Fig. 253.—Refectory in the Priory of St. Martin des Champs, Paris (now part of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers), the work of Pierre de Montereau, architect to St. Louis (Thirteenth Century).—Archæological Restoration by M. Alfred Lenoir.
Fig. 254.—St. Bernard taking possession, with the Cistercian Monks, of the Abbey of Clairvaux. At the foot of the engraving is inscribed: “St. Bernard, Chaplain of the Virgin Mary, was descended from the house of the Kings of Burgundy.” He was, as a matter of fact, related through his mother, Aleth (diminutive for Elizabeth), to the first house of the Dukes of Burgundy.—“Chroniques abrégées de Bourgogne,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.
Fig. 255.—The Great Beguin Convent at Ghent, called the Convent of St. Elizabeth, founded in the Twelfth Century, and which now occupies the same site as in 1234, when the Countess Jane gave a code of rules to the community.—General View taken from the “Ghent Churches,” by Baron Kervyn de Volkaersbeke, reproducing the Engraving of P. J. Goetghebuer.
Contemporaneously with the foundation in Palestine of the order of the Templars—a hospitaller and military order, which had no connection with the monastic orders, and which for a long time devoted all its energies to defending the holy places by prayer and force of arms—St. Norbert, the reformer of the regular canons of the St. Augustine order, founded the Premonstrants in Picardy; Stephen of Muret, a contemplative cenobite of Limoges, founded the order of Grandmont in his province; another Frenchman, Aimeric Malefaye, Patriarch of Antioch, being alarmed at the relaxation of discipline in the monasteries of Asia Minor, introduced some useful reforms into the establishment upon Mount Carmel; while Stephen Harding, third abbot of the Cistercians, an active propagator of the rules which Robert de Molême drew up under the title of “Charte de Charité,” entrusted to his pupil, St. Bernard, the destinies of the new communities which sprang from this glorious cradle. It was in the middle of the twelfth century that there appeared upon the scene one of the brightest lights of the Church, namely, St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (Fig. 254), which he founded, and which was called the third daughter of the Cistercians. He was an admirable orator, a savant of the first rank, a brilliant writer, and an eminent statesman; he had under his control all the interests and secrets of Christendom and of the sovereign papacy, and he never used them for purposes of worldly ambition. He sent forth vast armies of Crusaders to the East, but he adhered to his character of monk and apostle, by devoting his energies to combating the Oriental heretics by verbal arguments; to preventing schisms; to appeasing the scholastic quarrels, in which the famous Abelard was one of the disputants; to aiding with his counsels the popes and the monarchs; and to pouring forth, from diocese to diocese, from council to council, and from synod to synod, that fervid and powerful eloquence which won him all hearts. The death of the illustrious abbot of Clairvaux, in 1153, was a terrible blow to the Church, and an irreparable loss for monastic institutions; for there was no one to take his place or to continue his work of reformation in the monasteries of the Benedictine order.
Fig. 256.—A Beguin.—From an Engraving in the “Histoire de l’Origine des Béguines Belges,” by Hallman.
Amongst the contemporary monks, who were founders or reformers of abbeys, we need only mention the Danish Archbishop Eckel, Felix of Valois, John of Matha, the Englishman Gilbert of Sempringham, the Liége priest Lambert Begh or Lebègue, who created the Beguin convents (Figs. 255 and 256), of which there are so many in the Netherlands, and which were pious retreats where the Beguins lived in common without taking the vows. But the eminent reputation of these austere personages sinks into comparative insignificance before the touching legend of Heloisa, the unfortunate wife of Abelard, who quitted the convent of Argenteuil, near Paris, to immure herself in “the Paraclete,” a house which she had founded in Champagne, to await and receive there the mortal remains of her beloved lord.
