Saint Bernard

Abbot and Doctor of the Church

Feast Day

August 20

Life

1090–1153

Canonized

1174

Doctor of the Church

1830

Order

Order of Cistercians (OCist)

Born

Fontaine-les-Dijon, Burgundy, Kingdom of France

Saint Bernard was born at Fontaine-les-Dijon in Burgundy in 1090, third of seven children of Tescelin le Roux, a knight, and Saint Aleth (Aletta) of Montbard. After receiving a careful classical education with the canons of Saint-Vorles at Chatillon-sur-Seine, in 1112 the twenty-two-year-old Bernard, having persuaded thirty companions including four of his brothers and an uncle, presented himself at the new and struggling reform Cistercian abbey of Citeaux under Abbot Saint Stephen Harding. The arrival of so large a group of well-formed novices is the historical pivot at which the Cistercian reform of Western monasticism was secured.

Three years later, in 1115, Stephen Harding sent the twenty-five-year-old Bernard with twelve monks to found a new house in the Aube valley, the abbey of Clairvaux (Clara Vallis, the bright valley), of which he was abbot from his ordination as priest until his death in 1153. From Clairvaux, in those thirty-eight years, Bernard founded sixty-seven daughter houses; the Cistercian Order grew during his life from one house to three hundred and forty-three. He drew the Knights Templar Rule from Saint Hugh of Champagne and Hugues de Payens (1128) and gave the order theological foundation in his De laude novae militiae.

Bernard's public role made him perhaps the most influential ecclesiastical figure of the twelfth-century West. He decisively secured the legitimacy of Pope Innocent II in the schism with the antipope Anacletus II (1130-1138); preached the Second Crusade by command of his former pupil Pope Eugene III, beginning at Vezelay on March 31, 1146; intervened in the cases against Peter Abelard at Sens (1140) and Gilbert de la Porree at Reims (1148) on Christological and Trinitarian doctrine; and undertook countless missions of peacemaking among Christian princes.

His writings include the famous Sermons on the Song of Songs (eighty-six sermons, his masterpiece, on which he was working when he died), De diligendo Deo (On Loving God), De consideratione (a treatise of pastoral theology written for Pope Eugene III), and several hundred letters of immense theological and historical value. His doctrine of the four degrees of love and his ardent Christocentric and Marian piety (he is said to have given the Catholic tradition the prayer Memorare and to have inspired the Salve Regina) made him the principal source of the affective Catholic spirituality of the Middle Ages.

He died at Clairvaux on August 20, 1153. Pope Alexander III canonized him on January 18, 1174, the first Cistercian saint by formal canonization. Pope Pius VIII declared him a Doctor of the Universal Church on August 20, 1830, with the title Doctor Mellifluus, the Honey-Sweet (or Mellifluous) Doctor, in reference to his eloquence.