Justified True Belief

(●) The monk who never held an office higher than abbot, and whom half of Europe obeyed anyway. + Picture a man who spent his adult life in a damp valley in Champagne, eating badly, sleeping little, and copying out sermons on a love poem from the Old Testament. Now picture the same man deciding which of two claimants was the rightful pope, helping to frame the rule the Knights Templar were given, and being asked by a king what to do next. Both pictures are Bernard of Clairvaux, and he found the combination as strange as anyone. He called himself the chimera of his age, a creature stitched together out of parts that did not belong to each other: neither properly a monk nor properly a man of the world. The office he actually held was the smaller of the two. An abbot is the father and head of one monastery, answerable for the men inside its walls and for nobody outside them, and that is the only title Bernard ever carried. He belongs on a site about the reasons for Christian faith because he is the twelfth century’s great counterweight. His century is the one in which Europe rediscovered logic and fell in love with it. The schools of Paris were filling up, Aristotle was arriving through Arabic and Latin translations, and clever young men were learning to take a doctrine apart the way you take apart a clock. Bernard did not think that was wicked. He thought it was not enough. God, he insisted, is known the way a friend is known or a flavour is tasted, by being loved, and a theology that never gets past the argument has missed the thing it was arguing about. One fact is worth carrying away before anything else. He entered religious life at about twenty-three, in a house so poor and so obscure that it was close to dying out. When he died forty years later there were something like three hundred and forty Cistercian abbeys across Europe, and sixty-eight of them traced their founding to his own house. Cistercian is just the family name of that reform, taken from Cîteaux, the house he walked into. Meanwhile he was offered bishoprics and archbishoprics repeatedly, including the see of Milan, which is to say the office and territory of the archbishop there, one of the great chairs of Christendom. He refused every one of them. He stayed an abbot.

(●) 1090 AD: He was born into a Burgundian knight’s household, the third of seven children. + Bernard was born at Fontaines, just outside Dijon in Burgundy, around 1090; some sources give 1091, and the exact year is not recoverable. His father Tescelin held the castle of Fontaines and served the Duke of Burgundy as a knight. His mother, Aleth of Montbard, came from the same rank of Burgundian nobility. They had six sons and a daughter, and the whole family will keep turning up in this story, because in the end almost all of them followed him. In a knight’s household the pattern was ordinary enough: most of the sons learned to ride and fight, and one was set aside for the church. Bernard was the one set aside. His brothers were trained for arms, while he was sent to the canons at Châtillon-sur-Seine, a body of clergy attached to a church who served it together and kept a school, and there he learned grammar and rhetoric well enough that his Latin prose is still read for its own sake. His mother died while he was a student, and the early biographies, written by men who knew him, treat her death as the hinge of his life. That is the sort of claim a biographer makes and a reader should hold loosely. What is certain is that within a few years the polished young Burgundian noble had decided against the career everyone expected of him.

(●) 1113 AD: He talked about thirty relatives and friends into the poorest monastery in Burgundy, and walked in with them. + The abbey of Cîteaux had been founded fifteen years earlier by monks who thought the great Benedictine houses had gone soft: too much property, too much fine singing, too little manual labour. What they wanted was the Rule of Saint Benedict kept as written. The Rule is a short sixth-century handbook for running a monastery, seventy-three brief chapters on prayer, work, food, sleep, and how an abbot should handle the men in his care, and every Benedictine house in Europe claimed to be living by it. The founders of Cîteaux meant to live by it without the four centuries of softening that had grown up around it. The result was hard, poor, and unpopular. By 1113 the community was ageing and short of recruits, and there was serious doubt whether it would survive its founders. Then a young man from Fontaines arrived at the gate with a crowd behind him. Accounts of the number vary and the round figure of thirty is the traditional one, but the composition is well attested: his uncle Gaudry, four of his brothers, and a group of friends. His youngest brother Nivard was left behind as too young, and the story told in the family was that the departing brothers said the family lands would now all be his, and that the boy answered that the bargain seemed uneven, since they took heaven and left him only the earth. He followed them later. So, in time, did their father and their sister. There is something worth noticing here that is easy to skip past. Bernard did not go looking for the most attractive option and join it. He went looking for the hardest one. Mothers in the district were said to hide their sons when he came through, and the joke was not entirely a joke.

