To Hugh, Abbot of Pontigny
SELECTED LETTERS
You should try to control your stirrings of anger, however justified they may be, by remembering that saying of one of the saints who, when some of the brethren were provoking and reproaching him for not recalling a brother who had gone to another monastery in defiance of him, replied:
'Not at all.
Wherever he is, if he is good, he is still mine.'
3. My advice to you would not be sincere if I did not follow it myself. When one of my own monks, not only a professed religious but also a relation of mine, w as received and kept at Cluny against my will, I was sorry certainly, but I held my peace and prayed to God for those who had taken him away that they might return him, and for him too that he might come back of his own free will. But I left my vengeance to God 'who redresses wrongs' and 'who rights the wrongs of the de1 Through your mouth my spirit warns Brother Hugh of Lausanne 'not to believe every spirit' nor hastily to fenceless'. leave a certain good for one that is uncertain. Let him understand that the devil always attacks perseverance because he knows that it is the only virtue which wins the crown. I warn him that it would be safer for him to persevere with simplicity in the vocation to which he has been called, than under the pretext of seeking supposedly higher good to abandon what he has begun only perhaps to find that he is not equal to what he has presumed to undertake.
[34] To Hugh, Abbot of Pontigny To his most beloved Lord, Abbot Hugh, all that he could wish for himself, from Brother Bernard of Clairvaux.
AS far as I can gather from your letter it appears that either I have worded myself less clearly than I had wished or else that you have not understood me in the way I had intended
1. See Letter 1.
ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
you to do. The warning I gave you ofthe consequences of receiving that monk was quite genuine, I really did fear them and I still do, even as I wrote to you. But I had no intention of trying to persuade or advise you, still less did I mean, as you said I did, that the monk ought to be returned to his monastery. As I have known his wish to join us for a long time, I ought rather to congratulate him than urge his return. But when I was im1 with whom I am very intimate, and by plored by his abbot, the Archbishop of Rheims, to write to you and ask for his return,
I tried so far as I could both to clear myself of any suspicion of complicity in the affair and to warn you of the abuse you might incur by your action, while at the same time satisfying them. Knowing your shrewdness I thought you would read between the lines and see this, or that at any rate you would gather what I meant from what I put at the end of the letter, if you read it in the spirit in which it was written. For when I had warned you of the consequences which I feared, and not without cause, might come of your receiving this monk,
I added, if I remember right: 'Should you prefer to endure all this rather than lose the man, that is your affair and you must see to it\
These, or very nearly these, were my words. I had intended by saying this at the end of the letter to give you a covert hint that I had written what I did under pressure to satisfy, not to say hood-wink, others.
2. What you say about my insinuating to this monk by means of the messenger, that if he came to me I would obtain secretly a dispensation from Rome is, I assure you by the very Truth, quite untrue. Is it likely that I would boast or even hope that I could receive a monk from a monastery which is well known to me, whom I do not think even you can keep without giving great offence? But even were this so, even if I did envy you the monk and try to attract him to myself, hoping or pretending
I could engineer his dispensation from Rome, is it likely that I would reveal to the messenger of all people that I
. See previous letter.