The religious culture of European society from the turn of the thirteenth century to the Reformation was marked above all by the reception of motifs and practices that originated in the monasteries. The eagerness to endow or to enter a monastery may have waned over this period, yet pious layfolk showed a growing interest in the monastic framework for pursuing a Christian life. Many took up for themselves the liturgy of the office and the reading cycle of the Psalms; some adopted the discipline of the scourge and even devised their own modes of living under vows. “Contempt for the world” (contemptus mundi), the cornerstone of monastic spirituality, emerged as the dominant theme of the texts and images that animated lay religion in public and private. One of the most effective and enduring vehicles for this transmission from the cloister to the world was the text that passed through manuscript and early print as the Very Devout Meditations, typically under the authorship of the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. From the final quarter of the twelfth century the Meditations found a wide readership, which it sustained even as the forms, themes, and languages of devotional literature continued to diversify. It was a measure of their fixity as a source of spiritual counsel that the Meditations were positioned in manuscript as the natural companion piece to popular authorities of successive generations from Bonaventure to Richard Rolle and Jean Gerson. 670 surviving copies would suggest a ubiquity; the indirect witness of excerpts in prayerbooks and sermons may never be quantified. First translated into English as early as 1496, here David Bell provides a fresh, fluent, and contemporary text together with concise but richly insightful critical apparatus.
The Meditations were the most successful of several short works of spiritual literature composed in the decades either side of 1200 that accrued, among others, the name of Bernard of Clairvaux. They reflect not only the posthumous reputation of the Cistercians’ great champion but also the continuing vitality of the current of monastic spirituality he promoted in his own, known body of work. In his introduction David Bell dates theMeditations to the twenty years after 1170, almost a generation after Bernard’s own death, and beyond the end of the careers of the celebrated Masters of the Sentences (Lombard) and the Histories (Comestor), when there was already palpable and demonstrable novelty in the secular schools. Yet the only near-contemporary sources that shaped the text represent the period’s high-water mark of monastic thought, the Victorine spiritualty of Hugh, Richard, and perhaps Adam of St Victor, and Bernard himself, the origin of twenty-two passages cited across the fifteen meditations. In fact, the author is as much indebted to earlier expressions of claustral values, of Anselm and Peter Damian, Rabanus Maurus, Cassian and, more than any of these, Augustine. “A multitude of sources...seamlessly woven together” (34), Bell considers the text a case-study in monastic spirituality formed in the face of the schools. Authorities of different ages were drawn together and there was no discernible distinction between the two most recent milieus of Citeaux-Clairvaux and St Victor. Here the author “fuses together” Cistercian and Victorine. In passing, Bell notes that such fusion is a feature of the Song of Songs commentary of Thomas of Perseigne, dedicated to Pontius of Polignac, Bishop of Clermont (1170-89) and former abbot of Clairvaux. On the other hand, he identifies passages on judgment and the torments of hell (Meditations 2-3) that might have been derived from the Life of St Eligius of Noyon, which in turn might signal an association of the author with the Rouen archdiocese.
Wherever it was compiled, Bell is at pains to emphasise that the Bernardine association should not lead to a characterisation of the Meditations as a work of mysticism. Rather, these fifteen reflections were meant to give the reader a grounding in the guiding principles and the practice of meditation. “High-flying contemplativi” (57) are not the author’s intended audience but those just beginning their journey into God. Guigo of Chartreuse, another of the author’s recent monastic authorities, designated meditation the second rung of the cloister’s ladder. Readers are first reminded of the dignity of humankind as created by God; then they are confronted with the descent into sin and the “baseness” of humanity’s present condition, “nothing but stinking sperm, a sack of shit, and food for worms” (Meditation 3, 103). Presented with the prospect of redemption (Meditation 4), they are challenged to “strive to know yourself” (Meditation 5, 116), to give time and energy to prayer (Meditations 6-8) and animate their conscience to acknowledge what is hidden in their heart, for “I cannot hide from my sins for wherever I go my conscience is with me” (Meditation 11, 141). Before them is a final struggle with their own flesh, the sins of the world and Satan, which can only be won if they “crucify the old self” with Christ Himself (Meditation 15, 153). This forceful and unflinching argument for the monastic route to redemption is reinforced by repeated swipes at the alternatives, such as the Church worship of the secular clergy--“I’d rather read than hear masses,” declares the author (Meditation 7, 127)--and the learning of the schools--“It is far better and far more praiseworthy if you know yourself than…[to] know the courses of the stars, the curative powers of herbs, the constitutions of men and women, the natures of animals and have knowledge of all things in heaven and earth (Meditation 5, 116).
Here all the traditions of monastic spirituality together are mobilised to resist what, in the years around 1200, was already a steady drift away from the cloister and towards the world.