Bernard "Like a towering cedar"

Like a Towering Cedar. Solemnity of Saint Bernard 20 August 2007.

With reference to my earlier grouse about the style of St. Bernard compared to Thomas Merton I have two amendments.

1. In a Comment, the Answer was kindly sent by Liam, “No Man is an Islan, closing chapter ‘Silence’, §16-17.

2. In the Introduction to the Mass this morning I actually felt closer to St. Bernard when suggesting in our Penitential Rite that we should give comfort to the Saint in his greatest disappointment/failure of the 2^nd Crusade.

At First Vespers we sang the Antiphon, “Like a towering cedar he ascended to glory”, followed by the Chapter, “Well loved by God, well loved by man, a blessing rests on his memory. The Lord gave him glory given saints.”

Looking out from the Guesthouse there is a magnificent Cedar of Lebanon. The words and music of the Antiphon and the view of that tree lent grandeur to the feast of St. Bernard.

I cannot help feeling that, “The fire of his eloquence has been quenched in the written words that survive”. If these words, from Steven Runciman’s, “Crusades” ring true for me, it is also true what the same writer expresses regarding the charismatic presence of Bernard when his personal words roused minds and hearts of individuals or assemblies of councils or crusades.

My problem is to catch that spirit so smothered in words of rhetoric. In the midst of his 3 Volume History of the Crusades, Runciman seems to have acquired the insight of the particular character of this ‘chimera of his age’.

“King Louis wrote to the Pope to tell him of his own desire to lead a Crusade; and he sent for the one man in France whose authority was greater than his own, Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Saint Bernard was now at the height of his reputation. It is difficult now to look back across the centuries and appreciate the tremendous impact of his personality on all who knew him. The fire of his eloquence has been quenched in the written words that survive. As a theologian and a controversialist he now appears rigid and a little crude and unkind.

But from the day in 1115 when. at the age of twenty-five. he was appointed Abbot of Clairvaux, till his death nearly forty years later he was the dominant influence in the religious and political life of western Europe. It was he who gave the Cistercian Order its impetus ; it was he who. almost single-handed. had rescued the Papacy from the slough of the schism of Anacletus. The fervour and sincerity of his preaching combined with his courage. his vigour and the blamelessness of his life to bring victory to any cause that he supported, save only against the embittered Cathar heretics of Languedoc. He had long been interested in the fate of eastern Christendom and had himself in 112.8 helped in drawing up the rule for the Order of the Temple. When the Pope and the King begged for his help in preaching the Crusade. he eagerly complied!

The assembly met at Vezelay on 31 March 1146. The news that Saint Bernard was going to preach brought visitors from all over France. As at Clermont, half a century before, the crowd was too great to be fitted into the Cathedral. Saint Bernard spoke from a platform erected in a field outside the little town. His words have not been handed down. We only know that he read out the papal Bull asking for a holy expedition and promising absolution to an that took part in it. and that he then made use of his incomparable rhetoric to show the urgency of the papal demand. Very soon his audience was under his spell. Men began to cry for Crosses - 'Crosses, give us Crosses’.-. It was not long before all the stuff that had been prepared to sew into Crosses was exhausted; and Saint Bernard flung off his own outer garments to be cut up.

At sunset he and his helpers were still stitching as more and more of the faithful pledged themselves to go on the Crusade. King Louis was the first to take the Cross; and his- vassals forgot their earlier coolness in their eagerness to follow him.

Sir Steven Runciman, History of Crusades, 2. Kingdom of Jerusalem, pp.252-253

“Like a towering cedar he ascended to glory”. It is fine to sing in celebration of Bernard but he himself would appreciate the comfort of the Penitential Rite of the Mass as I suggested that we could comfort him in the great sorrow he had for the 2^nd Crusade. We can comfort him with the thought that the 2^nd Crusade was a movement, a mass movement on a European scale waiting for a voice, Kind Louis Vassals were against the Crusade, the Pope was reluctant, Peter Abelard was against it, the Abbot of Cluny did not favour it, Against all the odds the voice of Bernard ignited something of which he could not foresee the consequences. We can comfort him in the fact that when God calls someone to a task it does not necessarily that he is called to success. Bernard did what was God’s will for him. Bernard was later burdened by the results that may have hastened his death, August 20, 1153. Like the Prophets he was not called necessarily to success but to follow the divine designs. We are not called to success as of right but to do God’s will.

In his heart Bernard was set on other realms. (Ironically, while he urged on his own Knights Templar and Crusaders,he was violently opposed to any of his monks setting off for the Holy Land).

If one could reduce the outpourings in his writing in the Canticle of Canticles to a word, his greatest aim was to love love itself.

(Canticle Serm 83, 2-6. “Why should love itself not be loved?”)