The Life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron (review)

From the early-eleventh century until about the middle of the twelfth, a powerful religious revival characterized by asceticism and eremitic withdrawal flared up in many places across Western Europe. Loose-knit colonies of hermits sprang up in the wastes and multiplied, sometimes attracting hundreds of recruits to an existence unconstrained by the bonds of normal society and to a lifestyle patterned on that of the desert fathers and mothers in its reliance on prayer, manual productivity, and God's natural provision. The leaders of this revival at the peak of its creativity (about the end of the eleventh century) channeled its resources into the creation of families of reformed monasteries, such as Citeaux, Fontevrault, Savigny, and Tiron. Blessed Bernard (c. 1050–1116), founder of the Tironian congregation, was one of the leading luminaries. Thirty years or so after his death, a monk of Tiron named Geoffrey Grossus wrote a hagiographic account of his life, which Ruth Harwood Cline has rendered in English for the first time in this very accomplished translation. Scholars who wish to check it against the Latin text (BHL 1251) in Acta sanctorum, April 2, cols. 222–55, will be pleased to discover that the conveniently short, numbered paragraphs of the two correspond.

Despite the great need for them, competent translators are rare and sometimes undervalued. Cline's work merits praise and gratitude as much for user-friendly footnotes and introductory commentary as for the labor of bringing unread Latin to a wider audience. Maps locate places noted in the text within the geography of modern France, and a timeline of significant events provides chronology constructed from cartularies. For the most part, the reader is expected to take this on trust, because Cline does not reveal the reasoning or sources behind every given date, but her introduction does at least highlight errors in Geoffrey's account and the artificiality of its structure (pedimental chiasmus centered on visits to the pope created a tidier pattern than any that Bernard's career could have followed). Regarding Geoffrey's account, Cline detects different voices in what is, nevertheless, a unified work. Regrettably little is said about Geoffrey and the purpose of his work, which is taken to be a dossier for canonization. Longer than most Vitae, it has an average share of curious anecdotes and insights, but its value lies in its particular perspective, which reflects what one might expect of a member of one of the new orders, writing in the 1140s. It contends, for example, that sanctity inheres in virtues not miracles, while proving that Bernard possessed spiritual gifts such as prophecy and performed the occasional miracle just for good measure. It interprets Bernard's activities as an effort to restore divine reason to fallen, chaotic Creation. Thus Bernard subjugates appetites and unruly emotions to reason (pp. 110, 113), in line with Ciceronian and monastic ideals. Geoffrey also blended bits of St. Jerome's pastoral letters, St. Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis, and the Benedictine Rule to paint a portrait of Bernard that unites the holiness of a desert father with the perspicacity of a patristic doctor; the austerity of a hermit with an abbot's solicitude for souls, like "a new Antony" (p. 80). His voluntary poverty, however, is essentially Christomimetic, and he ministers to Christ in the person of the poor (pp. 13, 33, 80). All these points of inspiration—eremitic, patristic, and Christomimetic—had jostled for attention during the soul-searching revival of the preceding century and invigorated Geoffrey's study of Bernard of Tiron. Thanks to Cline, students will be better placed to study that revival and the currents of thought that inspired the often overlooked Tironian congregation.