by Freddy Silva
As for Aleth, she was the sister of Templar knight André de Montbard, one of the two men presently sitting beside her son bearing news from the Holy Land.
From an early age Bernard sought a direct, mystical experience of God, and began by persuading a small group of friends and relatives to establish a monastic community in his parental home—at the age of twenty-two! Then he learned about the Cistercian Order, its unique brand of asceticism, and its abbey at Citeaux founded by rogue monks who wished to break with Benedictine tradition and opt for an even stricter, more ascetic way of life.
Citeaux’s own story begins with Robert, a teenage noble of Champagne who renounced his wealth, became a monk, and founded a monastery at Molesme in Burgundy. In 1075 he was sought out by Albéric de Cîteaux and his group of hermits, who emerged from deep in the woods and asked Robert to erect a new monastery. The initial structure consisted of nothing more than a smattering of huts made of branches surrounding a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Nevertheless, it grew in popularity, so much so that when new and unsuitable monks joined this burgeoning group of Benedictines the brothers became disturbed by the growing lack of asceticism. Inevitably, Robert de Molesme left, along with Albéric and a third monk, the Englishman Stephen Harding, to found the abbey of Cîteaux deep inside a dense forest in a desolate valley, with the full support of the Duke of Burgundy.
Citeaux became the cornerstone for the new Cistercian Order. But the monks may have taken the idea of asceticism a tad too far because within a brief period of time the extreme austerity drove out so many brothers that the abbey almost ceased to function. By the time Bernard de Clairvaux and his small band of followers requested to join, the Cistercian Order was on its knees, literally, but the newcomers’ influence and business acumen quickly revitalized its fortunes.
Cistercian ideals were far removed from the Vatican’s. They pertained to education, agriculture, and the sacred arts, and the timing could not have been more fortuitous. The twelfth century was witnessing a move toward settlement, agriculture, and continuous growth of a market and monetary economy. Cathedral schools became established in several towns—particularly in Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy—and were heavily attended by sons of nobles who took up study in favor of militarism. People training to be monks, particularly those joining the Cistercian Order, “knew more of the outside world than previously had been the case. This trend also caused a change in the understanding and portrayal of the love toward God, which now more closely reflected the love between men and women.”11 Such an expanded view allowed for a healthier relationship between monasteries and the nobility, who in those days were also the military elite.
The Cistercians capitalized on this trend toward religious renewal and the shift to husbandry of the land. Even so, Bernard soon became unhappy with the lack of asceticism practiced at Citeaux and began to look for a new location where to build himself an abbey to develop his own brand of piety and austerity.
The news reached the ear of the Count of Troyes, better known as Comte Hugh de Champagne, who was more than happy to donate a goodly parcel of land to his relative, since he happened to own this part of Europe.12 He was, after all, one of the wealthiest lords, and in his time he had already made a number of important donations to abbeys and cathedrals in and around his seat in Troyes,13 even founding the Abbey of Cheminon.14
Comte Hugh understood Bernard’s vision only too well. In 1104 he had met in conclave with a close-knit group of lords, some of whom had just returned from Jerusalem.15 Whatever was conveyed at the meeting compelled him to sail immediately to Jerusalem with his cousin and vassal, Hugues de Payns,16 who had requested his patronage in support of a new Order of knights. While in Jerusalem, Comte Hugh would have been introduced to his illustrious Flemish neighbor, King Baudoin I, and a Burgundian knight by the name of Dom Henrique of Portugale, who, like himself, had traveled a great distance.
Comte Hugh returned a second time in 1114—coincidentally at the time of Dom Henrique’s death—but the stay was not only mysteriously brief, he also appears to have been privy to something of great importance, for “he announced a more serious project, he thought he should stay in these faraway lands for the rest of his life, and be part at the birth of the new militia.”17 Whatever vision the comte experienced, he returned in haste to Champagne less than a year later to renounce his worldly goods. But not before walking Bernard around his fields at Clairvaux and acquainting him with a tract of land he had chosen as the most suitable building site for the monk’s future abbey.
