In the twelfth century, there were two main centres of mysticism, themselves quite distinct from one another – among the Cistercian abbeys, particularly at Clairvaux and Signy, and the Abbey School of St. Victor in Paris. The leader of the Cistercian mystics was St. Bernard (1091-1153), who became Abbot of Clairvaux at the age of 24, a position which he occupied until his death. To talk of the twelfth century without mentioning St. Bernard would be like talking of the sixteenth century without mentioning Luther. He was one of its guiding spirits in everything that concerned religious life and Church discipline; if anyone personified the new reforming ardour of the time, it was he. His thought is only one aspect of his manifold personality, which was equally prominent in preparing the Second Crusade and in securing Abelard’s condemnation, at Soissons and Sens, for theological error. Although he did not, in any way, share Peter Damian’s hatred of knowledge, he distrusted it when divorced from belief. Like St. Augustine, he held that it should be harnessed to faith, not pursued for its own sake. “Thus,” he wrote of Abelard, “the human intellect usurps everything to itself, leaving nothing to faith; it wants to go too high in enquiries which go beyond its power.” It was when reason tried to rule faith that St. Bernard was moved to oppose it.
From: Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham by Gordon Leff (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 134.
At the time of publication, Gordon Leff (born in 1926) was Lecturer in History at Manchester University in Manchester, England.
