St. Bernard And The Second Crusade, A.D. 1145-1155
During the first half of the twelfth century – a period marked by conflicting spiritual tendencies – in Italy began a work of political and religious reform, which has ever since been associated with the name of its chief originator and apostle, Arnold of Brescia, so called from his native city in Lombardy.
He was born about the year 1100, became a disciple of Abelard – whose teachings fired him with enthusiasm – and entered the priesthood. Although quite orthodox in doctrine, he rebelled against the secularization of the Church – which had given to the pope almost supreme power in temporal affairs – and against the worldly disposition and life then prevalent among ecclesiastics and monks.
His own life was sternly simple and ascetic, and this habit had been strongly confirmed by the ethical passion which burned in the religious and philosophical instructions of Abelard. With the popular religion Arnold had earnest sympathy, but he would reduce the clergy to their primitive and apostolic poverty, depriving them of individual wealth and of all temporal power.
The inspiring idea of Arnold’s movement was that of a holy and pure church, a renovation of the spiritual order after the pattern of the apostolic church. He conformed in dress as well as in his mode of life to the principles he taught. The worldly and often corrupt clergy, he maintained, were unfit to discharge the priestly functions – they were no longer priests, and the secularized Church was no longer the house of God.
Arnold dreamed of a great Christian republic and labored to establish it, insomuch that his ideal, never realized in concrete form, either in church or state, took, and in history has kept, the name of republic. His eloquence and sincerity brought him powerful popular support, and even a large part of the nobility were won to his side.
But of course, among those whom his aims condemned or antagonized, there were many who spared no pains to place him in an unfavorable light and to bring his labors to naught. In the simple story of his career, as here told by the great church historian, his figure appears in an attitude of heroism, which the pathos of his end can only make the reader more deeply appreciate.
Through all this agitation is heard the voice of St. Bernard urging the religious conscience and better aspiration of the time, preaching the Second Crusade, and speeding its eastward march with earnest expectation – his high hope doomed to perish with its inglorious result.
Arnold’s discourses were directly calculated by their tendency to find ready entrance into the minds of the laity, before whose eyes the worldly lives of the ecclesiastics and monks were constantly present, and to create a faction in deadly hostility to the clergy. Superadded to this was the inflammable matter already prepared by the collision of the spirit of political freedom with the power of the higher clergy.
Thus Arnold’s addresses produced in the minds of the Italian people, quite susceptible to such excitements, a prodigious effect, which threatened to spread more widely, and Pope Innocent felt himself called upon to take preventive measures against it. At the Lateran Council, in the year 1139, he declared against Arnold’s proceedings, and commanded him to quit Italy – the scene of the disturbances thus far – and not to return again without express permission from the Pope.
Arnold, moreover, is said to have bound himself by an oath to obey this injunction, which probably was expressed in such terms as to leave him free to interpret it as referring exclusively to the person of Pope Innocent. If the oath was not so expressed, he might afterward have been accused of violating that oath.
It is to be regretted that the form in which the sentence was pronounced against Arnold has not come down to us; but from its very character it is evident that he could not have been convicted of any false doctrine, since otherwise the Pope would certainly not have treated him so mildly – would not have been contented with merely banishing him from Italy, since teachers of false doctrine would be dangerous to the Church everywhere.
Bernard, moreover, in his letter directed against Arnold, states that he was accused before the Pope of being the author of a very bad schism. Arnold now betook himself to France, and here he became entangled in the quarrels with his old teacher Abelard, to whom he was indebted for the first impulse of his mind toward this more serious and free bent of the religious spirit. Expelled from France, he directed his steps to Switzerland, and sojourned in Zurich.
The abbot Bernard thought it necessary to caution the Bishop of Constance against him; but the man who had been condemned by the Pope found protection there from the papal legate, Cardinal Guido, who, indeed, made him a member of his household and companion of his table.
