Preface To The Twelve Degrees Of Humility And Pride

PREFACE TO THE TWELVE DEGREES OF HUMILITY AND PRIDE

LIGHT IN THE VALLEY—

FROM LAW TO DESIRE

By William Edmund Fahey, Ph.D.

THE Roman mind of St. Benedict would have understood Leo XIII’s re-organization (and rejuvenation) of the Benedictines in the nineteenth century. Finally recovering from the devastation of the Enlightenment and its Revolutions, the Catholic Church entered into a period of re-organization. Through the Papal brief Summum Semper, Leo brought together the scattered remnants of the Benedictine houses and—in an authoritative act—fashioned them into a single confederation or “order” under one Abbot Primate. Today, we bring to monasticism a largely nineteenth-century notion of a single, centralized order of Benedictine monks. Yet monasticism is again showing its diversity of forms and the Benedictines themselves have long been progressing back towards a decentralized model. There are currently twenty loosely affiliated congregations of Benedictines, seven of which date from after Summer Semper.

For all his Romanitas, St. Benedict did not intend a monolithic idea of an “order.” His conception of monasticism was an attempt to understand how the Christian life could be lived purely and effectively. The confederation of monasteries that sprung out of his Rule was not a blueprint for a homogenized corporation. As the last chapter of the Rule makes clear, his directives were for beginners and envisioned modification and flexibility—much like the norms of classical Roman law and rule, in fact. By the tenth century, the various monastic communities in Western Europe had largely adopted the Rule of St. Benedict, while adapting it to local conditions and preserving, at least in part, ideas, customs, and rules taken from other authors. The Rule was successful in providing the essential architectural structure, but never envisioned uniformity, only unity of principles.

With its success came a diffusion of the vision and spirit of the Rule, as is often the case with organic and institutional growth: the further monasticism spread over geography and time, the less the fervor of the founding generation remained. Yet monastic literature and the Rule itself contained the principles of western monasticism’s own reform, and its elasticity was limited, of course, by the Gospel and the life of grace. By the tenth century the spirit of development and renewal awoke in Europe, taking a northern and southern form.

In southern Europe, the desire for austerity was voiced anew by St. Romuald and St. Peter Damian. The anchoritic or hermitical fervor limited by St. Benedict rose up again to call Italian monasticism away from its distractions and, in some monasteries, its decadence. At the beginning of the eleventh century in the mountain valley of the Apennines near Arezzo, the Camoldoli movement began, harkening back to the most primitive roots of monasticism; and the solitude that was largely an interior solitude amongst Benedictines became once again a structural solitude. Men were not to be alone and apart for God while still amongst men, rather they were to be alone and apart physically. The Camodolese monks organized themselves over whole sections of mountain valleys in a form similar to eastern monasticism.

In northern Europe, the desire for austerity had resulted in a massive internal reform of Benedictines, first initiated by St. Benedict of Aniane (747–821), and then a century later by William Duke of Aquitaine’s successful foundation of an abbey at Cluny in 910. The initial Cluniac reform was spurred on by a scholarly reawakening and a heightened sense of the world’s fragility and the ultimate judgment of God.

Cluniac monasticism vigorously cultivated the private and corporate prayer life of its members. Corporate solitude was to be protected not only by the physical cloister, but by the aural cloister of near continual chant and vocal prayer. Under the dynamic direction of St. Hugh and with strong papal backing, Cluny, positioned in the very heart of France, became a vehicle for the far-reaching reinvention of monasticism and inspired two centuries of splendor in the liturgical arts and church architecture. In one of the most beautiful paradoxes in European history, a zeal for absolute concentration on the soul and a life of endless praise in the face of the end times led to one of the greatest bursts in material creativity and enrichment in Church history.

In response to the Cluniac development and the arguable departure from primitive Benedictine observance, a group of men originally associated with the monastery at Molesme, turned away for the marshy thickets of Cîteaux, twenty miles south of Dijon. On Palm Sunday in the year 1098, a monk named Robert (1028–1111) and a small group of disciples left their larger community to live as the early Christians, understanding the Rule of St. Benedict as providing them a “formula of perfect penance” (formula perfectae penitentiae). A vision of this new life would soon be set out in the Exordium Parvum, one of the founding documents of a new kind of monastery. The members of the new association were to be poor men living with and contemplating a poor Christ, as they would say. Their common life, according to the Rule of St. Benedict, was to lead them back to a strict simplicity in all things exterior and interior. The perceived lavishness of the Cluniac-inspired Benedictines would be utterly rejected. Among the early founders was the English lawyer, St. Stephen Harding, whose hand was decisive in the Exordium and other early documents. These men were to be the Cistercians—the name originating from the simple place name for their new community: Cistercium in Latin (the site of modern Cîteaux), an abbreviation of cis tertium [lapidem miliarum] or “nearby the third milestone.” How appropriate that men questing for simplicity would take their name from nothing more than a wayside road marker.

