Bernard of Clairvaux 1090 – 1153

Bernard of Clairvaux was a French Cistercian abbot, mystical theologian, and one of the most influential figures of the twelfth century. As founder of the abbey of Clairvaux and father of more than sixty daughter houses, he reformed Western monasticism and contributed decisively to the spirituality of his age. His sermons On the Song of Songs developed a sustained mystical theology of love, while his treatises On Loving God and On Grace and Free Choice articulate a doctrine of the soul's ascent through humility to union with the divine. He preached the Second Crusade and intervened in the controversies surrounding Abelard.

Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 at Fontaine-les-Dijon in Burgundy, into a family of the lesser nobility. In 1112, shortly after his mother's death, he entered the new and struggling Cistercian abbey of Citeaux, persuading some thirty of his kinsmen and friends to come with him. Three years later the abbot Stephen Harding sent him to found a new house at Clairvaux in Champagne, of which he was abbot for the rest of his life.

His writings — On Loving God, On Grace and Free Choice, On Consideration, the great cycle of eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs, and a vast correspondence — combine spiritual exegesis with monastic theology and an austere Augustinian psychology of the will. Beyond the cloister Bernard preached the Second Crusade in 1146, intervened decisively in the papal schism of 1130 on behalf of Innocent II, opposed Peter Abelard at the Council of Sens in 1141, and oversaw the expansion of the Cistercian order to more than three hundred houses across Latin Christendom.

Bernard's mystical theology of love, his Marian devotion, and his cultivation of an interior religion of conversion shaped Cistercian and later Catholic spirituality and exerted lasting influence on Bonaventure, the Rhineland mystics, and the Reformers, whose suspicion of late-medieval scholasticism did not extend to him. He died at Clairvaux in 1153, was canonized in 1174, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830.