Bernard de Cluny

Bernard de Cluny (flourished 12th century) was a monk, poet, and Neoplatonic moralist whose writings condemned humanity’s search for earthly happiness and criticized the immorality of the times. He is also noted for his valuable chronicle of monastic customs.

Among the scant references to Bernard’s life is an unconfirmed tradition that described him as a native of England or Brittany who became a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Sauveur d’Aniane, in central France. He then transferred to the great Benedictine foundation of Cluny, near Lyon, where he studied literature and theology.

Bernard’s major work, De contemptu mundi (“On Condemning the World”), was written about 1140 and was dedicated to Abbot Peter the Venerable. A poem of about 3,000 lines in dactylic hexameter, De contemptu mundi expresses the disdain for the material world characteristic of Neoplatonism, a philosophical school that ascribed reality only to the world of ideas. Decrying the transitory nature of earthly life, Bernard maintained that man’s satisfaction could be found only in the spiritual existence of the next world, which could be reached most directly by a rigorous asceticism. With biting satire, he also censured the moral decay of the Western church. He concluded with a vividly apocalyptic description of heaven and hell that may have influenced Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Notable also is Bernard’s compilation of the Consuetudines Cluniacenses (“Customs of Cluny”), a systematic, annotated collection of the monastic principles and usages governing the Cluniac reform of the 6th-century Benedictine Rule.

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A Study of Poetry

Bernard’s devotional verse dedicated to the Virgin Mary became widely popular in medieval piety. De contemptu mundi was edited by H.C. Hoskier in 1929. An edition of Consuetudines Cluniacenses by P.B. Albers appeared in 1905.