(●) 1115 AD: Sent at about twenty-five to a valley called Wormwood, he renamed it Clairvaux, the valley of light, and stayed thirty-eight years. + Two years after his arrival, the abbot of Cîteaux, an Englishman named Stephen Harding, sent Bernard out with a small band of monks to start a new house in the diocese of Langres. The site was a clearing in a wooded valley on the Aube, known locally as the Valley of Wormwood, which is to say the valley of bitterness. Tradition puts the founding on 25 June 1115. Bernard called the place Clairvaux, the clear valley or valley of light, and stayed there as abbot for thirty-eight years. The first years were brutal. They ate barley bread and boiled beech leaves; the roof leaked; men who had followed a charismatic young man into the woods discovered what the woods were actually like. Bernard drove himself hardest of all, and it broke his health permanently. He was so undone by fasting and by vigils, the night offices that turn a monk out of bed in the dark to sing psalms and then send him back for an hour or two before dawn, that William of Champeaux, the bishop of Châlons and one of the leading teachers of the age, intervened and had him ordered away from all monastic duties for a year, to be fed and looked after in a hut outside the enclosure. He never fully recovered; for the rest of his life his stomach betrayed him and he could keep little down. Two things came out of that decade besides the abbey. He learned to govern, which meant learning that the men in front of him were not made of the same material he was, and his later writing on the abbot’s office is notably gentler than his practice on himself. And he began to write. An Apologia addressed around 1125 to his friend William, abbot of Saint-Thierry, defended the new austerity while conceding that austerity is not holiness, and turned aside to complain about the carved monsters in cloisters that give monks something to stare at instead of reading.

(●) 1129 AD: He helped give the Knights Templar a rule to live by, and then spent the better part of eight years on the roads of Europe settling which of two claimants was pope. + In January 1129, a year the older books give as 1128, a council met at Troyes. Among the items of business was a small band of knights living in Jerusalem under vows, who wanted two things from the church: recognition, and a rule to live by. That second request was less modest than it sounds. A rule is the written order of a community’s whole day, and drawing one up for men who were monks in the morning and cavalry in the afternoon had never been done. Bernard was there, and the Templars got both; tradition credits him with a large hand in drawing the rule up, though how much of the text he wrote is not recoverable. He followed it up, over the next few years, with a short book for them, In Praise of the New Knighthood, arguing that a soldier who fights without hatred and dies without fear is a different creature from the tournament knights of Europe, whose vanity he mocked at length. It is the first Christian defence of a religious order under arms, and it is written by a man who could not have lifted a sword. The next year a disputed papal election tore the church in half. Two men were chosen in Rome on the same day in 1130, Innocent II and Anacletus II, and each had a case. Nobody in Europe could stay neutral, because everything from a bishop’s appointment to a king’s standing depended on which of the two you recognised. Bernard was summoned to a council at Étampes to advise the French church, came down for Innocent, and then spent the better part of eight years on the roads of Europe arguing the case: to Louis VI of France, to Henry I of England, to the Emperor Lothair, to the cities of northern Italy, and to Duke William of Aquitaine, whom he faced down in the street at Parthenay. A split of that kind, with two popes and two obediences, is what the word schism means, and this one ended in 1138 with Innocent recognised everywhere. He knew what it was costing him. His letters from these years are full of a man complaining that he is a monk who is never in his monastery, and that his own sons at Clairvaux see less of him than strangers do. The complaint is genuine, and he kept going anyway.

