IN the last chapter I dealt with the beginnings of the disciplinary system by which the Christian religion was to be exhibited and permanently shaped as the life of prayer. It was inevitable that, given the Christian doctrine of prayer, such a discipline should be attempted. But, given also our actual human nature and the historical conditions under which it has had to manifest itself, it was perhaps equally inevitable that the attempt should be only partially successful. We have seen how inclusive was the original discipline of prayer, how it provided for the activity, of every side of our nature. Work, manual labour, was an integral portion of the discipline, and if there was no direct necessity to emphasise the part in it of intellectual labour, this latter was none the less assumed as an even more intimate factor in the life of prayer. Some kind of intellectual effort was of the very essence of prayer, was involved in the mere conception of it, and therefore did not need to be definitely enforced, while physical toil, as a disciplinary concomitant, did need to be assigned its exact place and measure in the total economy of the system. In the Rule of S. Benedict, for [49] instance, the 48th chapter is devoted to a regulation of the hours of manual labour for the different seasons of the year. The moral value of such labour is naturally insisted on first of all. "Otiositas inimica est animæ" (Idleness is an enemy to the soul's health). But the necessity of labour as the means of providing for the general needs of life is not only not forgotten, but is even given its place in the scheme of the religious life. In providing for extended hours of work, if necessary, at harvest-time, S. Benedict enjoins upon his monks that they be not saddened by the prospect--presumably of the shortening of the hours of prayer--since, he says, they are then proving themselves to be most truly monks when they live by the labour of their own hands, as their Fathers and the Apostles did. Incidentally, I may mention one general principle which S. Benedict introduces as governing all these labour regulations of his. It anticipates in a curious way one of the most debated features of modern Trade Union regulation. "Omnia tamen mensurate fiant propter pusillanimes" (Let all these regulations be applied with due regard to the capacity of the weaker brethren).

      But this admirable sanity and equipoise of the primitive Benedictine Rule could not always be maintained. It ought, indeed, to be admitted, or rather definitely affirmed, that the central Benedictine tradition has maintained it practically unimpaired until this day, though manual labour has been largely replaced by that intellectual [50] labour for which the modern congregations of the Order are so justly famous. But from an early period in the history of monachism there was a growing tendency to segregate the contemplative and the active expressions of the monastic life. The rise of the Order of Mount Carmel may be said, I suppose, to have first brought out clearly into the open a tendency which had long been secretly at work. Yet the distinction between the contemplative and the active Orders, so familiar in later times, was of very slow growth. It was the work of S. Francis of Assisi, and more definitely of the Orders founded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for well-defined objects, like the Oratorians, the Jesuits, the Lazarists, and others, that gave a prominence which could not be ignored to a breach in the ancient tradition.

      Still more important, however, for the purposes of our study than this growing division of labour within monachism itself was the almost inevitable appearance of a double Christianity, of two standards of Christian life: the integral Christianity of the cloister, and the diluted Christianity which could alone be looked for, or achieved in the world. Work which had been chiefly a discipline in the cloister became in the world an organised interest encroaching in ever-increasing measure on all higher and deeper interests. An instrument only for the ideal Christian life, it tended more and more in the life of the world to become an end to which all other interests and activities were [51] subservient. In a way, the situation had to be accepted. The life of the cloister was becoming an offering of prayer for a world that did not and could not be expected to pray. That was a state of affairs which might well prove to be as bad for the cloister as for the world. There is no more dangerous delusion than that one man can pray for another in the full Christian sense of prayer. It is of course, an elementary obligation of Christian charity, of the love which all God's human children owe to one another, to pray for others. But the furthest and highest effect of such prayer will be attained only when those for whom we pray, whether here or beyond the veil, have come to pray more perfectly themselves. For prayer in the full Christian sense is individual. It is, as I have so often insisted, the ascent of the whole personal nature to God. Our prayers for others may, and we offer them always hoping that they will, have the effect of awaking in them a stronger desire and purpose of achieving that ascensio in Deum. And it is beyond question that everyone who is in heart and mind ascending to God will desire with the full power of his