The abbot Bernard severely censured the prelate, on the ground that Arnold’s connection with him would contribute, without fail, to give importance and influence to that dangerous man. This deserves to be noticed on two accounts, for it makes it evident what power he could exercise over men’s minds, and that no false doctrines could be charged to his account.
But independent of Arnold’s personal presence, the impulse which he had given continued to operate in Italy, and the effects of it extended even to Rome. By the papal condemnation, public attention was only more strongly drawn to the subject. The Romans certainly felt no great sympathy for the religious element in that serious spirit of reform which animated Arnold; but the political movements, which had sprung out of his reforming tendency, found a point of attachment in their love of liberty, and their dreams of the ancient dominion of Rome over the world.
The idea of emancipating themselves from the yoke of the Pope, and of reestablishing the old Republic, flattered their Roman pride. Espousing the principles of Arnold, they required that the Pope, as spiritual head of the Church, should confine himself to the administration of spiritual affairs; and they committed to a senate the supreme direction of civil affairs. Innocent could do nothing to stem such a violent current; and he died in the midst of these disturbances, in the year 1143.
The mild Cardinal Guido, the friend of Abelard and Arnold, became his successor, and called himself, when pope, Celestine II. By his gentleness, quiet was restored for a short time. Perhaps it was the news of the elevation of this friendly man to the papal throne that encouraged Arnold himself to come to Rome. But Celestine died after six months, and Lucius II was his successor. Under his reign the Romans renewed the former agitations with more violence; they utterly renounced obedience to the Pope, whom they recognized only in his priestly character, and the restored Roman Republic sought to strike a league in opposition to the Pope and to papacy with the new Emperor, Conrad III.
In the name of the “senate and Roman people,” a pompous letter was addressed to Conrad. The Emperor was invited to come to Rome, that from thence, like Justinian and Constantine, in former days, he might give laws to the world. Caesar should have the things that are Caesar’s; the priest the things that are the priest’s, as Christ ordained when Peter paid the tribute money. Long did the tendency awakened by Arnold’s principles continue to agitate Rome.
In the letters written amidst these commotions, by individual noblemen of Rome to the Emperor, we perceive a singular mixing together of the Arnoldian spirit with the dreams of Roman vanity; a radical tendency to the separation of secular from spiritual things which if it had been capable enough in itself, and if it could have found more points of attachment in the age, would have brought destruction on the old theocratical system of the Church.
They said that the Pope could claim no political sovereignty in Rome; he could not even be consecrated without the consent of the Emperor – a rule which had in fact been observed till the time of Gregory VII. Men complained of the worldliness of the clergy, of their bad lives, of the contradiction between their conduct and the teachings of Scripture. The popes were accused as the instigators of the wars.
“The popes,” it was said, “should no longer unite the cup of the eucharist with the sword; it was their vocation to preach, and to confirm what they preached by good works. How could those who eagerly grasped at all the wealth of this world, and corrupted the true riches of the Church, the doctrine of salvation obtained by Christ, by their false doctrines and their luxurious living, receive that word of our Lord, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ when they were poor themselves neither in fact nor in disposition?” Even the donative of Constantine to the Roman bishop Silvester was declared to be a pitiable fiction.
This lie had been so clearly exposed that it was obvious to the very day-laborers and to women, and that these could put to silence the most learned men if they ventured to defend the genuineness of this donative; so that the Pope, with his cardinals, no longer dared to appear in public. But Arnold was perhaps the only individual in whose case such a tendency was deeply rooted in religious conviction; with many it was but a transitory intoxication, in which their political interests had become merged for the moment.
The pope Lucius II was killed as early as 1145, in the attack on the Capitol. A scholar of the great abbot Bernard, the abbot Peter Bernard of Pisa, now mounted the papal chair under the name of Eugene III. As Eugene honored and loved the abbot Bernard as his spiritual father and old preceptor, so the latter took advantage of his relation to the Pope to speak the truth to him with a plainness which no other man would easily have ventured to use.
