Our chief interest in Bernard relates to his monastic work which shed undying luster on his name. Vaughan, in his "Hours with the Mystics," says of him: "His incessant cry for Europe is, Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord.... Bernard had the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry, and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christianity."
But in spite of Dunstans, Brunos and Bernards, the monastic institution keeps on crumbling. The edifice will not stand much more propping and tinkering. While we admire this display of moral force, this commendable struggle of fresh courage and new hope against disintegrating forces, the conviction gains ground that something is radically wrong with the institution. There is something in it which fosters greed and desperate ambition. "Is it not a shame," we feel compelled to ask, "that so much splendid, chivalrous courage and magnificent energy should be expended in trying to prevent a structure from falling, which, it seems, could not possibly have been saved?" But while the decay could not be stayed, we must admire the noble aims and pious enthusiasm of the reformers who sought to preserve an institution which to them seemed the only hope of a sinful world.
Dr. Storrs, in his life of Bernard, says: "His soon-canonized name has shone starlike in history ever since he was buried; and it will not hereafter decline from its height or lose its luster, while men continue to recognize with honor the temper of devoted Christian consecration, a character compact of noble forces, and infused with self-forgetful love for God and man."
The Military Religious Orders
The life of Bernard forms an appropriate introduction to a consideration of the Military Religious Orders. Although weary with labor and the weight of years, he traveled over Europe preaching the second crusade. "To kill or to be killed for Christ's sake is alike righteous and alike safe," this was his message to the world. In spite of the opposition of court advisers, Bernard induced Louis VII. and Conrad of Germany to take the crusader's vow. He gave the Knights Templars a new rule and kindled afresh a zeal for the knighthood. Although the members of the Military Orders were not monks in the strict sense of the word, yet they were soldier-monks, and as such deserve to be mentioned here.
At the basis of all monastic orders, as has been pointed out, were the three vows of obedience, celibacy and poverty. Certain orders, by adding to these rules other obligations, or by laying special stress on one of the three ancient vows, produced new and distinct types of monastic character and life.
The Knights of the Hospital assumed as their peculiar work the care of the sick. The Begging Friars, as will be seen later, were distinguished by the importance which they attached to the rule of poverty; the Jesuits, by exalting the law of unquestioning obedience. In view of the warlike character of the Middle Ages it is strange the soldier-monk did not appear earlier than he did. The abbots, in many cases, were feudal lords with immense possessions which needed protection like secular property, but as this could not be secured by the arts of peace, we find traces of the union of the soldier and the monk before the distinct orders professing that character. The immediate cause of such organizations was the crusades. There were numerous societies of this character, some of them so far removed from the monastic type as scarcely to be ranked with monastic institutions. One list mentions two hundred and seven of these Orders of Knighthood, comprising many varieties in theory and practice. The most important were three,--the Knights of the Hospital, or the Knights of St. John; the Knights Templars; and the Teutonic Knights. The Hospitallers wore black mantles with white crosses, the Templars white mantles with red crosses, and the Teutonic Knights white mantles with black crosses. The mantles were in fact the robe of the monk adorned with a cross. The whole system was really a marriage of monasticism and chivalry, as Gibbon says: "The firmest bulwark of Jerusalem was founded in the Knights of the Hospital and of the Temple, that strange association of monastic and military life. The flower of the nobility of Europe aspired to wear the cross and profess the vows of these orders; their spirit and discipline were immortal."
A passage in the Alexiad quoted in Walter Scott's "Robert of Paris" reads: "As for the multitude of those who advanced toward the great city let it be enough to say, that they were as the stars in the heaven or as the sand of the seashore. They were in the words of Homer, as many as the leaves and flowers of spring." This figurative description is almost literally true. Europe poured her men and her wealth into the East. No one but an eye-witness can conceive of the vast amount of suffering endured by those fanatical multitudes as they roamed the streets of Jerusalem looking for shelter, or lay starving by the roadside on a bed of grass.