spirit that all others should ascend with him, and will be ready to pledge all that is in him to secure, in so far as it can secure, that end. None the less, the dangers of this practical dichotomy of the Christian world into those who pray and those who are prayed for ought to be apparent. It is hardly necessary to emphasise the danger for the average Christian who has to [52] live his life in the world. His conception of prayer is inevitably reduced, for practical purposes if not in theory, far below the level of the full Christian conception. But there is danger, and grave danger, too, for the cloistered. For them, too, there must be present the ever-besetting temptation to degrade the conception of prayer to that of a magical instrument of salvation. Prayer needs, above all things, if it is to be kept pure, the test of action. And in prayer for one's own salvation that test is there, always ready to be applied. The man who is sincerely striving to lift up his life towards God in and through prayer cannot permanently deceive himself as to his own success. He knows whether his life as a whole is growing closer to the Divine will. Prayer can never be for him merely the expression of desire, however ardent and impassioned that desire may be. If his total activity, or rather the permanent set of character from which all his actions spring, is not increasingly accordant with that desire, his prayer is self-reproved. He knows of himself that it has fallen earthwards with broken wing. But the soul which in the cloister gives itself to prayer for the unconverted generally has no such test, and its prayer is surely in grave danger of becoming unreal and its very conception of prayer magical. The healthy reaction against such spiritual magic was provided by the active Orders which arose during the Counter-Reformation, in imitation of the Reform itself, which was, in its most essential and intrinsic aspect, a like [53] reaction against the same dangerous tendencies. The Reform demanded of the secular life that it should become the life of prayer in the fullest Christian sense. The Orders of the Counter-Reform refused to limit the sum of their Christian duty towards the evil or indifferent world to that of praying for it. They were founded with the one object of going out into that world to convert it, to teach its individual units how worthily to pray for themselves. That was a return to the higher conception of prayer, a revival of the due relation between the contemplative and the active aspects of the religious life.

      Yet I would not exaggerate either the extent or the evil effects of their actual separation at any time. On the contrary, I would enter an energetic protest against the excessive way in which this separation has been represented. The fact rather is that, in the recurring periods of religious stagnation which have marked the history of the Christian as of every other religion, the religious life suffered as a whole, both on its active and on its contemplative side. And in periods of religious revival it recovered tone as a whole. Again, where the tendency to accentuate the one aspect or the other did manifest itself conspicuously, it was less from any essential loss of hold upon the true Christian conception of prayer than because division of labour is the natural result of every increase in the complexity of social organisation. And, as Christianity grew both in numbers and in depth of religious [54] feeling, the tasks to which it had to set itself and the organisation necessary to enable it to meet them grew in complexity also. In the present chapter I have selected for consideration one of those moments when the pressure of this complexity was most acutely felt. The earlier Middle Ages represented a great outburst of religious activity and zeal, and that in every department of the religious life. The revival of the Benedictine Rule through the Carthusian, the Cluniac, and the Cistercian reforms, the popular religious fervour awakened and sustained by the first Crusades, the intellectual earnestness and vigour of the precursors and the actual founders of Scholasticism, the rise of the mediæval Papacy--all these mark an epoch of unmistakable originality and greatness in the religious sphere. It is almost impossible to overestimate the religious greatness of the latter half of the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth centuries. I have chosen the central figure of that epoch to illustrate the application of the prayer-life to one of the most difficult tasks with which it has been confronted in the whole history of Christianity. I have chosen S. Bernard, because in him the religious life of that epoch was most conspicuously summed up. I might, indeed, in the Victorines, especially in Hugo and Richard, have found a more careful and profound treatment of the mystical aspects of prayer, though these are by no means wanting in S. Bernard. But it is in S. Bernard supremely that we can see the life [55] of prayer, the life gained through prayer, acknowledged, indeed acclaimed, by a torn and distracted Europe as its natural controller and guide. And with Bernard I would associate the friend he loved so well, Malachy, the only great man whom my own city of Armagh has ever produced--Malachy, who did for a still more distracted and barbarous Ireland all that Bernard did for Europe as a whole.

