Academic literature on the topic 'Centrale de Clairvaux'

What does it mean to speak of God in a sensory language? Christian exegetes in the middle ages were steeped in a Biblical language of visions and voices, not to mention the anthropomorphic and sensual imagery of the Song of Songs. Although they had inherited early Christian theologians' distrust towards human sense perception, medieval preachers and theologians from the twelfth century onwards talked about divinity in metaphorical language that systematically evoked not just seeing and hearing, but also the senses of touch, taste, and smell. This article discusses the wildly imagistic, sensory, and sensual language of the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Focusing on Bernard's sermon ‘On Conversion’ ( De conversione), given in Paris in 1140, I will interrogate the underlying theoretical assumptions in Bernard's rich rhetoric, and his emphasis on the senses. The central claim I make is that in these representations of the divine, embodied experience is both affirmed and negated at the same time. To bring out this point, I will consider why medieval Christian writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable regarded Jewish and Muslim exegetes' ‘carnal’ hermeneutics—and the latter's use of sensual and sensuous imagery to convey conceptions of divine bliss—as radically different from their own approaches.

This is an important collection of thirteen different studies that do much to overcome the degree to which Eugenius III has been underappreciated, as well as to illustrate the complexity of the medieval papacy with its conflicting spiritual and secular roles. One of the central issues addressed is whether the office makes the man. The various scholars take up such issues as the use of learned law in ecclesiastical courts, the papal stamp on the crusades, the tendency of the papal curia to attract morally weak characters, and the degree to which Eugenius was able to free himself from the influence of his Cistercian mentor, Bernard of Clairvaux. Naturally, these independent approaches to the issues tend to overlap and not always agree, but in so doing they strengthen the more complete picture of Eugenius as a skilled politician, communicator, and humane individual.

AbstractAt present, the historiographic classification of the Protestant reformation is changing from the concept of an epochal turning point towards the notion of a systemic, complex process. The reformer Johannes Bugenhagen, who was a central character in shaping the Protestant church, was also inspired by traditions deeply rooted in the Catholic church. His programmatic 1525 Pastoral Letter to the Hamburgers (Sendbrief an die Hamburger) features mystic images and motifs that can be traced back to Bernard of Clairvaux, the leading figure of Western mysti­cism. This theological setting helps Bugenhagen to develop a succinct alternative vis-à-vis the Erasmian humanism that has not lost its credibility until today. Modern church theories that are no longer characterized by hermetic isolation but oriented towards a systemic integration into the larger social context, are free from any zeitgeist - instead they are based on the core of reformatory ecclesiology.

Brian Stock's definition of textual community describes the process by which—in the face of growing levels of literacy and the rise of heretical movements in eleventh- and twelfth-century France—religious communities (from heretical sects to orthodox monastic communities) came to understand their identities through the mediation of written texts, which often were interpreted for them by key individuals. The text, the written word, became central to communal identity, affecting even the non-literate through its dissemination and acceptance by the members of the community. The relationship between the oral and the written, and the relationship developed between text and life, word and deed, in the interpretive models that developed out of texts and came to be applied to the lives of the readers or auditors, are two areas which are not the exclusive preserve of eleventh- and twelfth-century France, but are continuing concerns throughout the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the tendency to develop textual communities can also be found in the later medieval period, but with a different perspective on the question of literacy. For women religious in late-medieval England, for example, literacy usually did not denote Latinity but rather vernacularity; as a result, vernacular texts comprised the means by which these female religious came to understand their communal identity. While Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs addressed his male monastic community in Latin, women's religious rules formed a different kind of textual community that relied not on Latin exposition of mystical experience but on vernacular instruction concerning certain daily activities and proper conduct. The parallels between Stock's examples and the situation of medieval English female religious are still useful, because both highlight literacy, textuality, ritual, and activity as central to how communities define themselves.

This intimate portrait of one of the Middle Ages' most consequential men, 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 this book presents it all. Following Bernard from his birth in 1090 to his death in 1153 at the abbey he had founded four decades earlier, the book 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 re-evaluating Bernard's life and legacy through his own words and those of the people closest to him, the book reveals how this often-challenging saint saw himself and conveyed his convictions to others. Above all, the biography depicts Saint Bernard of Clairvaux as a man guided by Christian revelation and open to the achievements of the human spirit.