In congratulating him upon his elevation to the papal dignity, he took occasion to exhort him to do away with the many abuses which had become so widely spread in the Church by worldly influences. “Who will give me the satisfaction,” said he in his letter, “of beholding the Church of God, before I die, in a condition like that in which it was in ancient days, when the apostles threw out their nets, not for silver and gold, but for souls?
How fervently I wish thou mightest inherit the word of that apostle whose episcopal seat thou hast acquired, of him who said, ‘Thy gold perish with thee.’ Oh that all the enemies of Zion might tremble before this dreadful word, and shrink back abashed! This, thy mother indeed expects and requires of thee, for this long and sigh the sons of thy mother, small and great, that every plant which our Father in heaven has not planted may be rooted up by thy hands.
” He then alluded to the sudden deaths of the last predecessors of the Pope, exhorting him to humility, and reminding him of his responsibility. “In all thy works,” he wrote, “remember that thou art a man; and let the fear of Him who taketh away the breath of rulers be ever before thine eyes.” Eugene was soon forced to yield, it is true, to the superior force of the insurrectionary spirit in Rome, and in 1146 to take refuge in France; but, like Urban and Innocent, he too, from this country, attained to the highest triumph of the papal power.
Like Innocent, he found there, in the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, a mightier instrument for operating on the minds of the age than he could have found in any other country; and like Urban, when banished from the ancient seat of the papacy, he was enabled to place himself at the head of a crusade proclaimed in his name, and undertaken with great enthusiasm; an enterprise from which a new impression of sacredness would be reflected back upon his own person.
The news of the success which had attended the arms of the Saracens in Syria, the defeat of the Christians, the conquest of the ancient Christian territory of Edessa, the danger which threatened the new Christian kingdom of Jerusalem and the Holy City, had spread alarm among the Western nations, and the Pope considered himself bound to summon the Christians of the West to the assistance of their hard-pressed brethren in the faith and to the recovery of the holy places.
By a letter directed to the abbot Bernard he commissioned him to exhort the Western Christians in his name, that, for penance and forgiveness of sins, they should march to the East, to deliver their brethren, or to give up their lives for them. Enthusiastic for the cause himself, Bernard communicated, through the power of the living word and by letters, his enthusiasm to the nations.
He represented the new crusade as a means furnished by God to the multitudes sunk in sin, of calling them to repentance, and of paving the way, by devout participation in a pious work, for the forgiveness of their sins. Thus, in his letter to the clergy and people in East Frankland (Germany), he exhorts them eagerly to lay hold on this opportunity; he declares that the Almighty condescended to invite murderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in other crimes, into his service, as well as the righteous.
He calls upon them to make an end of waging war with one another, and to seek an object for their warlike prowess in this holy contest. “Here, brave warrior,” he exclaims, “thou hast a field where thou mayest fight without danger, where victory is glory and death is gain. Take the sign of the cross, and thou shalt obtain the forgiveness of all the sins which thou hast never confessed with a contrite heart.” By Bernard’s fiery discourses men of all ranks were carried away. In France and in Germany he travelled about, conquering by an effort his great bodily infirmities, and the living word from his lips produced even mightier effects than his letters.
A peculiar charm, and a peculiar power of moving men’s minds, must have existed in the tones of his voice; to this must be added the awe-inspiring effect of his whole appearance, the way in which his whole being and the motions of his bodily frame joined in testifying of that which seized and inspired him. Thus it admits of being explained how, in Germany, even those who understood but little, or in fact nothing, of what he said, could be so moved as to shed tears and smite their breasts; could, by his own speeches in a foreign language, be more strongly affected and agitated than by the immediate interpretation of his words by another.