      It is not, of course, my intention to sketch even in briefest outline the innumerable activities of Bernard. Suffice it to say that there was hardly a difficulty in the Christendom of his time in which his aid was not invoked. Popes, bishops, abbots, kings, all alike seemed anxious to constitute him a kind of unofficial court of final appeal for Christendom. And the impartial judgment of history must decide that the choice was more honourable to the conscience of his age than even to Bernard himself. For it was the recognition by a violent, selfish, and often brutal world of God's right to judge it; nay, more, it was that world's constant invitation to God to judge it. With all the warmth and tenderness of his loving heart, perhaps because of its warmth and tenderness, Bernard was the sternest and most implacable of judges. He would abate nothing of the rigour of the Divine law of justice in deciding the issues that were referred to him. He seemed determined to mete out the full measure of the Divine justice, as he saw it, with a special severity to those who were most closely bound to him by [56] the ties of friendship. He had done more than anyone else to establish Innocent II. on the Papal throne, in spite of the wiles of the usurper Anacletus II. backed by the powerful Roger of Sicily. Innocent's successor, Eugenius III., was an honoured member of Bernard's own Order of Citeaux and one of his most esteemed and intimate friends. Between Bernard and the great Peter of Cluny there was lifelong affection and respect. Yet this is the tone in which he writes to Innocent: "I speak boldly because I love faithfully. There is but one voice among our faithful bishops, which declares that justice is vanishing from the Church; that the power of the keys is gone; that episcopal authority is dwindling away; that a bishop can no longer redress wrongs, nor chastise iniquity, however great, even in his own diocese; and the blame of all this they lay on you and the Roman Court! What they ordain aright, you annul; what they justly abolish, that you re-establish. All the worthless contentious fellows, whether from the people or the clergy, or even monks expelled from their monasteries, run off to you and return boasting that they have found protection, where they ought to have found retribution." And when his beloved pupil and friend Eugenius III. ascended the Papal throne, here is how Bernard admonished him of his duty. He wants Eugenius to insinuate some gradual and practicable reforms--for he does not suppose that more stringent reforms would be immediately possible--into the [57] administration of justice in the Roman Courts, and he reminds him that "the ambitious, the grasping, the simoniacal, the sacrilegious, the adulterous, the incestuous, and all such like monsters of humanity, flock to Rome, in order either to obtain or to keep ecclesiastical honours at the hands of the Pope." The reforms which Bernard suggested may seem to us as we read them to have been mild enough, but it would have needed a spiritual dictator summoned, as he himself had so often been, by the outraged popular conscience to deal with a great emergency, to carry them through. It could hardly be expected that the president of the first Court in Christendom, bound by a long legal tradition and entangled in all the subtleties of the Canonists, would, with the best will in the world, succeed in effecting them. The present fashion of hearing causes, says Bernard, "is plainly execrable, and one which is unbecoming, I do not say to the Church, but even to the market-place. I, indeed, wonder how your religious ears can endure the pleadings of the advocates and the clash of words, which lead rather to the perversion than to the discovery of the truth. Correct this evil custom, cut off the tongues which talk vanity, shut the deceitful mouths. These advocates are they who have taught their tongues to speak lies, being eloquent against justice, and learned in the service of falsehood. They destroy the simplicity of truth, they obstruct the paths of justice. I would wish you, therefore, to decide on those causes which must [58] come before you carefully, yet briefly withal, resolutely avoiding vexatious delays." It seems, I have said, a mild suggestion. But it is not really so. It is practically a suggestion for replacing the impersonal process of law by a Divine dictatorship. And that is a dangerous experiment with us fallible beings of time. Better in the long run to endure the more or less of chicanery which is certain to accompany the application of any legal code whatsoever than to appoint a spiritual dictator whose succession we cannot ensure. Canon Law, like all other legal codes, was subject to evasion and might easily become, in the hands of a clever and unscrupulous Canonist, an instrument of even gross injustice. But it was none the less, in its flourishing period, the one security of freedom and of at least a balance of justice over injustice. At a given moment a spiritual dictator like Bernard might arise to arraign and even correct its abuses. But humanity cannot count on a succession of S. Bernards.