Bernard looked around the fertile land beaming with potency under the warm June air, graciously thanked him, and declined. True to his ideals, the monk instead requested an adjacent site in the Vale d’Absinthe, one of most inferior quality, in a dismal part of the forest that required extensive clearing. Slightly bewildered, Comte Hugh reflected on Bernard’s choice and granted his wish, and on the feast day of John the Baptist, in a valley possessed of a most notorious reputation as a haven of thieves and robbers, a new temple was founded in a place abundant in poverty of spirit.
In the decades that followed, the choice of locations for new Cistercian abbeys under Bernard’s leadership regularly deviated from the Rule originally set by the mother abbey of Citeaux, sometimes even relocating the site altogether.18 Indeed, after the founding of Clairvaux, Citeaux and its satellite monasteries would adapt Bernard’s methods and codes of conduct.
By his twenty-fifth birthday Bernard had not only become abbot of Clairvaux, his will also had completely revitalized the Cistercian Order. During his abbacy the Order grew to 345 monasteries and 167 filiations, with Clairvaux enjoying exceptional status. For good measure, Bernard also rebuilt the ruined chapel on the Scottish island of Iona into a Cistercian abbey, thereby rescuing the failing Celtic church.19
Clairvaux was admitting monks at such a rate that, within three years, sister abbeys needed to be founded, at which point Bernard’s cousin Godefroy came to his aid. One of the original members of Bernard’s troupe of monks, Godefroy de la Roche had been given a hermitage on the outskirts of the town of Montbard, and the grounds on which it stood proved suitable for the building of a larger abbey. The de la Roche family made financial contributions toward the construction, and at their insistence, Bernard founded the abbey of Fontenay in 1118. Godefroy de la Roche would in time become its abbot, and a decade later, prior of Clairvaux.20 Interestingly, religion played an important part in the de la Roche family: Godefroy’s sister was the first abbess of the sacred well of Orbe, and more importantly, members of the family had once moved to Portugale and one had given birth to a boy, Pedro Arnaldo da Rocha. Thus, Godefroy’s cousin Bernard de Clairvaux was also related to the man who became prior of the Ordre de Sion.
Life under Bernard at Clairvaux was just as you would expect from a man of passionate devotion. The monks slept on leaves and straw in unheated dormitories without blankets. Their diet consisted of wild berries, roots, and leaves; on extravagant days the menu’s pièce de résistance consisted of boiled vegetables. Bernard himself led an even more ascetic lifestyle than his peers, sleeping in a kind of hovel, a space under the stairs leading to the dormitory. But at least he enjoyed some privileges: the brethren at Clairvaux gave Bernard ample space to allow “his mystical contemplation of the blessings of Paradise that the saints may taste in their ascent to God.”21
Given his principles, it is understandable that Bernard should speak out against the corruption of bishops and priests within the church, for which he had little tolerance, evidenced by no less than seven letters to four consecutive popes requesting the removal of the archbishop of York, William FitzHerbert, because the Englishman acquired his position through bribery. In his treatise De Consideratione, Bernard is clearly disapproving of men of the cloth lobbying the pope in order to gain influence for their sole ends. He saw the overtly decadent and comfortable lifestyle of Benedictine monks in Cluny and other abbeys as a path to oblivion. These people drank the finest wine
s, ate the rarest of foods, and spent much of the year in luxury homes in Paris, all paid for with jewels, land, money, even works of art solicited by abbots through the advertising slogan, “Nothing can be too good for God.”
Writing in his Apology, Bernard broaches the extravagances of religious orders and the pomp and circumstance in which abbots indulged.
