Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) was one of the most influential figures in the medieval church. He was not only an impressive monastic founder, but his writings had their influence on the high medieval scholastics as well as the major reformers like Luther and Calvin. Most of his writings are now available in good English translations. We still await an authoritative contemporary biography, though the secondary literature on his writings comes out in a never-ending stream.

Bredero's dense and demanding study is not a biography but a prologomenon to one. A recently retired Dutch scholar, Bredero sets out to account for a problem. We have a picture of Bernard as a saintly mystic who has been the object of cult in the Catholic church for centuries as well as the wellspring for much mystical nourishment. But against that portrait, we have the "historical" Bernard who was engaged in ferocious attacks on the emerging university theology of the day, a relentless hunter of heretics (as Abelard found out to his sorrow), a bitter polemicist, and a preacher of crusades. As Bredero notes, the tension between the piety of Bernard's writings and the excesses of his public actions is patent.

This book is the "report of a long investigation" which has three prongs: (1) to read closely the first life of Bernard (the Vita Prima) in order to understand its apologetical character (especially the early part, which is the work of William of Saint Thierry); (2) to follow the history of historical interpretation from the saint's canonization down to the present renaissance of Bernardine scholarship; and (3) to come to some conclusions about Bernard as an "historiographical problem."

Bredero concludes that any complete biography of the saint will have to take into account Bernard as a monk and as a monastic founder (he is very good on Bernard's incredible gift for founding monasteries) in tandem with Bernard's attempt to "monasticize" the larger culture and, at the same time, to give "this state of life more depth in a mystical sense."

This is definitely a specialist's book and not a book for the casual reader. However, it is provocative and succeeds in contextualizing a figure who has often been called the "Last of the Fathers." Yet we still need an authoritative biography of the saint, who, in the words of the late Etienne Gilson, gave up everything for God except the art of writing well.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.