Download or read book Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Spirit written by Jean Leclercq and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1976 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bernard of Clairvaux written by Brian Patrick McGuire and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this intimate portrait of one of the Middle Ages' most consequential men, Brian Patrick McGuire delves into the life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to offer a refreshing interpretation that finds within this grand historical figure a deeply spiritual human being who longed for the reflective quietude of the monastery even as he helped shape the destiny of a church and a continent. Heresy and crusade, politics and papacies, theology and disputation shaped this astonishing man's life, and McGuire presents it all in a deeply informed and clear-eyed biography. Following Bernard from his birth in 1090 to his death in 1153 at the abbey he had founded four decades earlier, Bernard of Clairvaux reveals a life teeming with momentous events and spiritual contemplation, from Bernard's central roles in the first great medieval reformation of the Church and the Second Crusade, which he came to regret, to the crafting of his books, sermons, and letters. We see what brought Bernard to monastic life and how he founded Clairvaux Abbey, established a network of Cistercian monasteries across Europe, and helped his brethren monks and abbots in heresy trials, affairs of state, and the papal schism of the 1130s. By reevaluating Bernard's life and legacy through his own words and those of the people closest to him, McGuire reveals how this often-challenging saint saw himself and conveyed his convictions to others. Above all, this fascinating biography depicts Saint Bernard of Clairvaux as a man guided by Christian revelation and open to the achievements of the human spirit.
Download or read book Bernard of Clairvaux written by Saint Bernard (of Clairvaux) and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two lengthy letters from the abbot of Clairvaux illuminate the transition in theological method in the mid twelfth-century. In this letter to the bishop of Sens on the responsibilities of his office, Bernard articulates his monastic conviction that authority in the Church must be accompanied by contemplative virtues, especially a deeply ingrained humility. Pastors who do attend to their own spiritual health, he explains, are incapable of caring for others. In his letter of baptism, written to Hugh of Saint Victor, Bernard seeks to refute what he considered the doctrinal error of an unnamed scholar-likely Peter Abelard-and assails a theological method he deemed likely to mislead the faithful, because-as Emero Stiegman says in the Introduction-he considered all theological questions 'in the perspective of God's love'. These two letter-treatises (42 and 77) are not included in Bruno Scott James' English translation of The Letters of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Download or read book Befriending Silence written by Carl McColman and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2015-11-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year: Inspirational-religious books. Respected speaker, author, and Patheos blogger Carl McColman introduces Cistercian spirituality as "the hidden jewel of the Church," presenting a surprisingly contemporary path grounded in monastic tradition. This accessible and comprehensive guide highlights a unique focus on simplicity, living close to the earth, and contemplative prayer, all of which make Cistercian spirituality relevant today. Steeped in chant and silence, grounded in down-to-earth work and service, and immersed in the mystical wisdom of teachers ancient (Bernard of Clairvaux) and modern (Thomas Merton), Cistercian spirituality's beautifully humble path has for centuries made monasteries places of rest, retreat, and renewal. Now, Carl McColman offers the first practical introduction to this ancient, contemplative spirituality for all people. Hailed by reviewers of his many books as playful, and profound, McColman draws on his experience as a lay Cistercian to provide insight into the relevance of the tradition to contemporary issues and spiritual practice. He explains how silence, simplicity, stability, stewardship of the earth, contemplation, ongoing conversion, and devotion to Mary combine to offer a rich and unique path to discipleship and intimacy with God.
Download or read book Monastic Sermons written by Bernard of Clairvaux and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saint Bernard was born in 1090 near Dijon, France. He joined the fifteen-year-old monastery of Cîteaux in 1113. In 1115 he became the founding abbot of Clairvaux Abbey, whence his name, Bernard of Clairvaux. Saint Bernard was a gifted and prolific writer of theological treatises, Scriptural commentaries, letters, and many sermons. The sermons in the collection published here, styled Sermones de diversis (Sermons about Various Topics), lack the specific point of departure that characterizes his other sermons. That is, whereas the sermons on the Song of Songs are a verse-by-verse commentary on that biblical book and his Sermons for the Year follow the liturgical calendar, this collection of sermons deals with his various pastoral concerns. Since Scripture is always Bernard’s point of departure and inspiration, the sermons often read like a Scripture study, but what comes through equally is the voice of an understanding spiritual father who is a masterful student of Scripture, biblical language, and the needs of his monks.