(●) 1140 AD: At Sens he had Peter Abelard condemned, and refused to debate him. + Peter Abelard was the most brilliant logician of the age and the most famous teacher in France. He held that a believer may reason about what he believes, and he applied the tools of logic to the Trinity, to the atonement, and to the moral weight of an act. To Abelard this was ordinary care, the sort of examination any serious claim deserves. Bernard read him and saw something else: a man taking the faith apart to see how it worked, who would not be able to put it back together. William of Saint-Thierry, Bernard’s friend, who had given up a wealthy Benedictine abbey to become a Cistercian at Signy, drew up a list of propositions from Abelard’s books and sent it to Clairvaux. Abelard, who did not lose debates, asked the Archbishop of Sens to summon a public hearing where the two of them would argue it out before the bishops. Bernard’s own account of what he did next, in the letter he afterwards sent to Innocent II, is the most revealing thing he ever wrote about himself. He refused: partly, he said, because he was no match for the man, and partly on principle, because he thought it wrong "that the grounds of the faith should be handed over to human reasonings for discussion" when the faith rests on a surer foundation than that. The same letter says why he thought the case could not wait: instead of honey, or rather in honey, this man’s poison was being eagerly drunk in on every side. Then he went to Sens anyway. By the account of Berengar of Poitiers, one of Abelard’s own pupils and no friend of Bernard’s, he met the assembled bishops on the eve of the hearing and put the case to them privately. The next day the propositions were read out and condemned; Abelard, seeing what had happened, appealed to Rome and walked out. Innocent II confirmed the sentence. The year is given as 1140 by long convention, though a strong case has been made for 1141 and reference works still print both. Abelard got as far as Cluny, where its abbot Peter the Venerable took him in, got the excommunication lifted (the sentence that shuts a man out of the sacraments and out of the company of other Christians, which for a churchman was the end of everything), brought the two men face to face and made peace between them, and gave him a quiet place to die in 1142.

(●) 1146 AD: He preached the Second Crusade, rode into the Rhineland to stop a monk preaching massacre, and lived to see the expedition fail. + In 1144 the crusader county of Edessa fell, and Christian Europe took it as an emergency. Pope Eugenius III, who had been a monk of Clairvaux under Bernard before an astonishing election in 1145 put him on the papal throne, told his old abbot to preach the expedition. Bernard obeyed. At Vézelay in the spring of 1146 he preached before King Louis VII of France and a crowd too large for the church, which is why they built a platform on the hillside. The response was overwhelming, and Odo of Deuil, chaplain to Louis VII and soon to travel east with him, is the source for what happened next: the supply of cloth crosses ran out, and Bernard tore up his own garments to make more. While he was recruiting in France, a Cistercian monk named Radulf began preaching in the Rhineland that the crusade should start at home, with the Jews. Jewish communities in Cologne, Mainz, Speyer and Worms were attacked. Bernard wrote to the German bishops and then went himself, confronted Radulf in Mainz, and sent him back to his monastery. His letter to the eastern Franks and the Bavarians is unambiguous: "The Jews must not be persecuted, slaughtered, nor even driven out." He argued it from Scripture, from a psalm he read as God’s own protection order over them, and he added, with the sharpness he saved for Christians, that where there are no Jews to blame, Christian moneylenders do worse. Ephraim of Bonn, who lived through those years as a boy and later set them down in his Book of Remembrance, recorded that the abbot of Clairvaux had come and stopped it, and gave God the thanks for sending him. That is not a small thing to have on the ledger for a twelfth-century churchman. The crusade itself was a catastrophe. The German and French armies were wrecked crossing Anatolia, and the survivors broke off the siege of Damascus in 1148 after four days. Europe went looking for someone to blame, and a good deal of the blame came to Bernard, who had promised God’s favour and delivered a desert full of corpses. He did not deflect it. He opened the second book of On Consideration, written for Pope Eugenius, with the wreckage: "We said ‘peace’, and there is no peace; we promised good things, and lo! perplexity."

