XVI.

STEPHEN AND BERNARD.

 

The poor house of Citeaux was now, as we have seen, perfect; it had not only a strict rule, and a ruler to teach it, but it had also novices to whom it was to be taught. It had now become too small for its inmates, and the despised convent, which but lately was looked upon with fear rather than admiration, had now the choice of all the fair fields of France, and by and by of Europe, at its command. Many were the children of her that was called barren, and every year, band after band of monks were sent out from the now teeming house to form new monasteries, and these again increased and multiplied, till every kingdom of Europe was filled with the daughters of Citeaux.

Soon after the arrival of St. Bernard and his companions at the convent, Stephen was summoned away from home for the purpose of founding the new monastery of La Ferté in the diocese of Châlons. Walter, bishop of Châlons, and two noble­men of the country, on hearing that Citeaux was too full, had immediately looked out for a place where they might house the new colony, and proposed to Stephen to found a convent on their ground. He gladly accepted the offer, and himself accompanied the brethren whom he destined for this service to their new abode. In a few days he returned to his abbey of Citeaux. The charge which God had intrusted to him, was the more anxious, because St. Bernard's state of health was exceedingly precarious.  

The thinness of his slightly-built frame showed in what a frail earthen vessel that precious soul was contained. His neck especially was very long and delicate, so that when he threw back his cowl, none could help remarking it, and the monks praised its snowy whiteness and its elegance, like that of a swan. His life was even endangered by the narrowness of his throat; but his most troublesome infirmity was the weakness of his stomach, which rejected a great portion of the food which he had swallowed. With all these ailments he had entered the strictest order of the day, and now that he had thus put his hand to the plough, he was determined not to look back. He had entered the abbey of Citeaux in order to bury himself from the world, to become a poor man and a rustic, not simply to hide under a white cuculla an ambitious heart, nor even to give himself time to exercise a fine imagination on holy subjects. Every day therefore he used to excite himself forward, by repeating to himself, "Bernard, Bernard, wherefore are thou here?"

He earnestly set himself to work on the rough occupations in which the Cistercians passed their day. His attenuated frame was bent down with the rude labours of the field, and his delicate skin worn with holding the spade and the hoe. Nor did he work listlessly like a man who takes up a fork and makes hay on a fine sunshiny day, but he laboured with a will in downright earnestness, as if it had been the business of his life. His weak body often sunk under these labours; and often the awkwardness of his hands, which were used to far other work than digging and mowing, and such like toils, obliged his superiors to separate him from his brethren at the hours of manual labor.  He was, however, never happy on those occasions, and if he could not work with the convent, he immediately began cutting wood or carrying burdens on his shoulders.

Stephen seems to have been especially careful of him in this respect; during the harvest he had made many attempts at reaping, but was too weak and too little accustomed to such work to succeed; he was therefore ordered to lie by, and sit by himself, while, as says William of St. Thierry, the brethren were reaping with fervor and joy in the Holy Ghost. This was a sore trouble to him, and in the simplicity of his heart he began to weep; he then prayed to God to give him grace, so that he might be able to join his brethren in their labors. From that day forward he became a most expert reaper, and the same William, his personal friend, asserts, that even up to the period when he was writing his account, St. Bernard was wont to say with self-gratulation, and a sort of joyous triumph, that he was the best reaper of them all. This hard work, to which he subjected himself in order to carry out his rule, was the more remarkable in him, not only because of his extreme weakness, but from the exceeding austerity with which he lived. His very existence was a miracle, for he hardly seemed to eat, drink, or sleep, and his friends wondered how he could live. In after times he himself severely taxed his own austerity, which according to his own account had made him useless to the church. It is not on record that Stephen checked him in his mortification of the flesh; he probably looked upon his youthful novice with a saintly wonder, as one whom God's Holy Spirit was leading according to His own blessed will, and with whom he must not interfere. Indeed so much had this severe way of life become the habit of both body and soul, that he hardly could have increased his diet if he would.

St. Bernard is indeed one who cannot be judged by ordinary rules. God has set His seal upon His saint, by the wonderful things which He wrought through him, and none must rudely venture to blame his actions. He, in his white Cistercian dress, was raised up, for the needs of the Church, just as was John the Baptist in his garment of earners hair; and when he came forth from his monastery, and the world streamed forth to view him, and kiss the hem of his poor monkish habit, it was then seen that his weak frame, with the spirit of love and supernatural energy shining through it, and the flaming words of divine eloquence bursting from his lips, could serve God and His church to good purpose indeed. But this is not the place to speak of him as the companion of kings, the setter up of popes, and the real governor of the Church; it is only as a Cistercian monk that he appears here, and in this capacity his wonderful way of life was not thrown away. It subdued his body to his spirit to such a degree, that he seemed to live the life of an angel upon earth. His soul was wrapped up in a ceaseless contemplation of God, and he realized the crucifixion of the flesh of which St. Paul speaks, and all things which belong to the Spirit grew and flourished in him. His senses, from the abstraction of his soul, seemed to be dead within him. He did not know whether the ceiling of the novices' cell was arched or flat, though he passed there every day of his life. Again, the choir of the church of Citeaux had three windows, but to the last he fancied it had only one. So little conscious was he of the sense of taste, that he more than once drank oil instead of water, without perceiving it. It was this deadness to earth, which made him see so far into heavenly things as he did. Earnest as he was in working at the lowest manual labour, this habit of praying always never forsook him. It was this habit, which he acquired at Citeaux under Stephen's discipline, which was the source of all his power.