From all quarters sick persons were conveyed to him by the friends who sought from him a cure; and the power of his faith, the confidence he inspired in the minds of men, might sometimes produce remarkable effects. With this enthusiasm, however, Bernard united a degree of prudence and a discernment of character such as few of that age possessed, and such qualities were required to counteract the multiform excitements of the wild spirit of fanaticism which mixed in with this great ferment of minds.
Thus, he warned the Germans not to suffer themselves to be misled so far as to follow certain independent enthusiasts, ignorant of war, who were bent on moving forward the bodies of the crusaders prematurely. He held up as a warning the example of Peter the Hermit, and declared himself very decidedly opposed to the proposition of an abbot who was disposed to march with a number of monks to Jerusalem; “for,” said he, “fighting warriors are more needed there than singing monks.”
At an assembly held at Chartres it was proposed that he himself should take the lead of the expedition; but he rejected the proposition at once, declaring that it was beyond his power and contrary to his calling. Having, perhaps, reason to fear that the Pope might be hurried on, by the shouts of the many, to lay upon him some charge to which he did not feel himself called, he besought the Pope that he would not make him a victim to men’s arbitrary will, but that he would inquire, as it was his duty to do, how God had determined to dispose of him.
With the preaching of this Second Crusade, as with the invitation to the First, was connected an extraordinary awakening. Many who had hitherto given themselves up to their unrestrained passions and desires, and become strangers to all higher feelings, were seized with compunction. Bernard’s call to repentance penetrated many a heart; people who had lived in all manner of crime were seen following this voice and flocking together in troops to receive the badge of the cross.
Bishop Otto of Freisingen, the historian, who himself took the cross at that time, expresses it as his opinion “that every man of sound understanding would be forced to acknowledge so sudden and uncommon a change could have been produced in no other way than by the right hand of the Lord.” The provost Gerhoh of Reichersberg, who wrote in the midst of these movements, was persuaded that he saw here a work of the Holy Spirit, designed to counteract the vices and corruptions which had got the upper hand in the Church. Many who had been awakened to repentance confessed what they had taken from others by robbery or fraud, and hastened, before they went to the holy war, to seek reconciliation with their enemies.
The Christian enthusiasm of the German people found utterance in songs in the German tongue; and even now the peculiar adaptation of this language to sacred poetry began to be remarked. Indecent songs could no longer venture to appear abroad. While some were awakened by Bernard’s preaching from a life of crime to repentance, and by taking part in the holy war strove to obtain the remission of their sins, others again, who though hitherto borne along in the current of ordinary worldly pursuits, yet had not given themselves up to vice, were filled by Bernard’s words with loathing of the worldly life, inflamed with a vehement longing after a higher stage of Christian perfection, after a life of entire consecration to God.
They longed rather to enter upon the pilgrimage to the heavenly than to an earthly Jerusalem; they resolved to become monks, and would fain have the man of god himself, whose words had made so deep an impression on their hearts, as their guide in the spiritual life, and commit themselves to his directions, in the monastery of Clairvaux. But here Bernard showed his prudence and knowledge of mankind; he did not allow all to become monks who wished to do so. Many he rejected because he perceived they were not fitted for the quiet of the contemplative life, but needed to be disciplined by the conflicts and cares of a life of action.
As contemporaries themselves acknowledge, these first impressions, in the case of many who went to the crusades, were of no permanent duration, and their old nature broke forth again the more strongly under the manifold temptations to which they were exposed, in proportion to the facility with which, through the confidence they reposed in a plenary indulgence, without really laying to heart the condition upon which it was bestowed, they could flatter themselves with security in their sins.
Gerhoh of Reichersberg, in describing the blessed effects of that awakening which accompanied the preaching of the crusader, yet says: “We doubt not that among so vast a multitude some became in the true sense and in all sincerity soldiers of Christ.
