Religions Reviewed

As Tubach notes with respect to his proto-exemplum, this story provides “a minimum of individualized characteristics.”  It gives the names of Bernard, Theobald, and Constant, but virtually no personal specifics about any of them. There is not even any mention of Constant’s name prior to his conversion—as likely as not, Herbert never knew it, and it was not important to him.  Even so, a variety of details in this brief text serve to highlight information about Bernard himself and about Cistercian culture.

The most notable thing about Bernard in the story is the manner in which he relates to the Count of Champagne. Theobald may have professed fealty to the French king, but he was the head of an effectively autonomous county that was one of the largest and wealthiest in France. Bernard was merely the abbot of a deliberately out-of-the-way monastery. The deference shown to Bernard by Theobald, despite the count’s much greater political stature, illustrates an enormous respect for the abbot’s spiritual authority, and does in fact reflect the wide-ranging personal influence that Bernard is known to have exerted on governing leaders in the church and in secular society. As the historian C.H. Lawrence observed, Bernard was “the mentor of popes, the counselor of kings and cardinals, and the maker and unmaker of bishops.”

Bernard’s cleverness is also evident in the exemplum. He gets custody of the condemned man by telling the executioners, “Dimittite mihi sicarium istum: ego enim volo manibus meis suspendere illum.” Only in the later conversation with Theobald does it become evident that Bernard wants to execute a very different justice against the brigand. But there is another purpose to this way of talking, besides a simple demonstration of guile. By characterizing the life at Clairvaux as “punishment” (poena), Herbert in the voice of Bernard is highlighting the austerity of the Cistercian system, with its demands for physical labor by the monks, and its renunciation of the external ornamentation and opulence that had been adopted by the Cluniac Benedictines.   And this feature is one that Bernard himself stressed in his governance of the monks, and in his writings.

Constant’s final status as a conversus, or lay brother, illustrated another important and distinctive feature of the Cistercian reform. One of the Cistercian refinements of the Benedictine rule was a refusal to own serfs. Instead, Cistercians accepted members of the lower classes as converts, according them respect as monastic brothers.  Thus, for the first time, the medieval peasantry were given an admittance to a monastic way of life. This innovation was not an attempt to abolish class distinctions: difference of function was preserved between lay brothers and choir monks, and this difference was actually accentuated towards the end of the twelfth century.  The Cistercian view of the human person did not bar anyone from redemption through a monastic life—even the worst of criminals, as this exemplum illustrates—but class status was an inherent feature of the human condition, and not one that would be abolished by entering the cloister.