The Holy Spirit filled him with rapturous joys which only crucified souls can know; and this unction which anointed him from above, he poured back upon the Church, and thus enabled her to resist the dry and cold rationalistic heresies which then threatened to overwhelm her with the maxims of worldly science. It was this education, too, in the cloister of Citeaux, before the morning light, and at the feet of Stephen in the auditorium, which made him the great founder of the science of the interior life of the Christian. He has been called the last of the Fathers, and he thus stands on the confines of the system of the early Church, which contemplated God as He is in Himself, and that of the later ages, in which the mysterious dealings of God with the soul of the individual Christian were minutely analyzed. It is not to be supposed that he was so abstracted from the world, as to be either singular in his demeanour or dead to earthly affection.

He cast off a hair shirt which he had constantly worn next to his skin, lest in a monastery where all things were done in common it should be observed. Though his habit was of coarse and poor materials, yet it was always scrupulously clean. He used to say that dirt was the mark of a careless mind, or of one that cherished a fond idea of its own virtue, or loved the silly praise of men. His motions were ever regulated, and bore humility on the face of them, and a sweet fragrance of piety was shed around his person and his actions, so that all looked upon his countenance with joy. His voice was singularly clear, notwith­standing the weakness of his body, and in after times, its very tones won even those who did not understand the language which he spoke. In conversation, the spirit of charity shone through all his words; and he always spoke of what most interested his companion, making inquiries about his trade or profession, as if he had espe­cially studied it all his life.

Stephen did not prevent his seeing and conversing with his relations when they came to Citeaux; and on these occasions his courtesy was such, that his exceedingly tender conscience would sometimes prick him as though he had spoken idle words. On one occasion, he devised a strange expedient; when summoned to see some of his friends, who had come to visit him, he stopped his ears with tow, so that his deafness might give him an air of stupidity.

Loud laughter in a monk was an object of his special aversion, and he has recorded it in one place of his writings, by a graphic picture of the light-minded monk laughing to himself. He describes him covering his face with his hands, compressing his lips, clenching his teeth, and laughing as though he would not laugh, till at length the suppressed mirth burst out through his nostrils. With all this hatred of levity which thus appears in the almost ludicrous vividness of his description, he would on occasion even force himself to smile.

Another characteristic of Bernard’s soul, was the wonderful strength of his affections. Though he had torn himself thus rudely from all earthly affections, yet the wounds which he had suffered in the conflict did not close over a hardened heart, but he carried them with him all bleeding to the cloister. Even long after his novitiate was over, nay, to his last day, the tenderness of this maternal heart cost him many a pang; chiefly if any one of his brethren went wrong, he mourned over him with a passionate grief with which he in vain struggled, as though it were an imperfection. On occasion of his brother Gerard's death, he endeavored to preach one of his sermons on the Canticles without alluding to it, but it was too much for him: in the midst of the sermon, his grief bursts forth, and down fall the bitter tears which he had pent up so long, and he breaks out into expressions of the most vehement and impassioned sorrow. He kept to the very last the most vivid recollection of his mother; he carried it with him into Citeaux, and every day before he went to bed, he recited the seven penitential psalms for the repose of her soul This practice is connected with the only time on record when Stephen reproved his illustrious disciple.

One night he went to bed without having repeated his psalms: in some way it came to Stephen's knowledge that it was his practice thus to pray for his mother, and that night he knew that his novice had left that duty unfulfilled. It may be that God revealed to him the whole matter, or else by the strange spiritual instinct which those intimately connected with others possess, he read in his face that something had been left undone overnight. Mothers possess this instinct, and why should not the abbot, who watched over his young disciple with a mother's love? However it came into his mind, at all events he did know it, and that in some uncommon way. Next morning he called Bernard to him, and said, Brother Bernard, where, I pray you, hast thou dropped those psalms of thine yesterday, and to whose good keeping hast thou committed them? Bernard, being shy, as says the history, blushed, and marvelled much within himself how the abbot knew that of which he alone possessed the secret. He perceived that he stood in the presence of a spiritual man, and fell at Stephen's feet, begging pardon for his negligence, which, as we may suppose, he was not long in obtaining.

Such is one of the few specimens of Stephen's way of guiding his novice, which time has spared. The other circumstances of the intercourse between these two elect souls are known only to God and His angels. Historians mention but slightly even the solemn ceremony by which St. Bernard knelt at the feet of Stephen to take his vows on quitting the novitiate, the year after his entering the convent. This was the culminating point of the abbot's life; his great work was the training of St. Bernard; henceforth the materials for his history become scanty, for he appears only the administrator of his order, the history of which is merged in St. Bernard.

He had passed the great trials of his life, and he now lived in comparative peace, founding new abbeys every year, and quietly watching the growth of the mighty tree into which his grain of mustard seed had grown. Doubtless he who had so often tried to hide his head in the depths of a forest, did not now regret that his light had waned before his illustrious disciple. And let no one suppose that he is doing nothing, because his name occurs but seldom; every new monastery founded year by year is his work, and he is gradually becoming the head of a vast federacy of which he is the legislator, as well as abbot of his own convent of Citeaux.

While St. Bernard is astonishing the world by his supernatural power over the minds of men, every now and then, from Citeaux, the central point in which these vast rays of glory converge, some new act of monastic policy issues, which is owing to its abbot.

 

STEPHEN CREATES AN ORDER.