I will overlook the immense heights of the places of prayer, their immoderate lengths, their superfluous widths, the costly refinements, and the painstaking representations which deflect the attention while they are in them those who pray and thus hinder their devotion. To me they somehow represent the ancient rite of the Jews. But so be it, let these things be made for the honor of God. However, as a monk, I put to monks the same question that a pagan used to criticize other pagans. “Tell me, priest,” he said, “what is gold doing in the holy place?” I, however, say, “Tell me, poor man, if indeed you are a poor man, what is gold doing in the holy place?”22
In the twelfth century Bernard was the focal point of Christianity, certainly in its purest form, for he saw in Christ an example of oneness and inner balance, and in his Letter to the Rain he describes the voluntary Cistercian lifestyle as closer to peasantry than other religious orders, thus showing solidarity with the common people.23 His sermons and personal accounts offer an image of a visionary, a human being living on a foundation of love and compassion, and as far as he was concerned, anything a man did in life that was less than complete devotion to God was a waste of effort. But he also recognized the duality within man and preached austerity, poverty, and purity as a foundation for inner greatness.
He advocated the rights of the working classes, the poor, and the peasantry in opposition to the oppression of the class to which he was born. He outlawed slavery, had monks work alongside laborers, paid fair wages, provided free schools, fed and clothed the poor, and treated them in sickness. He forbade racial discrimination, promoted tolerance of Jews and women, and appears to have respected the codes of honor of different classes with whom he interacted: “He preached to all kinds of people, anxious as he was for the salvation of their souls. He adapted himself to each particular audience, on the basis of what he knew about their understanding, their customs and their interests.”24
He practiced what he preached—a simple faith, complete surrender to God.
According to the abbot Guillerme de Saint-Thierry, Bernard was less concerned about the hardships he and his community endured than about the future blessings his example at Clairvaux would bring to the souls of mankind:
His greatest desire was for the salvation of all mankind, and this has been the greatest passion of his heart from the first day of his life as a monk even to the day on which I am writing this, so that his longing to draw all men of God is like a mother’s devoted care for her children. All the time there is the conflict in his heart between his great desire for souls and the desire to remain hidden from the attention of the world, for sometimes in his humility and low esteem of himself he confesses that he is not worthy to produce any fruitful increase in the Church, whilst at other times his desire knows no bounds and burns so strongly within him that it seems that nothing can satisfy it, but the salvation of mankind.25
In his sermon In septuagesimo, Bernard refers to Clairvaux as the city of Sion, the city of the eternal king, and warns of enemies who seek to destroy it from without, and traitors from within, particularly those who seek to soften spiritual discipline, wage war, and generally hurt the love toward others. He often compares his abbey to a fortress and repeatedly identifies it with the heavenly Jerusalem and an ideal state of peace—a metaphor of the eternal struggle between malice and injustice, and right action: “Clairvaux . . . is truly Jerusalem, united to the one in heaven by whole-hearted devotion, by conformity of life, and by a certain spiritual affinity. . . . [One] has chosen to dwell here, because here he has found, not yet, to be sure, the fullness of vision, but certainly the hope of that true peace, peace which surpasses all our thinking.”26
For Bernard, Jerusalem was a like a mother who descends to Earth as a place of divinity and peace, and in this symbol lies an explanation behind the symbol of nine knights guarding the pilgrim trail. Their task was to protect the path to an ideal state, a kingdom of heaven. Metaphorically speaking, the Knights Templar assisted the pilgrim seeking a road to a better life. As for the popular concept of the Templars as “poor knights,” this quite possibly arose from Bernard’s description of Clairvaux as a community consisting of paupers Christi:27 poor not insomuch as deficit in poverty, but humble, a desire to associate with the common man rather than people who covet material gain, for the person who is poor yet spiritually awake is permanently wealthy.
More than five hundred of Bernard’s letters survive, and peering into them, as well as his prolific prose, offers a tremendous insight into the patron of the Knights Templar, and through him, the desire that motivated the Order of the Temple. Definitely it was not one of military might or of religious conversion by coercion. Bernard was, after all, a reformer of the Cistercian Order, whose practitioners renounced violence on pain of excommunication. Nor did they preach the word of God as missionaries; instead they sought the way of the Light through personal spiritual development and followed examples set by, among others, John the Baptist.