      I have illustrated the frankness, amounting almost to brusquerie, of Bernard's dealings with his friends on the Papal throne. With his friend Peter, the head of the great rival house of Cluny, he dealt with a freedom bordering on harshness. A Cluniac monk had been elected by the chapter, in defiance of Bernard's expressed wishes, to the See of Langres and had received investiture at the King's hands. Bernard's objection was motived by reports which had reached his ears [59] injurious to the moral character of the bishop-elect; and though Peter, who, if anyone, ought to have known the worth of a member of his own house and Order, vouched in the most unequivocal terms for the high moral rectitude of the monk, Bernard persisted in his acceptance of the hearsay evidence which had reached him as an imperative ground for the cancelling of the election and the choice of his own nominee. And, strange to say, he prevailed--prevailed, as it must seem to an unbiassed judgment on the evidence before us, against the requirements of strict justice. Whatever the strict merits of the case may have been, Bernard persuaded everyone concerned of his single-mindedness, his honesty, his fearlessness, his unswerving loyalty to what seemed to him the best and highest. It was always so that he impressed men, and therein lay the secret of his power over them. It need not surprise us, though it probably will, to learn that his determined and passionate opposition to Peter's wishes in the matter of the bishopric of Langres did not abate by one iota the tenderness and depth of Peter's affection for him, that his frank denunciation of the abuses of the Roman Court only helped to bind the successive occupants of the Roman See more closely to him. It is the highest tribute that can be paid to Bernard's influence. But surely it is a still higher to the moral soundness of an age which could not only accept, but invite, such castigation of its vices and other excesses.

      Such was S. Bernard's outward activity. The [60] power which generated it, the native source of inner life from which it flowed, is what it behoves us most to consider. To indicate that power I cannot do better than quote the words of one of his more recent English biographers, Mr. Cotter Morison. "The central impulse of his being," he says, "the springhead from which flowed the manifold streams of his public acts, had no necessary connection with the outer world of men and events. He was, by intention and inclination, a prayerful monk, doubtful and anxious about the state of his soul, striving to work out his salvation with fear and trembling here on earth. The highest good he knew of, the ideal of Christian faith as he had been taught it--this was what inflamed his heart, nerved his will, and braced his energies of mind and body to the extremest tension. To him and to his contemporaries, this ideal was realised in the life of a pious monk. And a pious monk it was his desire above all things to be. That he failed to obtain the perfection at which he aimed, no one would have been more ready to acknowledge than himself; but that he also succeeded better than most, is the almost concurrent testimony of after ages." That is the judgment of a biographer who was certainly not lacking in due sympathy, but still was religiously detached, as Mr. Morison was not a Christian but a Positivist. It is all the more noteworthy that he has caught the real secret of S. Bernard's extraordinary influence. It was not in spite of, but exactly because of, his being [61] a monk that he exercised such power over the distracted counsels of the outer world of his time, and that that world felt the need of his power. The world was becoming just Christian enough to experience a conscious need of guidance by the prayer-life of the cloister. And the cloister on its side had begun to listen to the world's call. It could no longer be satisfied to pray for the world. It needed now to pray with it and in it, to teach it to pray with that full Christian prayer which is life self-uplifted towards God.

