12 - Bernard of Clairvaux

Summary

The earliest surviving reaction to the news of Bernard’s death on 20 August 1153 was written by Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford, who had met Bernard in northern France, during 1147 and 1148. He wrote to congratulate a friend, William de Hinet, who had recently joined Bernard’s Order, and possibly even his own monastery, and then to sympathise with him on Bernard’s death and to praise the qualities of the dead man. He began those praises by expressing his inability for the task, using the rhetorical device of praeteritio (literally: a passing over): ‘O who am I that I might worthily commemorate that holy pastor and that most famous and fecund abbey of Clairvaux?’ and then doing just that.

One sentence reflects the impression that Bernard, then in his late forties and already, by that day’s standards, an old man, had made on him. ‘He was a man horrible with filthiness, whose shrivelled flesh stuck everywhere to his bones, whose body never tasted too much wine, nor mouth any delicacies save for spiritual ones.’ Yet although he looked so appalling, he was ‘celebrated for his knowledge. Most well-known for holiness, most holy without deceit, a famous writer, eminent preacher, the mirror of his order, and enlarger of the church.’ That shrunken figure was produced largely by having strained his physical resources by long periods at prayer, often at night. As early as 1119 his physical condition was such that his fellow abbots allowed the bishop William of Champeaux to take him away from the monastery for twelve months to convalesce. Another picture of Bernard at an earlier stage of his life, by Geoffrey of Auxerre, who had first met Bernard in 1140, scarcely hints at how Bernard was ageing, except when he wrote ‘his body was very thin, and he seemed gaunt’.