction, and that same eloquence, is on full display in his best-known theological work, On Loving God (De diligendo Deo). It is a short treatise, but it is one of the great meditations on love in the whole Christian tradition, and it repays slow reading. Bernard's basic question is deceptively simple: why should we love God, and how much? His answer to the first question is that God deserves love simply because of who He is and what He has done — the very asking of "why" is already half-answered by the giving of the question itself, since only a God worth infinite love would provoke a man to ask how much love is owed Him. His answer to the second question is the famous line that summarizes the whole book: the measure of loving God is to love Him without measure. From there Bernard lays out his celebrated four degrees of love, moving the soul upward like a ladder. A man begins by loving himself for his own sake, which is simply fallen human nature. He progresses to loving God for his own sake, because God is useful to him and answers his needs. From there, through grace and discipline, he comes to love God for God's own sake, delighting in Him not for what He gives but for who He is. And Bernard held out a fourth and final degree, rarely attained in this life even by the saints, in which a man loves even himself only for God's sake, so wholly absorbed into the divine will that self-love as such disappears. It is a beautiful and demanding structure, and it reflects Bernard's whole spiritual instinct: that the Christian life is not a static transaction but a long climb, powered by grace, toward an ever purer love.

That instinct toward grace is not incidental to Bernard. It is the deepest debt he owed to Augustine of Hippo, whose writings shaped Bernard's mind more thoroughly than any other source outside Scripture itself. Bernard was, in the fullest sense, an Augustinian. He held to Augustine's low view of fallen human nature and his high view of divine grace as the only remedy for it. Bernard insisted, against any hint of self-sufficiency, that free will after the fall is real but wounded, capable of choosing but not of choosing rightly apart from grace, and that every upward step of the soul — even the very desire to love God — is itself a gift rather than an achievement. He wrote at length on grace and free choice in a treatise directly modeled on Augustine's own concerns, defending the idea that merit itself is, paradoxically, a gift, so that when God crowns a man's good works He is, in Bernard's memorable phrase, crowning nothing other than His own gifts in that man. This is about as far from a religion of self-improvement as one can get.

It is this Augustinian emphasis on grace that has led some later readers, Protestant readers especially, to feel a strange kinship with Bernard across the centuries, and it is worth being honest and careful about exactly how far that kinship goes. Bernard did not teach anything like the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, understood as the free, once-for-all imputation of Christ's righteousness received by faith apart from the ongoing cooperation of the sanctifying life. That is a later, sharper formulation, forged in a controversy Bernard never lived to see. He remained, to the end of his life, a son of the medieval church in his sacramental theology, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and his assumption that the monastic life was a uniquely privileged path toward God. And yet it is no accident that both Martin Luther and John Calvin, men not given to praising medieval Catholics lightly, quoted Bernard approvingly and more often than almost any other writer between Augustine and their own day. Luther found in Bernard's sermons a piety that pointed away from human merit and toward Christ as the sole ground of comfort for a terrified conscience. Calvin, in the Institutes, cited Bernard's insistence that our merit is really only God's grace working in us, and used Bernard's own words as a weapon against the very system of merit-mongering that had grown up in the medieval church Bernard belonged to. The honest verdict, then, is that Bernard was no Reformer, but he was a serious enough Augustinian, and serious enough about the ruin of the fall and the sufficiency of grace, that the Reformers themselves recognized a kindred voice in him even while rejecting the church he served.

Nowhere did Bernard's gifts and his flaws come together more dramatically than in his championing of the Second Crusade. In 1145, word reached Europe that the crusader county of Edessa had fallen to Muslim forces, the first of the Latin states in the East to be lost since the First Crusade had carved them out half a century earlier. Pope Eugenius III, himself a former monk of Clairvaux and Bernard's own spiritual son, commissioned Bernard to preach a new crusade to recover the situation. Bernard threw himself into the task with the same total-commitment energy that had once emptied households into monasteries. At Vezelay on Easter of 1146, before King Louis VII of France and a vast crowd, Bernard preached with such force that the supply of cloth crosses ran out and he reportedly began tearing his own habit into strips to meet the demand. He toured Germany and persuaded the Emperor Conrad III to take the cross as well, effectively turning the Second Crusade into a joint venture of the two great powers of Latin Christendom. It was, in terms of sheer rhetorical achievement, perhaps the single greatest performance of his life. And it ended in catastrophe. The German and French armies were badly mismanaged, suffered devastating losses on the march through Asia Minor, and the campaign collapsed in humiliating failure outside Damascus in 1148. Bernard, who had staked so much personal credibility on the enterprise, was left to answer for it, and he did so with characteristic bluntness, refusing to blame God for the disaster and instead placing the failure on the sins of the crusaders themselves, his own included, in a passage of genuine anguish in his later writings.

That willingness to take the blame rather than excuse himself tells you something true about the man. Bernard of Clairvaux was not a cautious figure, and he was not always right — the wreckage of the Second Crusade and the broken households his preaching sometimes left behind are proof enough of that. But he was consistent. The same fire that emptied out family estates into monastery cells and marched two kings toward Damascus is the fire that produced On Loving God, a book still capable of humbling a reader eight centuries later. He believed that God alone was worth an unmeasured love, that grace alone made such love possible, and that a man who understood this had no business hedging his bets. History does not often produce men willing to live out their theology that completely, for better and for worse, and that is finally why Bernard of Clairvaux still repays our attention.