Author

Bernard of Clairvaux

1090–1153

SaintDoctor of the ChurchCistercian

Bernard (1090–1153) was born near Dijon in Burgundy and in 1113 entered the reformed monastery of Cîteaux with some thirty companions. Two years later he was sent to found Clairvaux, which he governed as abbot until his death and from which some seventy Cistercian houses were founded in his lifetime. He was canonized in 1174 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

Bernard was the most influential churchman of his generation: he secured recognition for Innocent II in the schism of 1130, preached the Second Crusade, and opposed Peter Abelard at the Council of Sens. His sermons on the Song of Songs and his treatises on grace, free choice and the love of God made him a principal authority for later spiritual theology, and the scholastics cite him alongside the Fathers.

The library holds De consideratione, the treatise of counsel he wrote between 1149 and 1152 for Pope Eugene III, a former monk of Clairvaux. It sets out what a pope must consider about himself, those beneath him, those around him and those above him; the Latin follows the Gaume edition of 1839 and the English George Lewis's translation of 1908.

Works

Texts currently available in the library.

De Consideratione

1839

De Consideratione ad Eugenium (On Consideration, to Eugene) is Bernard of Clairvaux's last major treatise, composed between 1149 and 1152 and addressed to Pope Eugene III, a former monk of Clairvaux whom Bernard had personally formed before his elevation to the papacy. Written in five books, the work is at once a spiritual manual and a mirror for princes: Bernard urges the newly burdened pope not to let the ceaseless business of Rome — litigation, petitions, the "malicious occupations" of the Curia — extinguish the interior life of consideratio, the reflective self-examination that alone keeps action rightly ordered. The treatise moves outward in careful stages, following the fourfold scheme Bernard sets as its architecture: the pope's consideration of himself, of what lies beneath him (the clergy and people of Rome), of what surrounds him (the cardinals and household), and finally of what lies above him, culminating in Book V's ascent toward the contemplation of God, angelic hierarchy, and the divine nature itself. Alongside its mystical and pastoral concerns, the work is notable for its unsparing critique of curial corruption, its meditation on the proper limits of papal power (including the celebrated distinction between the "two swords"), and its warning — startling in an address to a reigning pope — that Eugene's worldly pomp descends "not from Peter, but from Constantine." Blending rhetorical intensity, biblical exegesis, and Cistercian spirituality, De Consideratione stands as one of the most influential texts of twelfth-century ecclesiology and remains a foundational witness to the monastic critique of ecclesiastical power.