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Biography

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Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 at Fontaines-lès-Dijon in the Duchy of Burgundy, the third of seven children of Tescelin, lord of Fontaines, and Aleth of Montbard. He grew up in a noble household whose piety was especially marked on his mother's side; Aleth died while he was still an adolescent, an event later remembered as decisive for his vocation. He was educated among the secular canons of Saint-Vorles at Châtillon-sur-Seine. After a brief period in which family and friends expected him to pursue a worldly career, he resolved to enter monastic life and, about 1112 or 1113, presented himself at the reform monastery of Cîteaux, taking with him some thirty companions that included several brothers and other kinsmen. That influx of vocations helped stabilize the still-fragile Cistercian experiment begun at the end of the eleventh century by Robert of Molesme, Alberic, and Stephen Harding.

In 1115 Abbot Stephen Harding sent the young monk to found a new house in a remote valley in Champagne. Bernard named the site Clara Vallis, Clairvaux, and became its first abbot, a charge he held until his death. He imposed a severe reading of the Rule of Saint Benedict, with emphasis on poverty, silence, manual labor, and the liturgy. Chronic illness did not prevent him from governing Clairvaux for nearly forty years or from directing an extraordinary expansion of the Cistercian family. By the mid-twelfth century hundreds of monasteries belonged to the order, a large share of them daughter or granddaughter houses of Clairvaux. He repeatedly declined episcopal sees, remaining formally a simple abbot, though his moral authority in Latin Christendom came to rival that of popes and kings.

Bernard was drawn into the major public controversies of his age. In the papal schism that followed the death of Honorius II in 1130 he championed Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II and traveled through France, Germany, and Italy to secure recognition for Innocent. He played a leading part in the proceedings against Peter Abelard, whose theology was condemned at the Council of Sens in 1141. At the Council of Troyes in 1129 he helped obtain approval for the Knights Templar and afterward wrote De laude novae militiae in praise of the new military order. In 1146, at the urging of Pope Eugene III, himself a former monk of Clairvaux, Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay. The subsequent failure of the expedition in the East brought him sharp criticism, which he answered by ascribing the disaster to the sins of the crusaders rather than to the crusade itself.

His writings made him one of the central spiritual authors of the twelfth century. They include an unfinished series of sermons on the Song of Songs, treatises such as De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae and De diligendo Deo, the De consideratione addressed to Eugene III, a large correspondence that is a principal source for the period, and works of Marian theology that strongly influenced later medieval devotion to the Virgin. Contemporaries and later tradition called him Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-sweet doctor, on account of the affective eloquence of his preaching. He died at Clairvaux on 20 August 1153 and was buried in the abbey church. Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1174. In 1830 Pope Pius VIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. His liturgical feast is kept on 20 August. The abbey was suppressed in the French Revolution and his relics were dispersed; some are preserved at Troyes Cathedral.

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