Some, however, were led to embark in the enterprise by various other occasions, concerning whom it does not belong to us to judge, but only to Him who alone knows the hearts of those who marched to the contest either in the right or not in the right spirit. Yet this we do confidently affirm, that to this crusade many were called, but few were chosen.” And it was said that many returned from this expedition, not better, but worse than they went. Therefore the monk Cesarius of Heisterbach, who states this, adds:
“All depends on bearing the yoke of Christ not one year or two years, but daily, if a man is really intent on doing it in truth, and in that sense in which our Lord requires it to be done, in order to follow him.” When it turned out, however, that the event did not answer the expectations excited by Bernard’s enthusiastic confidence, but the crusade came to that unfortunate issue which was brought about especially by the treachery of the princes and nobles of the Christian kingdom in Syria, this was a source of great chagrin to Bernard, who had been so active in setting it in motion, and who had inspired such confident hopes by his promises.
He appeared now in the light of a bad prophet, and he was reproached by many with having incited men to engage in an enterprise which had cost so much blood to no purpose; but Bernard’s friends alleged, in his defence, that he had not excited such a popular movement single-handed, but as the organ of the Pope, in whose name he acted; and they appealed to the facts by which his preaching of the cross was proved to be a work of God – to the wonders which attended it.
Or they ascribed the failure of the undertaking to the bad conduct of the crusaders, themselves, to the unchristian mode of life which many of them led, as one of these friends maintained, in a consoling letter to Bernard himself, adding, “God, however, has turned it to good.
Numbers who, if they had returned home, would have continued to live a life of crime, disciplined and purified by many sufferings, have passed into the life eternal.” But Bernard himself could not be staggered in his faith by this event. In writing to Pope Eugene on this subject, he refers to the incomprehensibleness of the divine ways and judgments; to the example of Moses, who, although his work carried on its face incontestable evidence of being a work of God, yet was not permitted himself to conduct the Jews into the Promised Land.
As this was owing to the fault of the Jews themselves, so too the crusaders had none to blame but themselves for the failure of the divine work. “But,” says he, “it will be said, perhaps, how do we know that this work came from the Lord? What miracle dost thou work that we should believe thee? To this question I need not give an answer; it is a point on which my modesty asks to be excused from speaking. Do you answer,” says he to the Pope, “for me and for yourself, according to that which you have seen and heard.”
So firmly was Bernard convinced that God had sustained his labors by miracles. Eugene was at length enabled, in the year 1149, after having for a long time excited against himself the indignation of the cardinals by his dependence on the French abbot, with the assistance of Roger, King of the Sicilies, to return to Rome; where, however, he still had to maintain a struggle with the party of Arnold. The provost Gerhoh finds something to complain of in the fact that the Church of St. Peter wore so warlike an aspect that men beheld the tomb of the apostle surrounded with bastions and the implements of war.
As Bernard was no longer sufficiently near the Pope to exert on him the same immediate personal influence as in times past, he addressed to him a voice of admonition and warning, such as the mighty of the earth seldom enjoy the privilege of hearing. With the frankness of a love which, as he himself expresses it, knew not the master, but recognized the son, even under the pontifical robes, he set before him, in his four books On Meditation, which he sent to him singly at different times, the duties of his office, and the faults against which, in order to fulfil these duties, he needed especially to guard.
Bernard was penetrated with a conviction that to the Pope, as St. Peter’s successor, was committed by God a sovereign power of church government over all, and responsible to no other tribunal; that to this church theocracy, guided by the Pope, the administration even of the secular power, though independent within its own peculiar sphere, should be subjected, for the service of the kingdom of God; but he also perceived, with the deepest pain, how very far the papacy was from corresponding to this its idea and destination; what prodigious corruption had sprung and continued to spring from the abuse of papal authority; he perceived already, with prophetic eye, that this very abuse of arbitrary will must eventually bring about the destruction of this power.
