Twelfth century

The twelfth century, conventionally dated from 1101 to 1200, appears in the book as a formative age of Christian monastic spirituality and public religious authority. Through Bernard of Clairvaux and Hildegard of Bingen, it is not a retreat from the world so much as a period in which inward devotion, disciplined communal life, theological writing, and intervention in church and state repeatedly meet.

Monastic life and the search for God

The Cistercian setting gives the period a material and communal texture. At Clairvaux, a plain stone monastery was difficult to heat; in winter, monks gathered in their habits with their cowls drawn over their heads. Bernard taught them that mystical experience did not require anything seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted: it could be an interior encounter with God, prepared for by desire and love. The austerity of the place and the intensity of longing belong together in this account of twelfth-century spirituality.

The book also links the century to a living monastic inheritance. In the late 1950s, a Protestant seminary student visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani encountered about 250 monks entering the church silently, taking their places in the choir stalls, and singing Latin psalms in Gregorian chant. Professor Bard Thompson brought his first-year church history class there to see that medieval monasticism remained an active institution, not merely a historical subject. The visit offers a later vantage point on the period: its forms of communal prayer and disciplined life could still be encountered centuries afterward.

Bernard of Clairvaux: contemplation and public authority

Bernard entered Cîteaux around 1113, choosing its austere life over the prospects that his education and talent might have offered elsewhere. He arrived with a group said to include thirty friends and relatives. Under Abbot Stephen Harding, the community endured primitive facilities, difficult asceticism, and isolation. Bernard completed his novitiate and was sent to establish Clairvaux; all four of his brothers eventually became monks as well.

From 1125, Bernard wrote on monastic life, humility, love of God, and grace. Around 1135–36 he began the eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs that became his best-known work and a classic of Christian spirituality. Their allegorical reading makes the longing between lovers an image of the soul's desire for God. Bernard’s teaching on inward devotion arose from a life that was also conspicuously public: between 1130 and 1145 he wrote to European rulers about their duties, settled ecclesiastical disputes, and influenced church councils. At the Second Lateran Council in 1139, he worked for the recognition of Innocent II; in 1140, he helped bring about the condemnation of Peter Abelard, whose emphasis on understanding before believing conflicted with Bernard’s contemplative approach. He also encouraged the Second Crusade, whose defeat at Damascus made that intervention a disastrous one.

His return to Clairvaux after extended absences mattered both to the abbot and to his monks. Bernard missed the community, and the monks missed him; his sermons addressed men he regarded as ready for the “solid food” of spiritual teaching. In the final, unfinished sermon, he urged prayer in privacy and silence, seeking the Word for its own sake rather than as a means to some other end. Bernard died in 1153 before completing the series. Others continued it, but the book stresses that none could write as he did. His life complicates any division between contemplation and action: he administered a large community, advised rulers, and intervened in church affairs while insisting that virtue belonged to the mystical life.

Hildegard of Bingen and visionary authority

Hildegard’s career shows another twelfth-century route to religious authority. She said she had experienced visions since the age of five and described an experience of the “reflection of the living Light”; in one vision during prayer, she experienced the Light as the presence of God. The account also preserves uncertainty about the visions’ physical basis. Later commentators suggested that her poor health might have involved scintillating scotoma, a form of migraine, but the book concludes that the cause cannot be known. It distinguishes that open question from the surviving evidence of her work: she wrote orthodox Catholic theology through imaginative allegory, including the complex Scivias.

Hildegard’s authority developed within a women’s religious community and through conflict over its independence. Sent at eight to live with Jutta, she learned Latin Bible reading and the chanting of the Psalms; after Jutta’s death in 1136, she became abbess. A vision instructed her to move the community away from the male monastery at Disibodenberg to an abandoned site near Bingen. Despite opposition from the abbot and the reluctance of some nuns, the move to Rupertsberg took place in 1150. Hildegard renovated the poor buildings and raised funds; by the 1170s the house could accommodate fifty nuns, had running water, and attracted a steady stream of visitors.

Recognition and resistance accompanied that growth. Bernard of Clairvaux praised Hildegard’s work, and Pope Eugenius III supported an examination of Scivias; the synod at Trier approved the work in 1148–49. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted her convent a charter of protection in 1163, but their relationship soured when he backed antipopes. Hildegard also refused church authorities’ demand that an excommunicated nobleman’s body be removed from the convent cemetery, maintaining that he had repented and died in a state of grace. The resulting interdict barred the sacraments at Rupertsberg and was lifted only a few months before her death. Her story places visionary experience within the practical struggles of governance, reputation, and ecclesiastical power.

The century’s legacy and limits

The book’s twelfth century is defined by a tension it does not resolve: mystical authority could be grounded in silence, longing, and inward experience, yet it also depended on institutions, texts, and public recognition. Bernard’s sermons made the Song of Songs a vehicle for devotional teaching, while Hildegard’s visionary theology acquired authority through patrons, ecclesiastical review, and the life of her convent. Their careers show that contemplation was not simply the opposite of action; it could inform leadership and, at times, bring its practitioners into direct conflict with established authority.

The evidence also sets limits on any single portrait of the period. Hildegard belongs to a wider tradition of Christian visionaries, while the book’s account of her visions leaves their physiological explanation unsettled. Likewise, Bernard’s influence extended beyond his monastery, with consequences ranging from church reform to the failed crusade. The later visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani makes the temporal distance visible while emphasizing continuity: the twelfth century appears both as a distinct historical world and as a source of living monastic practice.