(●) 1153 AD: He died at Clairvaux in August, still dictating sermons on a love poem he had not finished. + His last years were spent ill, mostly at Clairvaux, still writing. He finished the Life of his friend Malachy, the Irish bishop who had died in his arms at Clairvaux in 1148. He finished the five books On Consideration for Eugenius, which is a letter from an old teacher to a former pupil now wearing the papal tiara, telling him that the danger of his office is drowning in other men’s lawsuits and forgetting his own soul. He did not finish the sermons on the Song of Songs. He had been preaching them to his monks, on and off, for eighteen years, and had reached the third chapter of an eight-chapter book when he stopped at sermon eighty-six. He died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153, aged about sixty-three; a few sources put it on the 21st. Eugenius had died on 8 July, and Bernard outlived his pupil by six weeks. He was canonised, which is to say formally declared a saint, on 18 January 1174 by Alexander III. He was among the earliest raised that way after that same pope moved to reserve the making of saints to Rome rather than leaving it to local acclamation, which until then had mostly meant a district deciding for itself that the man they had buried belonged in the calendar. The abbey he had built out of beech leaves and stubbornness kept his books, and the books travelled. Four centuries later they would be quoted with affection by men who had left his church, which is a stranger tribute than any of the ones he was offered in his lifetime.

What He Taught

(T1) The reason for loving God is God himself, and the only right measure of that love is to love without measure. + Haimeric, a cardinal deacon who ran the papal chancery (the office that drafted, sealed and sent out the pope’s letters, which made him one of the busiest administrators in Europe), wrote to Bernard with what sounds like an examination question: why should God be loved, and how much? He was used to asking the abbot for prayers, Bernard notes, not for answers. The short book he sent back, On Loving God, has never gone out of print in eight centuries, and its answer to the first half of the question fits in a sentence. God is to be loved because he is God. Not because of what loving him gets you, and not because of the punishment for skipping it. He is his own reason. Then Bernard does something unexpected. Having said that God should be loved for nothing but himself, he spends the rest of the book admitting that nobody starts there. The shape of it is familiar from ordinary affection. A small child loves his mother for what she brings him, and it takes years before he loves her for who she is, and nobody looking back thinks the first stage was a fraud because it came first. It was the beginning of the real thing. Bernard maps four degrees of love on that pattern, and the first one is not flattering: - First, a man loves himself, for his own sake. This is where everyone begins, and Bernard does not scold it. It is simply how a creature is built: nobody, as the apostle says, ever hated his own flesh. - Second, he loves God, but for his own sake. Trouble drives him to prayer. He needs help, help comes, and gratitude begins. - Third, he loves God for God’s own sake. Being brought back to God so often, he begins to notice what God is like, and the affection detaches itself from the benefits. Bernard’s illustration is the Samaritans in John 4, who first believed the woman’s report and then said they believed because they had heard him for themselves. - Fourth, he loves himself only for God’s sake. This is the one Bernard doubts anyone reaches in this life, and he says so plainly. To look at yourself and value yourself purely as something God loves is, he thinks, what the resurrection is for. Two things follow that are worth holding on to. The first is that the ladder is honest about where people actually stand; a spirituality that begins at the fourth rung is a spirituality for nobody. The second is the direction of travel. Bernard is not describing a technique for climbing. He is describing what happens to a person who is loved first, which is why the book keeps returning to the cross as the argument. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19) is the sentence the whole scheme hangs from.

(Q) "I should say that God Himself is the motive of our love to Him, and that the measure of due love is to be without measure." + Source: Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, chapter 1 (Patmore translation). The opening answer to the question he had been sent, given before he has explained anything, and then unpacked for the rest of the book (T1). The translation is the Victorian one by Marianne Caroline and Coventry Patmore, which is in the public domain.