An example of this ideal lies in a letter Bernard wrote to Comte Hugh de Champagne following his donation of land for the building of Clairvaux, after which the comte set sail for Jerusalem to become a Templar knight:
If, for God’s work, you have changed yourself from count to knight and from rich to poor, I congratulate you on your just advancement, and I glorify God in you—however, it tries me sorely to be deprived of your delightful presence by God’s mysterious ways; but at least we might see you from time to time, if it is possible. How can we forget our old friendship you have shown to our house? And with what joy we would have cared for you, body, soul and spirit, had you come to live with us! But since it is not so, we pray constantly for the absent one whom we cannot have amongst us.
For a number of years Bernard also kept up correspondence with their mutual friend and relative Hugues de Payns, particularly around the early part of 1126, when the Templars grew noticeably active on Temple Mount and several members returned to Europe, as evidenced by the appearance at Clairvaux of André de Montbard and Brother Gondemare.
But they were by no means the only knights stirred into action by Hugues de Payns. In May of the previous year, the Templar Grand Master cosigned a document in which he and Prior Arnaldo established good relations between their respective Orders,28 after which said prior also becomes noticeably absent from Mount Sion. Writing of this, the chronicler Lucas de Santa Catarina states, “The Grand Master soon dispatched several knights with powers to establish the Portuguese crown. Four of the Knights were Dom Guilherme, who supervised the others, Dom Hugo Martiniense, Dom Gualdino Paes, and Dom Pedro Arnaldo. They had the title and the power of Procurators of the Temple, which they exercised in due course, as many writers agree, while the Order sought to establish a home, and proceed as planned.”29
Joining them on the clandestine voyage was a fifth Templar knight and Procurator, Raimund Bernard.
No doubt Brother Gondemare and André de Montbard shared this explosive piece of news with Bernard. And yet to the Cistercian abbot such a daring move would not have come as a surprise. Bernard may have been contemplating the idea of establishing a new kingdom of conscience for quite some time, a temporal New Jerusalem, a model nation-state that would come to represent the epitome of his ideals,30 because seven years earlier, Bernard himself had dispatched a delegation of monks to that very same Portuguese county, domain of his late uncle, Count Dom Henrique.
Abbey of Clairvaux.
And soon, Henrique’s son, Afonso.
15
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER. CLAIRVAUX. A SPECIAL MOMENT ON JUNE 24 . . .
As if the young abbot did not already have enough on his plate, four year
s after founding Clairvaux, Bernard fostered a relationship with an even younger Afonso Henriques.
The Cistercian monastic chronicles record how, in a moment of meditation on the feast day of John the Baptist, Bernard de Clairvaux was shown another monastery that was to be founded in the western-most part of the Iberian peninsula. After a few days of reflection he gathered eight monks—Boemund, Aldebert, Jean, Bernard, Alderic, Cisinand, Alano, and Brother Roland—and briefed them: “The purpose of your journey will be to found a monastery, to be inhabited by the laws of heaven, so that the inhabitants of the earth may be risen, and those who will inhabit its walls will find the right remedies for their souls, and in doing so they will be shown the road to glory.”1
He told them they were to travel to where a sign from the heavens would present itself, then turned to Brother Gerald and asked the bursar of Clairvaux to organize the necessary provisions for their journey. Much crying was done by all at the time of farewell, for the trip would take them eight hundred miles away and beyond their known world.2
The itinerant monks followed one of the preferred pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, finally reaching the town of Lamego, home to the second oldest Visigothic chapel in Europe, forty miles to the southwest of Braga. Their instructions were to meet with a colleague of Bernard’s, the hermit João Cirita, to whom they would hand a personal letter from the abbot.
João’s virtues and reputation were well known in the nearby Portuguese court of Guimarães. After reading the letter, he and the eight monks walked the 33 miles to the royal court and solicited permission to build a monastery from the heir to the Portuguese throne, Afonso Henriques.
Upon reading the name on the letter, the eleven-year-old was so overjoyed that he kissed the hems of the monks’ habits; after all, this was probably the first letter Afonso had received from his uncle Bernard de Clairvaux.3