High Middle Ages (12th century)
Feast: August 20
He walked into Clairvaux with thirty relatives and built an empire of prayer. He also talked Europe into a crusade that failed, and it haunted him until he died.
When Bernard arrived at the struggling abbey of Citeaux in 1113, he brought thirty friends and family members with him — his brothers, an uncle, and enough young Burgundian noblemen to fill a small army. Within three years, the abbot sent him out to found his own monastery at Clairvaux, a cold, boggy valley that Bernard and his monks had to drain and clear by hand. He nearly killed himself with fasting in those early years, eating so little that he made himself chronically ill. But Clairvaux grew. By the time Bernard died, the Cistercian order had over three hundred monasteries across Europe, and Bernard had founded sixty-eight of them personally. His writing is fierce and tender at the same time. On Loving God builds from self-interest to pure love in four stages. His sermons on the Song of Songs took him eighteen years to preach and fill four volumes. His Marian hymns gave the medieval Church some of its best-loved prayers. But Bernard was also a political operator who couldn't stay out of the world's business. He settled papal schisms, debated Peter Abelard into silence, and, most consequentially, preached the Second Crusade with such fire that half of Europe's nobility took the cross. The crusade was a catastrophe. Bernard spent his last years sick, grieving, and writing letters trying to explain what went wrong. He never quite managed it.