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Rosemary Hayes
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From: "The Medieval Review" <[log in to unmask]>
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Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 2:44 PM
Subject: TMR 12.09.08 McGuire, A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux (Berman)
McGuire, Brian. <i>A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux</i>. Brill's
Companions to the Christian Tradition 25. Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2011. Pp. 406. $205. ISBN 978-9004201392.
Reviewed by Constance H. Berman
University of Iowa
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The volume testifies to the continued importance in the first decade
of the new millennium of Cistercian studies and studies of Bernard of
Clairvaux. As always Brian McGuire is an astute and appropriate
editor and his gentle introduction and survey of Bernard's life and
work (1-61), reflect an expertise on all things Cistercian developed
over a lifetime. Calling on a diversity of contributors, each
approaching Bernard from a specific viewpoint, McGuire as editor
encourages new modes of analysis. The volume throughout is solid and
intelligently produced. Anyone beginning work on either Bernard or
the early Cistercians will benefit from this wealth of information,
but even those long familiar with the field will find new
interpretations and analyses. My personal preferences were articles
by Christopher Holdsworth, Michael Casey, M. B. Pranger and Mette
Bruun. I find it hard not to comment on the work of so many authors
who have become friends over the years and my remarks beyond the
descriptive or exclamatory are often mere quibbles.
Michael Casey, "Reading Saint Bernard: The Man, the Medium, the
Message" (62-107), is a carefully nuanced view of Bernard and his
writings. Again and again, Casey tells us <i>not to take Bernard too
literally</i>. We should not fail to appreciate Bernard's humor,
self-deprecation, admission of mistakes, collaboration, appreciation
of others, and personal attraction; these are the topics of
subsections in Casey's analysis. Thus Casey points to Bernard's
<i>Apologia</i> to argue for taking things with a grain of salt: "No
medieval reader would believe that the descriptions of gigantic meals
supposedly served to Black Monks or the pontifical splendour of their
abbots were meant to be true-to-life pictures. They were making a
point about values, not creating an historical record" (67). I want
my students to read this statement over and over! Hear! Hear! We
need to stop treating medieval voices as somehow devoid of rhetoric!
Casey argues, similarly that Bernard was a collaborator with his
fellow abbots and open to a certain amount of trial and error in their
early reform efforts: "Bernard is often regarded as a man of solitary
brilliance, charging forward and expecting others to follow. Although
we cannot be certain of all the details concerning the exact working
of the collectivity that came to be known as the Cistercian Order, it
is clear that its first decades were strongly collegial" (72).
Similarly M. B. Pranger on "Bernard the Writer" (220-248) argues that
Bernard's writing is not only religious writing and that its
rhetorical and literary aspects must be appreciated by modern readers
as they were by medieval ones. Pranger turns to Chapter Twelve of
Robert of Basevorn's <i>De Arte Praedicandi</i> (written in 1322) to
show that medieval appreciation of Bernard's writing was based on
admiration of its skill in rhetoric and its incorporation of the
language of Scripture: "using every rhetorical color so that the whole
work shines with a double glow, earthly and heavenly" (225). Pranger
argues that often a surface meaning turns out to mean something else.
Thus regarding "the subtle structure of Bernard's text" (241), he
describes how a spontaneous-seeming outburst found unchanged in a
carefully revised set of sermons is obviously not a spontaneous
outburst at all, but a carefully planned one. Similarly Bernard uses
satire in his description of cooking eggs at Cluny--something that may
easily be recognized as such, but then Pranger asks, why would we take
literally his description of Abelard as the monk without a rule?
Pranger, like Casey, reminds us that reading Bernard is not easy.
Mette Bruun does something of the same in an elegant analysis of
"Bernard of Clairvaux and the Landscape of Salvation," (249-78), in
which the unending war between Babylon and Jerusalem is just one
element in the topics of Biblical soteriology incorporated into
monastic praise. Psalm 137's opening "By the rivers of Babylon, I lay
me down and dream of Zion," is as evocative to Bernard then as it has
become to us today because of its use in popular music and sometimes
reversed in slogans for the Arab spring. Brunn thus describes Bernard
"as the cartographer who maps the landscape of salvation" (255) from
Eden to Egypt to the crib of Jesus, and as Brunn points out, Bernard's
monastic murmurers wanting to depart on Crusade are compared to the
Israelites Dathan and Abiron who murmured against Moses and Aaron, and
were therefore swallowed up by the earth.
Christopher Holdsworth's "Bernard as a Father Abbot" (169-219) shows
Bernard as a different kind of leader. Letters from Bernard as
father-abbot at Clairvaux to his daughter-houses are here discussed
under categories such as recruitment. This allows Holdsworth to place
the oft-told story of Bernard's young cousin Robert (who entered
Clairvaux after Cluny, returned to Cluny, and so on) in the context of
similar cases that Bernard handles. Under the category letters to
patrons and benefactors, he presents Bernard's thank-you notes and
encouragement for gifts to daughter houses. Under those about
foundation and affiliation are requests that Bernard send monks to
found new houses, or commendation of affiliation to the practices of
his monastery, such as that to Toulouse commending Grandselve for
becoming a daughter of Clairvaux. Also included are letters about
abbatial elections, visitation, and meetings of the chapter at
Citeaux, which while Holdsworth calls it the General Chapter, are
carefully set out by the degree to which they had become annual,
universal chapters with mandatory attendance of all abbots. Under
letters on pastoral care, Holdsworth describes Bernard's practical
approach to a lack of wine in the chalice over which consecration had
been said, his plea to the pope to reinstate a supporter of Anacletus
who had become a monk at Clairvaux, and how to handle the problem of
someone trained at Clairvaux who had become abbot of a Benedictine
house wanting to be affiliated with Clairvaux. [1] On page 208
Bernard is quoted as referring to a popular saying, "Remember that the
rougher the thistle the softer the cloth." This reference to the
teasel plant, whose prickly dried flowers or seed pods were used as
bristles to bring up the matte when finishing fine woolen cloth,
suggests that Bernard knew more about textile production than might
have been thought. Holdsworth's Table One provides a useful list of
foundation or affiliation dates for Clairvaux's daughter-houses and
which ones received letters from Bernard, and Table Two provides a
distribution of dates for different types of letters, which may add to
our understanding of the dating process. Overall Holdsworth brings
alive that aspect of Bernard as abbot of community over which he takes
his abbatial duties seriously, missing his community when away, and
developing solutions to common problems in what Casey called his
collegial collaboration with other abbots.
