Bernard of Clairvaux, and so high are the praises which must, on any just view of his character, be considered his due, that an eloquence not less than his own would be needed to give adequate expression to them. He was an untiring and transcendently able labourer; and that in many fields. In all his manifold activities are manifest an intellect vigorous and splendid, and a magnetic attractiveness of personal character which never failed to influence and win over others to his views.
We have to look at S. Bernard in more than one capacity. First and chiefly, he was a monk, for he lived in an age when the most elevated religious enthusiasm inevitably took the form of the monastic vocation. Nor is it difficult to see why this was necessarily the case.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries war, public or private, was the chief business of princes and nobles, and a constant incident of the daily life of the masses of the common people. But always when the world lives in a state of war, religion is driven to take the incorporated or associate i. Exaggerated forms generate each other in turn; and the idealized unworldliness of the monastic theory was the virtual protest, and a very needful one, against the coarseness and cruelty of the world as it stood.
Monastic institutions satisfied, in fact, the conscience of the age, and were popular because they did so. Even so gifted a man as Bernard, we may venture to believe, would not have been nearly so influential had he been anything but a monk; because monachism was the expression, and the necessary expression, of the religious sentiment of those times. How deeply the monastic theory was graven into the consciousness of the twelfth century is shown by the practical paradox attempted, and actually accomplished for a time, in the welding together of characters absolutely contradictory—the soldier and the monk,—in the Knights Templars, the Knights of Calatrava and Alcantara, and other military Orders.
Bernard, then, was a monk and an ascetic, and as such the foremost in power and influence of his time. He was not only practically the founder of the great Cistercian Order, which was frequently called by his name, but to him was owing in great measure, though not wholly, that general reform of the monastic Orders which restored for a time the austerity of the ancient discipline, and even surpassed it. So great was the enthusiasm which he inspired that thousands of eager postulants, drawn from all classes, crowded into the convents which were reorganized or founded by him.