(T2) Humility is not thinking poorly of yourself; it is seeing yourself accurately, which is the only door truth comes through. + Bernard’s first book began as a request from a relative. Godfrey, a kinsman who had followed him into the monastery, had heard him talk in chapter about the section of the Rule of Saint Benedict that lays out twelve steps of humility, and asked him to write it down. Chapter, in a monastery, is the daily meeting: the whole community in one room, a passage of the Rule read aloud, and the abbot speaking on it, which is where most of Bernard’s books started life. He wrote up the twelve steps, and then, in a move that tells you what kind of writer he is, said he could describe the way down better than the way up, because he had been down it, and wrote twelve steps of pride in reverse. That second half is the part people still read: a comic and merciless account of a man’s descent, beginning with idle curiosity about other people’s business and ending in open contempt for God, with recognisable stops along the way for the man who laughs too easily, the man who has to be heard, and the man whose confession is a performance. His definition of humility is worth slowing down on, because the English word has drifted. He does not mean low self-esteem, which is its own kind of self-absorption. He means accurate self-knowledge, the thing you get when you stop grading yourself on a curve of your own choosing. Most of us have had the small version of it. You hear a recording of your own voice for the first time and it is not the voice you have been hearing all your life, and there is no arguing with the tape. Humility, for Bernard, is that experience applied to the whole man, and it is uncomfortable for exactly the same reason: what corrects you is not an insult but a fact. Truth about yourself, he argues, is the first of three stages: a man sees himself truly, and that makes him merciful toward his neighbour, and mercy toward the neighbour is what fits him to see God. The claim underneath is an epistemological one, which is to say a claim about how knowing works. Bernard holds that some truths are hidden from the proud not because God is withholding them out of pique but because pride is an eye condition. The proud man cannot see himself, so he cannot see anything else in proportion either. Scripture puts the same thing as a policy: "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6). Bernard treats that not as a rule about rewards but as a description of how reality is arranged.

(Q) "It is the virtue which enables a man to see himself in his true colours and thereby to discover his worthlessness." + Source: Bernard of Clairvaux, The Twelve Degrees of Humility and Pride, chapter 1 (Mills translation). His formal definition of humility, offered just after he has argued that truth is disclosed to the humble and withheld from the proud (T2). Mills is rendering a Latin verb that means to become cheap or of little worth in one’s own eyes; Bernard’s point is about a false valuation being corrected, not about a man learning to despise himself.

(T3) God saves nobody with their help, and nobody without their consent. + Bernard had preached a sermon in which he said that whatever good he had ever done was God’s doing, not his. Someone in the congregation asked the obvious follow-up: then what exactly am I contributing? He wrote a whole treatise to answer, On Grace and Free Choice, and it is the closest thing the twelfth century has to a settlement of the oldest quarrel in Christian theology. His terms need laying out, because he is precise about them and the precision is the argument. By free choice he means the capacity to consent, the fact that a human being, unlike a stone or a horse, can say yes or no and mean it. That capacity, he says, survived the fall intact. What did not survive is the ability to want the right thing or to carry it out. So Bernard distinguishes three freedoms: freedom from necessity, which is simply having a will at all and which nobody ever loses; freedom from sin, which was lost and is restored by grace; and freedom from misery, which nobody has yet and which belongs to heaven. Put those together and you get his answer. Grace does everything, and consent is what grace does it to. Salvation is not a joint venture in which God supplies most of the effort and we top it up, because there is no amount we could top it up with. But neither is it something done to a person the way weather happens to a field, because the thing being saved is a will, and a will that has not consented has not been saved. Bernard’s image is that God is the giver and free choice is the receiver, and a gift that nobody takes is not yet a gift. The passage of Scripture he is working from is Paul’s: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12–13). Both halves of that sentence, in that order, are Bernard’s whole position. Reformed and Catholic readers have both claimed him since, and the reason they can both do it is that he refuses to solve the problem by dropping either half.