      It is the revelation of power in the prayer-life that this historical figure and influence most conspicuously represents. But our subject requires that we should seek also to learn from him what he can teach us about the nature of prayer, how he and his time at their best conceived of it. It is not, indeed, to S. Bernard among the men of his time that we would most naturally turn for such information. For he was not a thinker in any exact sense of the term, and though he wrote much, his style--which is always the most adequate witness to a writer's intellectual habit--is rather that of a rhetorician than of a thinker. He was a preacher, a letter-writer, and an occasional pamphleteer. Yet there is much that is most precious, that is indeed beyond price, for the mystical theologian in the four huge volumes of the Benedictine edition of his works. And it is interesting to find occasional exact parallelisms in the treatment of certain mystical subjects between Bernard and the most [62] considerable mystical theologian of his time--Hugh of S. Victor. Hugh was a mystic who continued the old intellectualist tradition in theology which took its rise in S. Clement. As a mystic, he necessarily thought of contemplation as the highest achievement of the soul, as the consummation of the ascent of the mind to God, as the full realisation of prayer. But as an intellectualist, he had also to account for the lower stages of the mind's upward progress towards God. I know of no writer who makes the mediæval attitude towards spiritual things, with its peculiar intellectual bias, more intelligible than Hugh of S. Victor. We must wonder sometimes why the mediæval Schoolmen, and especially those of them who were pure mystics, attached such value to the intellect as a religious instrument. Why, we are inclined to ask, should the contemplation of God Who is love and Who is known through love require any preparation through ordinary knowledge? Love is unique, independent of all knowledge save that of the person loved. And then that kind of knowledge which is indispensable to the love of God, the personal knowledge of God, is itself unique and independent of all other kinds of knowledge. Moreover it is directly revealed to us in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the way in which our minds work about this question. But such considerations would have seemed altogether too meagre and inadequate to the mind of a Schoolman. He would, of course, have admitted that the perfect [63] and inclusive revelation of God's nature was given to us in His incarnate Son. But he would hardly have admitted that that revelation, in its fulness, was capable of being directly apprehended. What the Incarnate Life of God immediately revealed was God's infinite love towards men, and in a general way His will of righteousness manifested in the costingness of the Son's obedience. But all the detail of the Divine will in its claim of righteousness from men it was a duty imposed upon men themselves to learn more and more perfectly by continual reflection upon God's ways in the world, in this actual universe of time and space. To the mediæval Schoolman the ordered universe was the revelation of the thought of God, and the patient study of that universe was a gradual entrance into the mind of God, and therefore into the requirements of His changeless will. It is only necessary to read S. Augustine's treatise on Order to realise this, and to appreciate the general view which he left as a heritage to the Schoolmen. We have to remember that for the Middle Ages the sciences which deal with the constitution of the physical universe were not independent. They did not, as they do for us, yield a knowledge independent of all spiritual values. The physical universe lay within the totality of the spiritual, and it was studied for the sake of the fight which it could throw upon the nature of the spiritual. But this study of the universal order had its various stages through which the mind of man must pass in its ascent to the full [64] contemplation, the perfect vision, of the spiritual. These stages Hugh of S. Victor described as thought, meditation, the lower contemplation and the higher contemplation (cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio naturalis and contemplatio mystica). Thought is the mind's initial acquaintance with the ideas of things. That power of abstraction from the separate things presented in sense, of forming universal ideas out of an immediate sensible perception of things, was already a first step in the ascent towards the perfect knowledge of God. It helped us towards a recognition of the Divine order and harmony and of its nature. The next stage, meditation, Hugh describes as "the assiduous and sagacious revision of cogitation which strives to explain the involved and to penetrate the hidden." Then comes contemplation, "the mind's perspicacious and free attention, diffused everywhere throughout the range of whatever may be explored"--such contemplation first of the creatures, the ordered creation, and finally of the Creator. But perhaps it is by allowing Hugh to use the imagery by which he delights to illustrate his thought that we may see most clearly how for him there is only one field of knowledge, and how within that field we ascend from the most elementary knowledge of the natural to the sublime and perfect knowledge of the supernatural, of God. "In meditation," he says, "there is a wrestling of ignorance with knowledge ; and the light of truth gleams as in a fog of error. So fire is kindled with difficulty [65] in a heap of green wood ; but then, fanned with stronger breath, the flame burns higher, and we see volumes of smoke rolling up, with flame flashing through. Little by little the damp is exhausted, and the leaping fire dispels the smoke. Then the conquering flame, darting through the heap of crackling wood, springs from branch to branch, and with lambent grasp catches upon every twig; nor does it rest until it penetrates everywhere and draws into itself all that it finds which is not flame. At length the whole combustible material is purged of its own nature and passes into the similitude and property of fire; then the din is hushed, and the vivacious fire having subdued all, and brought all into its own likeness, composes itself to a high peace and silence, finding nothing more that is alien or opposed to itself. First there was fire with flame and smoke; then fire with flame without smoke; and at last pure fire without flame or smoke." That surely is a very wonderful image of the ordered and gradual ascent from our confused effort to apprehend the order of things visible to the clear vision of the invisible God.