Behind this somewhat romantic narrative about the origins of this new branch of the Benedictine family was the common reforming spirit of the age. St. Robert of Molesme was seventy years-old in 1098. He had held a variety of positions within various monastic communities and clearly was restless in his pursuit of simplicity. At least three times prior to the attempt at Cîteaux, St. Robert had led groups of men into the wilds of France to establish hermitages. Molesme, which he would dramatically depart from and denounce, was initially his own attempt at a reformed Benedictine community. His early work had been fruitful; many were attracted to his austere zeal. St. Bruno, for example, who would eventually go on to found the most successful of the hermitical forms of western monasticism—the Carthusians—studied at Molesme under St. Robert in the 1070s. But ultimately St. Robert desired a more perfect form to structure his imitation and service of Christ. In his last attempt, he leaned heavily on St. Stephen Harding, a man marked by a deep understanding of the scholarship and legal reforms that were emerging throughout western Christendom.

For the new community at Cîteaux, law would take an almost mystical meaning. Law—the law of Benedict through his Rule and the laws or customs of the new Cistercian norms—was the means by which the Holy Spirit communicated His love. Obedience to the Rule of Benedict and the Cistercian documents led one to see the spiritual rectitude and purity that could be found in the selfless observations of rules in their integrity. Prayer life was simplified and the concept of pursuing an “ordered life,” an Ordo, came to the fore. The “order” of Cistercian life re-emphasized things found in the Rule of St. Benedict—silence, mortification, manual labor—but recovered the centrality of charity as the objective. Observance of the law was not impersonal obedience, but the complete alignment of the monk’s heart to the heart of Christ and to the will of the Father. In so doing, he would become a vessel of grace and love, untainted or diluted by the material riches or worldly apostolates (such as education, ornate liturgical craftsmanship, or diplomacy) that were increasingly becoming the expertise of the Cluniac Benedictines. It was into this setting, in the year 1113, under St. Stephen Harding as the third abbot of Cîteaux that a young Burgundian noble then named Bernard of Fontaines arrived with thirty companions, seeking Christ according to the principles of the new monastery.

The impossibility of adequately sketching the life St. Bernard of Clairvaux can be understood in Thomas Merton’s remark that “Bernard contained the whole twelfth century in himself.” Born for knighthood and adventure, St. Bernard (1090–1153) displayed his remarkable character most magnificently in his youthful rejection of either the straightforward pursuit of military and political prowess as a feudal lord or the apparently obvious route towards authority by way of the Cluniac monasticism. An inner impulse drove Bernard toward the austere vision of a kingly power which demanded displays of love and loyalty in the miry woods of Cîteaux. Yet in choosing the harder path of nascent Cistercian monasticism, Bernard would discover that all the functions of a feudal lord or powerful Churchman were not removed from his life, but only purified and multiplied under the laws of charity and the ordo of the Cistercian life which he would do much to shape and develop. St. Bernard would have a life filled with drama: interventions (political and ecclesial), public preaching, the reform of the papacy, the countering of grave theological and moral errors, and the organization of Christendom’s greatest military endeavor—the Crusades—as well as its most best-known military order—the Templars. Finally,

St. Bernard would oversee the reform or foundation of more than sixty monasteries; he stands as one of the most charismatic leaders in history.

The work which follows this introduction—De Gradibus Superbiae et Humilitatis (or The Degrees of Humility and Pride) was composed before Bernard of Fontaines was transformed by trial, conflict, and ardent fidelity into St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the “Doctor Mellifluus” of the Church. This was Bernard’s first work. He had recently been sent by Stephen Harding along with a small group of followers to found a monastery in a marshy valley of Champagne, a site Bernard would name Clairvaux—“the clear valley”—testifying both to Bernard’s humor and his faith-filled vision of what would rise up there. Despite a future punctuated by travel, he would remain the Abbot of Clairvaux until his death thirty seven years later. But 1115, the year of this work’s appearance, witnessed little that could hint at future renown.

