What sort of man was St Bernard? Where did he come from? He towers over the twelfth-century Cistercian movement: such were his charisma and industriousness. On the face of it, the Cistercian project was conservative. Yet its protagonists introduced novelties. This dialectic was fruitful. Bernard’s confidence in his own judgement could make him flexible in the observance of conventional procedures he otherwise claimed to uphold. His view of the Church’s needs drove him sometimes to adopt rigid positions that involved fierce partisanship.