If Bernard was abbot and leader, we also begin to learn in this volume
that Bernard could sometimes be led. Thus, in "Bernard and William of
Saint Thierry" (108-32), E. Rozanne Elder remarks on the mens' complex
interactions. It was not always clear about who was the leader and
who the follower, who was inspired, who was manipulator. Sometimes
not Bernard, but William, was the leader, as Elder asserts: "In the
<i>affaire</i> Peter Abelard, there is no doubt that William took the
initiative in embroiling Bernard" (120). As for Bernard and Abelard,
Constant J. Mews in "Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard," (133-
168), discusses a different William--William of Champeaux, bishop of
Châlons-sur-Marne (1113-22)--whose early interactions with Bernard,
recounted here, suggest William's manipulation of Bernard with regard
to the theological issues at the Council of Sens. Mews concludes
that: "Geoffrey of Auxerre, the secretary who kept the correspondence
relating to the [Abelard] affair, had a vested interest in preserving
this image of Abelard [that the latter's excommunication had not been
lifted]" (168).
Diane J. Reilly, in "Bernard of Clairvaux and Christian Art," (279-
304), raises a problem, but then seems to avoid the obvious solution:
that some of Bernard's letters need to be re-dated. Good points are
made in discussion of Bernard's <i>Apologia</i> and the early
manuscripts at Cîteaux (dated 1109-1111) in Reilly's incorporation of
findings in a recent (2004) doctoral dissertation by Kathleen Doyle.
Reilly reiterates what Doyle has observed regarding the descriptions
of sculpture in the <i>Apologia</i>, which "conform closely to antique
rhetorical models," (289) and about how much Bernard's rhetorical form
follows that of the standard late antique oration. Reilly goes on to
pose the question of how Bernard could be so ill-informed in his
letter to Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, that he says, "Now the vaults
of the great abbey that once resounded to the hubbub of secular
business echo only to spiritual canticles" (295-296). According to
Reilly, traditional dating has assigned the letter from Bernard to
Suger to c. 1127 and the <i>Apologia</i> to c. 1124, yet as she points
out "the renowned vaults commissioned by Suger would not be begun for
another fifteen years." This is peculiar according to Reilly because,
as she points out: "Bernard oversaw the construction of monastic
buildings at Clairvaux and its daughter houses, and he arranged for a
consistent building plan to be transmitted to new houses as far away
as Yorkshire, Flanders, and Germany, suggesting that William of Saint
Thierry's tales of Bernard's indifference to vaults and windows
notwithstanding, Bernard took a lively interest in the stunning
structures built under his leadership" (293-294). One cannot resist
describing Reilly here as making a perfectly good argument for dating
those writings later and then missing the forest for the trees. If
the dating given by Reilly about the beginning of the Gothic cathedral
at Saint-Denis to circa 1140 and the dedication of the new choir to
1144 is correct, then Bernard's letter to Suger and <i>Apologia</i>
must come from considerably later in his life and stretch even further
the dates between the early illuminated manuscripts from Cîteaux and
the <i>Apologia</i> than is their traditional dating.
James France, in "The Heritage of Saint Bernard in Medieval Art,"
(305-346), looks at how Bernard was represented in medieval art
starting with an author portrait dated 1135 showing Bernard writing
<i>The Steps of Humility</i> in Oxford Bodleian Library MS 530 fol.
15r. France's fascinating analysis has eleven figures including this
one, but refers to many more available only in his 2007 Cistercian
Studies publication <i>Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux</i> with CD Rom appended to it. This is frustrating for
those of us who do not have the earlier volume. A minor quibble:
France's sources have garbled the reference on page 317 to Duke
William of Aquitaine, converted outside a church during Bernard's
"visit to southern France to combat heresy." At the time of Bernard's
visit to southern France, usually dated to 1145, the last William Duke
of Aquitaine was dead. He had died in April 1137 and his heir was his
daughter Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had married Louis VII of France in
August of that same year.
Finally, I have several quibbles with McGuire's overview (18-61).
While Bernard bravely argued that Crusaders at the outset of the
Second Crusade should not attack the Jews, earlier he was not above an
attack on Innocent II's rival, Anacletus, as the grandson of a
converted Jew. Similarly, in his analysis of Bernard's relationship
with women, McGuire seems to have overlooked Bernard's interactions
with the nuns at Jully, stating that, "A later Cistercian generation
would publicly embrace devout women, but Bernard seems to have
reserved his feelings for women to his mother and the Virgin Mary"
(25). It is also incorrect to refer to the monastery at Tre Fontane
outside Rome as a "foundation," by Clairvaux, as opposed to a
"refoundation" or "translation" from one monastic practice to another.
He falls into a retrospective view with regard to the Savigniac
congregation's affiliation saying, "Not all their abbots wanted to be
part of the success of Cîteaux" (56); a different word than success is
what is wanted there.
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Notes:
1. Here a quibble: on p. 181 the reference should be to the monastery
of Saint-Germer at Fly (not Flay) in the diocese of Beauvais.
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