INTRODUCTION PRAISE. Skip Over This Word in the General Title Of

INTRODUCTION RAISE. Skip over this word in the general title of Bernard's four Marian homilies, and you are off to a bad start. PIn PRAISE of the Virgin Mother, we read, Praise, then, is what provides the proper focus for our reading of these texts; praise is what renders the content of these homilies clear and limpid and undistorted. When Bernard of Clairvaux wished to refer to his own cycle of four homilies on the text, 'And the angel Gabriel was sent to a city of Gali- lee, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David. And the virgin's name was Mary,' he explicitly included praise in the title: 'I must tell you that I have written . four homilies In Praise of the Virgin Mother, for that indeed is their proper title,' he writes to the Cardinal Deacon Peter;1 or again to his friend Oger, a Canon Regular of Mont-Saint-Eloi, 'I am sending you a booklet I wrote not long ago, In Praise of the Virgin Mother.'2 Those who write learned introductions to works of mediaeval spirituality are surely right when they forewarn the modern-day reader of some of the difficulties which may be encountered: the unfamiliar system of symbols, the use (or apparent abuse) of biblical citations, the flights of rhetoric and the high-blown literary diction which hardly ever come across convincingly in translation. But much more significant and much more characteristic of this kind of devotional literature is the climate of praise that envelops these texts from beginning to end. Praise seems to be much less a hallmark of contemporary spirituality than was the case in past centuries, and we would do well to keep this in mind as we turn our attention to these twelfth-century homilies in praise of Mary. For the Christian, the spiritual life has always been the fruit of a personal relationship between God and the individual within a community of believers. In an earlier age, people seem to have taken for granted that, in such a relationship, the prime point of reference was God. One's conscious awareness was directed less to the individual's xi xii Introduction inner experience than to the objective reality of God, and to God's intervention in human history. Self-awareness and great gifts for intro- spection and psychological analysis there certainly were (Augustine's Confessions!); but even where this talent for self-reflection was most developed, the prime point of reference remained, for all that, God. It was all but inevitable that such a keen theocentricism should find ex- pression in a spirituality of praise. A basic stance of praise is, of course, to be found in all living reli- gions; but this is true in a special sense for the believing Christian: for no other religion teaches that God has entered so absolutely and so definitively into the depths of human existence and experience—the Word was made flesh—and in no other religion has the individual and the community been raised to such heights as sharers in the very life of God—partakers of the divine nature. The response of the believer can hardly be other than a response of praise and thanksgiving. Scholars are still trying to sort out what happened at the time of the Renaissance. At the risk of overgeneralization, we can at least suggest that, as man became more and more the center of the universe and the measure of that same universe, the emphasis in the relationship between God and man shifted manwards; and as the individual's spiritual experience tended to become increasingly anthropocentric, his capacity to live in a climate of praise waned correspondingly. Still, the longing to live in a spiritual universe conditioned by an atmosphere of praise remains very much a part of the human experience. No wonder, then, that we find ourselves so deeply moved when, in the grandiose epic of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien describes the triumphant return of the Ring-bearers on the Field of Cormallen, and breaks into the hymn. Long live the Halflings! Praise them with great praise! Cuio i Pheriain anann' Aglar'ni Pheriannath!3 We are moved, and deeply moved, because we have within us a des- perate longing to hear things praised; and we realize in some obscure way that Tolkien's breaking into Elvish at this point is less a display of his wonted semantic wizardry than a simple admission of the fact that what he is celebrating transcends the possibilities of conventional diction. The key-note of Bernard's marian homilies is, then, PRAISE. They belong to the genre of piaise-literature. And though Bernard does not break into Elvish or indulge himself in the charisms of glossalalia, his recourse to rhetoric and his use of symbols has something of the same effect. Let us listen to this writer from another age, another civilization, as he praises the high deeds of God, and praises them with great praise. Bernard I Four Homilies xiii BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX AND THE FOUR HOMILIES IN PRAISE OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER Saint Bernard's Homilies in Praise of the Virgin Mother have a unique place in the writings of the Saint. Almost alone of all his works, these reflections on the gospel-text of the Annunciation were written not for any practical purpose or to answer to a precise pastoral need, but simply to satisfy the exigencies of their author's personal devotion. These homilies are the work of a very young man, and they still give off, for the attentive reader, something of a springtime fragrance and freshness. That this is so is something of a paradox, for there was nothing lightsome or springtime-ish about the circumstances in which they were composed. Physically frail, chronically ill, and ridiculously young and inex- perienced to be, at the age of twenty-five, head of a monastic community, Bernard of Fontaines had been sent from the abbey of Cfteaux in mid-June of 1115, at the head of a group of twelve monks, to found a new abbey in the district of Langres, not far from the river Aube, 'The "Valley of Wormwood" men called it in times past,' writes Bernard's first biographer, William of Saint-Thierry, 'either because of the wormwood growing there in such abundance, or because of the bitter pain experienced by the victims of the local robbers.'4 In time this Valley of Wormwood was to become the Vale of Light, 'Clairvaux'; but only after a period of much darkness and heartbreak. By the standards of other mediaeval hagiographical writings, William's portrayal of Bernard's early years as abbot is brutally frank. Saints are sometimes difficult to live with; and Bernard's signal flair for the things of the spirit roused his less gifted companions not only to admiration, but to a perfectly understandable desire to keep a comfort- able distance between their unremarkable selves and their quite remarkable abbot. There was not only something more than human in the intensity of Abbot Bernard's spiritual experience, there was something a bit inhuman as well. William's insightful analysis of the relationship between the young Bernard and his community is matched only by his penetrating description of the crisis in Bernard's relations with his monks. From a point of mutual and involuntary estrangement, abbot and community began growing together in the closest possible com- munion; and Bernard's palpable holiness, which had once seemed to set him apart from and above his brethren, now placed him at the very heart of the community. 'From that time on,' William writes, 'the Holy Spirit began speaking more manifestly in him and through him, giving xiv Introduction added impact to his words and deeper insight to his understanding of the Scriptures . 's And this was the context in which Bernard composed his homilies in praise of Mary. The crisis between Bernard and his brethren had left Bernard not only spiritually torn apart, but physically exhausted—so much so that there was danger of imminent death for the young abbot. The diocesan bishop, William of Champeaux, had been following at close hand the struggle of the young community during their heroic days of first beginnings; and it was Bishop William who asked for and obtained from the Cistercian General Chapter a rather remarkable decision: Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, was to be under obedience to William of Champeaux, Bishop of Chalons, for the period of a year. William drew up Bernard's rule of life for him, had a special cabin built for him out- side the monastery enclosure, and relieved him of all administra- tive duties. Bernard's retreat was unpretentious enough: 'the kind of shack people build for lepers next to public cross-roads', writes William of Saint-Thierry.6 Here in a leper's hut, during the dark hours of the night, the Homilies in Praise of the Virgin Mother were born. The regime established for Bernard by William of Champeaux had ruled out for him the long night-vigils practiced by Bernard's brethren in the monastery. But Bernard was allowed to spend at least some part of the night hours in his exercises of devotion. Though freed from the worries of temporal administration, he had to be available to the brethren during the day. This left him brief periods of time in the pre-dawn hours. In darkness, then, and isolated from community-life, the desperately ill young abbot was free for the moment to follow his heart's impulse; and he began singing the high praises of the Virgin Mother and the deep mystery of the Incarnation.

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