With this spartan ideal firmly in mind, the young Bernard was praying one day in a small wayside church, asking God for his guidance, and when he arose, he had his answer. Transfixed by the clarity of his decision, he persuaded his brothers Barthomieu and André, his uncle, Gaudry and soon, thirty-one other Burgundian nobles, to venture with him to Cîteaux, leaving the Kingdom of France for the Holy Roman Empire and leaving old lives for new. Two other brothers Gérard and Guy were away as soldiers though in time they would join him too. Only the youngest, Nivard, was left behind.
‘Farewell, Nivard,’ Bernard had called to this favourite brother the day the party rode off. ‘You will have all the lands and estates for yourself.’
The boy cried out tearfully, ‘Then you are taking Heaven and leaving me only the earth! The division is too unequal!’
These words greatly moved Bernard and there would be a pit in his stomach until the day when he and Nivard were finally reunited.
In the year 1112, Cîteaux Abbey was still all wood and no stone. It had been established fifteen years earlier but the abbot, Stephen Harding, a flinty Englishman, had not received new novices for some time. He was overjoyed by this influx of humanity and he welcomed Bernard and his entourage with open arms.
That first cold night in the lay dormitory, Bernard blissfully lay awake, the crowded room resonating with the snores of exhausted men. In the days and weeks to come, the harder the travails the greater his pleasure and in the future he would tell all novices at his gate: ‘If you desire to live in this house, leave your body behind; only spirits can enter here.’
His abilities were so exceptional and his labour so vigorous that within two years, Stephen had decided Bernard was more than ready to initiate a new sister abbey. He made him abbot and sent him off with his brothers André and Gérard and twelve other men to a house in the diocese of Langres in Champagne.
On a flat clearing, they built a simple dwelling and embarked on a life of extreme hardship, even by their own tough standards. The land was poor, they made their bread from the coarsest barley and in the first year they had to make do with wild herbs and boiled beech leaves. But they persevered and built up their monastery. They named it Clairvaux.
Because of Bernard’s charisma, disciples flocked to Clairvaux and by the time he became ill there were over a hundred monks in residence. He missed the union of sleeping with his fellows in the long open dormitory but it was just as well he had agreed to move to a small abbot chamber adjacent to the church. His month-long coughing fits would have deprived the monks of what little sleep they had.
Gérard was always the most robust of the six brothers. Other than a sliced thigh, a proper soldier’s trophy, he had never suffered a sick day in his life. He fussed over his frail brother and tried to have him keep down soups and infusions but Bernard was slipping away, a slack bag of bones. Too listless to lead the men at prayer, he delegated the authority to his prior but still insisted on being helped to the church to attend services and observe the hours.
One day, Gérard took it upon himself to ride off to inform the powerful cleric, William of Champeaux, Bishop of Châlons-en-Champagne, about the state of Bernard’s health. William openly appreciated Bernard and acutely recognised his potential as a future church leader. On report of his illness, he obtained the permission of the Cistercian order at Cîteaux to govern Bernard for a year as his superior. The decree in hand, he ordered the young abbot to be relieved of all clerical duties and freed from the harsh observances of the order until his body was healed. Bernard was taken by horse cart south, to the warmer climes of a richer and more comfortable abbey where a few years earlier his middle brother Barthomieu had been dispatched. And thus, Bernard of Clairvaux came to reside at the Abbey Ruac.
Ruac was a Benedictine community sluggishly shedding the excesses which Bernard had railed against. It was not yet fit to be part of the Cistercian order. Although new nuns were no longer admitted, the abbot, a benevolent old sort, did not have the heart to cast the old ones out. Nor did he cast away the wine cellar or the brewery or empty the plentiful larder and granary stores. Barthomieu and some other new men had been sent to Ruac as a vanguard of reform, but they began to relish the comforts they found there having endured hard years at Clairvaux. In truth, they were more changed by Ruac than Ruac changed by them.
On arrival, Bernard was too ill to notice the ecclesiastical shortcomings of his new environs, let alone protest them. He was given a one-room stone house on the outskirts of the abbey with a hearth, a comfortable bed, a reading table with horse-hair chair and an abundance of thick candles. His brother Barthomieu stoked the fire and hovered at his bedside like a worried lover, and an elderly nun, Sister Clotilde, plied him with fresh food and wholesome drink.
At first it seemed Bernard might not survive. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, intermittently recognised his brother, weakly blessing him anew each time, and called the nun ‘mother’, which seemed to please her no end.
On the twentieth day, Bernard’s fever broke and he became aware of his surroundings.
He propped himself to a sitting posture as his brother adjusted his coverlet. ‘Who brought me here?’ he asked.
‘Gérard and some of the monks from Clairvaux.’
Bernard rubbed the grit from his eyes and artfully concealed chastisement as compliment. ‘Look at you! You look well, Barthomieu!’ His older brother was fleshy and robust, his complexion pink as a pig, his hair in need of updated tonsuring.
‘I’m a little fat,’ Barthomieu said, defensively patting his middle through his good linen robe.
‘How is that?’
‘The abbot here is not so strict as you!’
‘Ah, I have heard that said about me,’ Bernard said. His down-cast eyes made it impossible to tell if he rued the austerity he had imposed on his community or Barthomieu’s dismissiveness. ‘How is your life here, brother? Are you serving Christ fully?’
‘I believe I am, but I fear you will look upon my contentment with suspicion. I do love it here, Bernard. I feel I have found my place.’
‘What do you do beyond prayer and meditation? Have you a vocation?’ He recalled his brother’s aversion to manual labour.
Barthomieu acknowledged he was more inclined to indoors pursuits. His abbot had freed him from planting and harvesting. There was a small scriptorium at Ruac turning out copies of The Rule of St Benedict for a tidy profit and he had been apprenticed to a venerable monk with a practised hand. He was also adept at caring for the ill, as Bernard had come to witness first-hand. He assisted Brother Jean, the infirmarer, and spent a good hour a day scuttling around the infirmary, making sure the fires were ample, lighting the candles for Matins, cleaning the bowls that had been used for bloodletting, washing the feet of the sick and shaking their clothing of fleas.
He hoisted Bernard to his feet, let the skeleton of a man lean on his back as he held the piss pot for him. He enthusiastically commented on the improved flow and colour of his brother’s urine. ‘Come,’ Barthomieu said when he was done, ‘take a few steps with me.’
Over the weeks, the few steps turned to many and Bernard was able to take short walks in the spring air and start attending mass. The old abbot, Étienne, and his prior, Louis, were both entrenched in the ancient Benedictine ways and were, as they admitted to each other, rather fearful of the esteemed young man. He was a fire-brand, a reformer, and their provincial minds were no match for his intellect and powers of persuasion. They hoped he would see fit to be a humble guest and let them keep their casks of wine and the likes of dear old Sister Clotilde.