(Q) "What, therefore, thou askest, doth free will do? I answer in a word: It is saved. Take away free will and there remaineth nothing to be saved; take away grace and there is no means whereby it can be saved." + Source: Bernard of Clairvaux, Concerning Grace and Free Will, chapter 1 (Williams translation). Bernard answering the question his own sermon had provoked (T3). The 1920 translation by Watkin W. Williams keeps the older English pronouns; "free will" here is his term liberum arbitrium, free choice, meaning the power to consent rather than the power to do good unaided.

(T4) Christ is learned the way a flavour is learned, by tasting, and no description substitutes for it. + Try explaining the taste of honey to someone who has never had any. You can get a long way. You can say it is sweet, and floral, and thicker than syrup, and that it coats the back of the mouth. Every word is accurate and the person still does not know what honey tastes like, and the moment they try a spoonful they know something your description could not deliver. That analogy is Bernard’s own, and it is the centre of his most ambitious work. For eighteen years he preached to his monks on the Song of Songs, the Old Testament love poem, and in eighty-six sermons he never got past the opening of its third chapter. The reading he takes for granted is the one the church had held since Origen and the synagogue had held before that: the bride and the bridegroom are the soul, or the church, and God. Bernard is not arguing for that reading. He is using it, the way a musician uses a key signature. What he does with it is the point. Sermon after sermon insists that there is a kind of knowledge of God that argument cannot hand over, and that this is not mysticism as an escape from doctrine but doctrine arriving where it was always going. He opens his third sermon by telling the monks that today they will be reading in the book of experience, and asks each of them to look inward and check whether he can honestly say the words of the text. He is quite clear that most cannot, himself included. There is a warning built into this that Bernard’s admirers sometimes miss. He is not saying feelings are the test of truth, and he is not offering experience as a substitute for what the church teaches; he prosecuted a man for what he took to be doctrinal error, which is not the act of someone indifferent to propositions. He is saying that the doctrines are about a person, and that persons are known by being met.

(Q) "As honey to the mouth, as melody in the ear, as a song of gladness to the heart, is the Name of Jesus." + Source: Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 15.6 (Eales translation). He is preaching on the line "your name is oil poured out" from the first chapter of the Song, and has been arguing that the name of Jesus is light, then food, then medicine (T4). The sentence just before it is his admission that a book with no mention of that name holds nothing for him, and a conversation without it does not interest him.

(Q) "We shall read to-day in the book of experience." + Source: Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 3.1 (Eales translation). The opening line of a sermon on "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth" (Song of Solomon 1:2). Bernard tells the monks to turn their attention inward and examine whether they can say those words honestly, and then says he doubts anyone understands them who has not been there. It is the sentence that carried furthest: seven centuries of Christian devotional writing, in every part of the divided church, is downstream of a preacher telling a room full of ordinary men to check the text against their own lives.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He found a dying reform and left it the fastest-growing order in Europe. + The plainest measure of Bernard is arithmetic. Cîteaux in 1113 was one struggling house short of recruits. By 1153 the Cistercians had something in the region of three hundred and forty abbeys from Ireland to the Holy Land, and sixty-eight of them were founded from Clairvaux alone. Men joined because of him, and houses were founded because bishops and lords wrote to him asking for a colony of his monks. What travelled with them was a way of life that changed the ground it stood on. Cistercian houses were sited in wild country and worked by the monks themselves and by lay brothers, men who joined the community for the labour and the simpler prayers rather than for the choir and the books. These were men who had gone into the woods to pray, and who found that praying in the woods meant first draining them. So the order became, without ever intending to, one of the more consequential agricultural and engineering operations of the Middle Ages: water management, sheep farming, iron working. The architecture followed the same instinct. A Cistercian church of Bernard’s period is stripped of carving and colour and left with proportion and light, and the result is one of the few medieval styles a modern eye finds immediately beautiful. The formal reception came in stages. Alexander III canonised him on 18 January 1174, twenty-one years after his death. In 1830 Pius VIII named him a Doctor of the Church, which is the title reserved for teachers whose work the church commends to everyone, and the epithet that stuck was Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing teacher. Dante, who had a low tolerance for churchmen, paid him the highest compliment in the poem: at the end of the Paradiso, when Beatrice has taken Dante as far as she can, it is Bernard who takes over as his last guide and prays the prayer that opens the final vision.