Download or read book Honey and Salt written by St. Bernard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century monk who wrote that "Jesus is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, a cry of joy in the heart," was both a mystic and a reformer. His writings reveal a mystical theology that Thomas Merton, a monastic heir to Bernard’s Cistercian reform, says "explains what it means to be united to God in Christ but (also) shows the meaning of the whole economy of our redemption in Christ." Critical of the monastic opulence of his times, Bernard exhorted his monks to consider that "Salt with hunger is seasoning enough for a man living soberly and wisely." Martin Luther believed that Bernard was "the best monk that ever lived, whom I admire beyond all the rest put together." Bernard's zeal and charisma led to the reform of Christian life in medieval Europe. Today it is reported that Pope Benedict XVI keeps Bernard's treatise Advice to a Pope close at hand for spiritual support. Honey and Salt is an original selection for the general reader of Bernard’s sermons, treatises, and letters.
Download or read book The Spirit of Simplicity written by Jean-Baptiste Chautard and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people have ever seen or heard of The Spirit of Simplicity: it has been hidden for almost seventy years after quietly being published by the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Anonymously translated and annotated by a young monk named Thomas Merton, the book’s author—who also is not mentioned by name in the original edition—is Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous French Cistercian whose only other book, The Soul of the Apostolate, has been a favorite of modern saints and popes, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Every generation struggles with the question of simplicity. In the history of our faith, there have been no more eloquent voices calling us back to simplicity than the monks of the Cistercian Order, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Chautard to Merton—all of whom contribute to this powerful book. Merton surrounds Chautard’s text with his own remarks on simplicity, translations of classic texts by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and commentary that allows readers to pursue the themes of simplicity in their own lives. "Only a very inadequate idea of exterior simplicity can be arrived at if we do not trace it back to its true source: interior simplicity. Without this, our resolution to practice exterior simplicity would be without light, without love …," Chautard wrote at the beginning of the book. He is writing to his fellow Cistercians, but he might as well be speaking to twenty-first century Christians. He goes on to lay out the best disciplines that a monk—or anyone—might practice to find the elusive simplicity, with quotations from St. Benedict, St. Bernard, and other pillars of monastic life and spirituality. A dozen photographs of Cistercian architecture illustrate how principles of simplicity are incorporated into Cistercian daily life. In Part 2, Merton opens up the teachings of St. Bernard, a great mystic and doctor of the Church, offering excerpts from St. Bernard’s writings on the original simplicity in the Garden of Eden, the difficulty of intellectual simplicity, the simplicity of the will (obedience), and other kindred topics. Merton also offers personal reflections from the perspective of one who had recently exchanged an active life in pursuit of worldly things for the solitude of a monk.
Download or read book The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux written by William of Saint-Thierry and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, traditionally known as the Vita Prima, originated to prepare the case for canonization of Bernard, first abbot of Clairvaux. The work was begun by William of Saint-Thierry, continued by Arnold of Bonneval, and completed by Geoffrey of Auxerre. When the initial case put forth for Bernard was rejected by Innocent II, Geoffrey undertook a revision of the original vita (Recension A) and submitted another version (Recension B) to Pope Alexander III, who declared Bernard a saint in 1174. This work emphasizes the deep love in which Bernard was held during his life by his monks and the people of France and Italy as well as his role as a powerful public figure. This book contains the first English translation of Recension B, drawn from what is apparently the only manuscript of the work found today in a Cistercian monastery, Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. The introduction begins with the story of how this manuscript came to Mount Saint Bernard, so fixing this translation of the Vita prima within Cistercian life from the twelfth century to today.