The life of the white-robed monks at Clarivaux was precarious, the health of their ascetic young abbot marked by illness, and the most basic material security of the establishment was a decade away. Those who know the restrained architecture that the Cistericians would later create or who envision something like that which inspired the “serene and blessed mood” which fell upon Wordsworth while walking near Tintern Abbey, must put aside such thoughts. The ideas fashioned to give monasticism its most mystical form were shaped under conditions on which men murmured for lack of food and the author spent many months in and out of the makeshift infirmary. Yet this is precisely what allowed the passionate heart of Bernard to develop the essential teaching of the Cistercians: that all the mortification and order of the monastic life was but preparation for the mercy and rapture of God’s love.

For Bernard, men would ascend or descend, and they needed formal guidance on how to steady their souls, but the goal of monasticism was an experience of God’s love beyond mere knowledge. The rules of Benedict were to keep the monk humble in their observation and in their breach, for God’s intervening mercy would move the monk from the austere bruising of justice back towards the soul’s ascent. Humility was the ladder to climb or fall, but even in falling, the ladder would remain for all who accepted the monastic life—not as a set of Pharisaical “rules,” but as a path through one’s own frailty and ever towards Christ. The Rule of Benedict was designed to strengthen the soul not only by successful ascent through the virtues, but through the hard yet necessary revelation of our vices. Only what was purified could be united to God. Bernard’s early meditation marked a profoundly psychological turn into Catholic spirituality and the beginning of a sensual language that could strike some as distant from the spare Romanitas of St. Benedict. Yet these men are of a piece: without Benedict the lawgiver, Bernard the mystic would have no sturdy frame for his ardent contemplative journey. In the seventh chapter of Benedict’s Rule, St. Bernard found the means for exploring the soul and working with God to return it to its Source, as a spouse gives her body to her true love. Readers of the Ladder should read and re-read that chapter as they move through this text.

Readers should note also the essential structure of the treatise: there are two basic parts, an exploration of the relationship between humility and truth, followed by a detailed analysis of the degrees or steps of pride and humility. The steps upon which Bernard focuses his attention are largely the precipitous steps taken in pride—steps that move one away from God—yet in honestly recognizing them for what they are, the Christian recognizes that an ascent can again begin in truth and through grace and mercy.

In the opening exposition on humility and truth, St. Bernard explains that our knowledge of the truth begins in humility and only with humility: we must understand ourselves as we really are. This perception of truth is then sharpened when we see others as ourselves—that is, as mortal men, limited and marred by sin and, like us, in need of mercy. The process by which we call for mercy on behalf of others and show mercy to others leads to the third stage of truth, the clear perception of what is true through contemplation of God. This contemplation is only possible because the heart has been utterly cleansed by grace, cleansed precisely because we have shown and, therefore, participated in God’s mercy. While parts of this analysis can be found in both Christian and pagan authors, Bernard gives this exploration of the truth a Trinitarian dimension, pointing to the progressive aspect of mystical union. Christ the Son teaches us through our intellect first the purpose of humility. This stage is chiefly directed towards the self. The Holy Spirit enables man to love in charity, act with justice and show mercy through his will and actions. This stage is chiefly directed towards neighbors. God the Father leads the thoughtful and merciful man—like St. Paul—into the rapture of true Wisdom. The second half of the treatise carefully portrays the descending grades of the spiritual life with a delightful, humorous, and painfully accurate depiction of human self-deception and frailty.

This treatise, penned by the man whom the seventeenth-century Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon called the “last of the fathers,” displays the florid, patch-work style of the Patristic age, where a host of Church Fathers reinforce the principles of Scriptures and find themselves occasionally supported by unlikely pagan poets. The text is highly rhetorical. St. Bernard aims at the kind of delight alluded to in the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “Thou hast seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced.” (Jer. 20:7—Seduxisti me, Domine, et seductus sum). A principle of Cistercian spiritual writing from Bernard on is the movement of the person from carnal desire to spiritual desire. The language of love and desire and, indeed, the whole range of secular literature remain in place, but purified gently and progressively so that the soul does not cease to desire, but desires all the more its truest object: God.