      Now S. Bernard, as I have said, was a far less exact thinker than his contemporary, Hugh of S. Victor. But as a child of his age he, too, held Hugh's view of the necessity of the lower stages of thought to the mingled intellectual and spiritual ecstasy of contemplation. Only, what Hugh called "meditation" Bernard described as "consideration." In the treatise on [66] Consideration which he addressed to his friend and disciple Eugenius III., he thus distinguishes the lower and the higher: "Contemplation may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind regarding anything, the sure apprehension of the true; while consideration is thought intently searching, or the mind's endeavour to track out the true." There, you see, is Hugh's meditation, the painful wrestling of ignorance with knowledge, and his contemplation, "that acumen of intelligence which comprehends all with clear vision." And for Bernard, as for Hugh, the cross of consideration or meditation is the way to the crown of contemplation or clear and ecstatic vision.

      Yet, it may be asked, what contribution can the intellect make, which is at all necessary, to the supreme act of contemplation, to the communion of the soul with God in prayer? Now, the answer to that question contains the very essence of what I have called the Christian conception of prayer, of the conception which Bernard had inherited from all the great Christian doctors who had preceded him. All true and worthy prayer implied as its condition as exact a knowledge as possible of the Divine will and an intention of absolute submission to the Divine will. But the easy presumption of such knowledge was the supreme danger which he who would pray rightly must avoid. No text of Holy Scripture was more frequently on the lips of every doctor who treated of the subject of prayer than [67] that saying of S. Paul, "We know not what to pray for as we ought." It was more and more exact knowledge of the Divine will which was necessary to genuine growth in the power of prayer, to the true development of the prayer-life. And the desire to pray more worthily required of him who was possessed by it a diligent and sustained effort to know the Divine will more adequately. I will conclude this chapter by a quotation from one of S. Bernard's sermons which will illustrate his mind upon this point. "Let the man who would pray faithfully beware lest he ask for things which ought not to be asked for, or ask with too great importunity for those things which may be asked for, or seek lukewarmly those things which ought to be sought always and with the whole heart. 'Ye seek and do not receive,' says James, 'because ye seek amiss that ye may spend it on your pleasures.' So does every man who seeks earthly things beyond the measure of strict necessity, or who clamours after worldly glory or pleasure. Such also are those petitions which certain lay folk are accustomed to offer when they pray for the death of an enemy and other like things which are not convenient. Temporal goods, if they are lacking, may indeed be asked for, so far as human necessity requires: but, according to the judgment of the blessed Gregory, even they are not to be asked for with an urgent importunity. In this kind also are to be included those spiritual gifts (without which, none the less, salvation [68] cannot subsist), such as the word of knowledge, the grace of healing, and, in short, all things of which we have no certain knowledge that they are expedient for us. For instance, if you are wearied out by temptation, you may indeed pray that it be taken away from you, yet not too insistently, since in such things it behoves us always to remember the apostolic saying, 'We know not what to pray for as we ought.' But these are the things which are to be asked for always and with the whole heart. These are the things for which your desires may cry aloud to God continually and with all possible insistence--that you may gain the benediction of His grace, that you may be pleasing in His eyes Who is righteousness itself, that you may live in Him and die in Him, that you may earn the right to behold His glory and to enjoy Himself for ever. For it is of these things that it was said, 'Pray without ceasing.'" [69]

[PCT 47-69]