Download or read book Bernard of Clairvaux written by Gillian Rosemary Evans and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Bernard of Clairvaux on the Spirituality of Relationship written by John R. Sommerfeldt and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cistercian Fathers and Their Monastic Theology written by Thomas Merton and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These conferences, presented by Thomas Merton to the novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1963–1964, focus mainly on the life and writings of his great Cistercian predecessor, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Guiding his students through Bernard’s Marian sermons, his treatise On the Love of God, his controversy with Peter Abelard, and above all his great series of sermons on the Song of Songs, Merton reveals why Bernard was the major religious and cultural figure in Europe during the first half of the twelfth century and why he has remained one of the most influential spiritual theologians of Western Christianity from his own day until the present. As James Finley writes in his preface to this volume, “Merton is teaching us in these notes how to be grateful and amazed that the ancient wisdom that shimmers and shines in the eloquent and beautiful things that mystics say is now flowing in our sincere desire to learn from God how to find our way to God.”
Download or read book The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church The medieval church written by Hughes Oliphant Old and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church is a multivolume study by Hughes Oliphant Old that canvasses the history of preaching from the words of Moses at Mount Sinai through modern times. In Volume 1, The Biblical Period, Old begins his survey by discussing the roots of the Christian ministry of the Word in the worship of Israel. He then examines the preaching of Christ and the Apostles. Finally, Old looks at the development and practice of Christian preaching in the second and third centuries, concluding with the ministry of Origen.
Download or read book In Praise of the New Knighthood written by Saint Bernard (of Clairvaux) and published by Cistercian Publications Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monk and the knight -- the two quintessentially medieval European heroes -- were combined in the Knights Templar and in the other military orders founded in the era of the Crusades. With characteristic eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux voices the cleric's view of knights, warfare, and the conquest of the Holy Land in five chapters on the knights' vocation. Then the cistercian abbot who never visited Palestine and discouraged monks who proposed doing so, in another eight chapters, provides a spiritual tour of the pilgrimage sites guarded by this 'new kind of knighthood and one unknown to ages gone by.'
Download or read book Jesus as Mother written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.
Download or read book The Cistercian World written by and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-04-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cistercian Order was born in Burgundy at the start of the twelfth century as a movement of radical renewal - an Order that survives to this day with the greater part of its written heritage preserved. This volume brings together a selection of its finest works, which speak powerfully across the centuries to modern readers. Writings by St Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153) - including his letters, The Life of Malachy the Irishman, sermons on the Song of Songs and the sharply satirical Apologia for Abbot William - reveal him to be a highly individual and influential writer of the Middle Ages. Also included here are a charming description of Clairvaux, biographies of abbots and a series of exemplary stories, all drawing on the Scriptures to express intensely personal forms of monastic theology.
Download or read book Immortal Combat written by Fr. Dwight Longenecker and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, far too many leading Christians water down the robust teachings of our Faith. Ignoring Christ's clear example and constant demand that we boldly confront evils, they preach an amicable, nonconfrontational, feel-good gospel. Instead of teaching the faithful to edify and enjoin the wayward, they urge them to pacify and submit . . . with catastrophic results personally, for the Church, and for society at large. Now comes Fr. Dwight Longenecker with this potent book that shows how, by engaging in the lost art of spiritual warfare, good Christians can cure this trend and repair the extensive damage it has caused. Here, without fear or favor, Longenecker maps out the myriad places where evil lurks in our world, shines a light on its many faces, and details the countless clever tricks it uses to hide. He delineates ten sturdy principles that must motivate all Christian warriors who hope to expunge evil and stop it from returning. And finally, he explains in fascinating detail the art of immortal combat, showing how self-sacrifice and contemplation of the Cross can bring victory over any evil, no matter how hidden or how grave. Be forewarned: this book calls you to sanctity and is not for wimps. For sanctity is impossible apart from heroic virtue, and heroic virtue is impossible apart from spiritual warfare. As Fr. Longenecker puts it, “Find a saint, and you'll find a warrior.” These pages are a mighty guidebook for souls hungry to follow the way of the Christian warrior by taking up their crosses and following into immortal combat the King of the Universe, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Download or read book Life and Works of Saint Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux written by Saint Bernard (of Clairvaux) and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
