Little is known about Bernard's life prior to the time he joined the Cistercian (sis-TUR-shun) order. An order is an
"Men are saying it is not you but I who am the Pope, and from all sides they are flocking to me."
Letter to Pope Eugenius III, a former student
Portrait: Reproduced by permission of Archive Photos, Inc.
Organized religious community within the Catholic Church, and the Cistercians were monks who sought out a particularly austere, or hard, lifestyle. They did this because they believed that only by denying the needs of the physical body could they truly concentrate on God.
The life of a Cistercian was not for everyone, and though it had only been founded in 1098, its numbers were dwindling when Bernard joined twelve years later. Twenty-year-old Bernard arrived at the Cistercians' abbey in the French town of Citeaux (see-TOH; hence the name Cistercian) with great religious zeal. Like a military recruit who opts for the marines or special forces in the other armed services, he was eager to be tested, and courted the challenges of the Cistercian way of life. So great was his enthusiasm, in fact, that he brought with him thirty male friends and relatives he had convinced to join him. In so doing, he saved the entire Cistercian movement, which at that point consisted of only thirteen members.
The Cistercians quite literally gave Bernard the name by which he is known. When the abbot at Citeaux saw how Bernard had saved the monastery there, he appointed him to establish a second one at Clairvaux (klayr-VOH) some seventy miles away. By the end of Bernard's life, the Cistercians would claim not one or two, but 340 monasteries, and much of the credit belongs to him.
World History