He desired that the Pope should disentangle himself from the secular part of his office, and reduce that office within the purely spiritual domain; and that, above all, he should learn to govern and restrict himself. But to the close of his life, in the year 1153, Pope Eugene had to contend with the turbulent spirit of the Romans and the influences of the principles disseminated by Arnold; and this contest was prolonged into the reign of his second successor, Adrian IV. Among the people and among the nobles, a considerable party had arisen who would concede to the Pope no kind of secular dominion.
And there seems to have been a shade of difference among the members of this party. A mob of the people is said to have gone to such an extreme of arrogance as to propose the choosing of a new emperor from among the Romans themselves, the restoration of a Roman empire independent of the Pope. The other party, to which belonged the nobles, were for placing the emperor Frederick I at the head of the Roman Republic, and uniting themselves with him in a common interest against the Pope.
They invited him to receive the imperial crown, in the ancient manner, from the “senate and Roman people,” and not from the heretical and recreant clergy and false monks who acted in contradiction to their calling, exercising lordship despite of the evangelical and apostolical doctrine; and in contempt of all laws, divine and human, brought the Church of God and the kingdom of the world into confusion. Those who pretend that they are the representatives of Peter, it was said, in a letter addressed in the spirit of this party to the emperor Frederick I, “act in contradiction to the doctrines which that apostle teaches in his epistles.
How can they say with the apostle Peter, ‘Lo, we have left all and followed thee,’ and, ‘Silver and gold have I none’? How can our Lord say to such, ‘Ye are the light of the world,’ ‘the salt of the earth’? Much rather is to be applied to them what our Lord says of the salt that has lost its savor. ‘Eager after earthly riches, they spoil the true riches, from which the salvation of the world has proceeded.’ How can the saying be applied to them, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’? for they are neither poor in spirit nor in fact.”
Pope Adrian IV was first enabled, under more favorable circumstances, and assisted by the Emperor Frederick I, to deprive the Arnold party of its leader, and then to suppress it entirely. It so happened that, in the first year of Adrian’s reign, 1155, a cardinal, on his way to visit the Pope, was attacked and wounded by followers of Arnold. This induced the Pope to put all Rome under the interdict, with a view to force the expulsion of Arnold and his party. This means did not fail of its effect.
The people who could not bear the suspension of divine worship, now themselves compelled the nobles to bring about the ejection of Arnold and his friends. Arnold, on leaving Rome, found protection from Italian nobles. By the order, however, of the emperor Frederick, who had come into Italy, he was torn from his protectors and surrendered up to the papal authority. The Prefect of Rome then took possession of his person and caused him to be hanged.
His body was burned, and its ashes thrown into the Tiber, lest his bones might be preserved as the relics of a martyr by the Romans, who were enthusiastically devoted to him. Worthy men, who were in other respects zealous defenders of the church orthodoxy and of the hierarchy – as, for example, Gerhoh of Reichersberg – expressed their disapprobation, first, that Arnold should be punished with death on account of the errors which he disseminated; secondly, that the sentence of death should proceed from a spiritual tribunal, or that such a tribunal should at least have subjected itself to that bad appearance.
But on the part of the Roman court it was alleged, in defense of this proceeding, that “it was done without the knowledge and contrary to the will of the Roman curia.” “The Prefect of Rome had forcibly removed Arnold from the prison where he was kept, and his servants had put him to death in revenge for injuries they had suffered from Arnold’s party.
Arnold, therefore, was executed, not on account of his doctrines, but in consequence of tumults excited by himself.” It may be a question whether this was said with sincerity, or whether, according to the proverb, a confession of guilt is not implied in the excuse.
But Gerhoh was of the opinion that in this case they should at least have done as David did, in the case of Abner’s death, and, by allowing Arnold to be buried, and his death to be mourned over, instead of causing his body to be burned, and the remains thrown into the Tiber, washed their hands of the whole transaction.
But the idea for which Arnold had contended, and for which he died, continued to work in various forms, even after his death – the idea of a purification of the Church from the foreign worldly elements with which it had become vitiated, of its restoration to its original spiritual character.