(†) He taught Europe to pray to the Jesus of the Gospels, and the Reformers who left his church kept reading him. + Before Bernard, Western devotion tended to look at Christ enthroned in glory. After him, it looks at the manger and the cross. That shift is not his alone, but he is its greatest voice, and everything downstream carries his fingerprints: the Franciscans a generation later, the fourteenth-century mystics, the Imitation of Christ, and eventually the Lutheran chorale and the English hymn. Two of the most-sung hymns in English, "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" and "Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee," reached us through Latin poems long attributed to Bernard, though scholars now credit both elsewhere; the attribution itself is evidence of what people thought he sounded like. The stranger part of his reception is what happened at the Reformation. Bernard was a monk, an abbot, a preacher of crusade and a devotee of the Virgin, and none of that stopped Luther and Calvin from claiming him. Luther, who had little patience for medieval teachers as a class, made an exception for Bernard and said so repeatedly: no doctor of the church was his equal in the pulpit, though in a disputation, Luther thought, he gave away too much to law and free will. Calvin names him again and again in the Institutes, turning to him with approval more often than to any other writer between Augustine and his own century, and quoting him where it matters most: on grace, on self-knowledge, and on a conscience that has nothing of its own to plead and rests on Christ’s merits instead. They were not misreading him. What they found was a man who had said, four hundred years before the argument broke out, that nothing is ours but the consent, and that a Christian’s confidence is in mercy rather than in a record. That he said it inside the medieval church, and stayed there, is exactly why he became common property afterwards. Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed and Anglicans have all gone on printing him.

(†) He promised God’s blessing on a crusade that ended in disaster, and he beat an opponent by refusing to meet him. + Two entries belong on the other side of the ledger, and both are his own doing rather than anything done later in his name. - The crusade. He preached the Second Crusade with the authority of a man everyone believed spoke for God, and told those who took the cross, which meant sewing a cloth cross onto your clothes and swearing in front of witnesses that you would go, that they were being handed a bargain: a battle where victory is glory and death is gain. Tens of thousands went. The armies were destroyed in Anatolia, the siege of Damascus collapsed in four days, and the survivors came home to a Europe asking what the promises had been worth. Bernard’s own answer, in the second book of On Consideration, is worth reading before anyone else’s: he does not deny that he preached the thing in God’s name, and he says he would rather men murmured against him than against God. What he offers by way of explanation is Israel in the desert under Moses, promised a better land and dying short of it because their hearts kept turning back to Egypt, which is a brave passage and also a way of laying the failure at the feet of the men who went. The plain fact is that he lent the whole weight of his holiness to an enterprise he could not deliver, and Christians have had to reckon since with what it costs when a good man speaks for God about the outcome of a war. - Abelard. Peter Abelard asked for a public hearing and Bernard would not give him one, on the stated principle that the faith should not be handed over to human reasoning for discussion. Then he went to Sens, spent the evening before working on the bishops privately, and had the propositions condemned in the morning. Whatever one makes of the theology at stake, that is winning a case by not arguing it. The refusal is in Bernard’s own letter to Innocent II, in his own words; the evening with the bishops comes from Berengar of Poitiers, a pupil of Abelard’s writing to defend his master, which is worth weighing before it is repeated. A church that owes him the reminder that God is more than a conclusion also has to own that he treated a man’s questions as an infection rather than as questions. Neither entry cancels the ledger’s other side, and the same years hold his ride into the Rhineland to stop the killing of Jews, at a moment when almost nobody else with his authority troubled to. He was not a consistent man. He was a large one, and both columns are his.