Bernhard von Clairvaux und der Beginn der Moderne ed. by Dieter R. Bauer and Gotthard Fuchs.

Abstract

Bernhard von Clairvaux und der Beginn der Moderne. Edited by Dieter R. Bauer and Gotthard Fuchs. (Innsbruck:Tyrolia-Verlag. 1996. Pp. 345.) A conference held in the monastery of Schontal in March, 1990, to celebrate the nonacentenary of the birth of Saint Bernard is the source for this valuable collection of papers. Unlike the celebrations at Kalamazoo and Rome that year, both of which brought together scholars from many nations and continents, all but one of the papers here collected are by German or Austrian scholars. The sole exception is a paper by the late and deservedly renowned master Bernardine scholar Jean Leclercq, whose presence at, and participation in, all the celebrations was, of course, both mandatory and acclaimed. Space limitations prevent a detailed report on all of the papers. And so I offer my reading of a few of the papers, chosen to represent the wide range of topics treated in this valuable volume. Peter Dinzelbacher provides the justification for the perhaps surprising title of the collection with his Die 'Bernhardinische Epoche' als Achsenzeit der europiischen Geschichte(pp. 9-53). He offers an inescapably broad and general sketch (p. 15) of the transition from the late antique/early medieval world view to the early modern (through the first half of the seventeenth century). He sees the century 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal period in the birth of the modernThat crucial century was characterized by the birth of cultural pluralism, an acceptance of the new class of townsmen as an integral part of society and as a time of greater social interaction. The period saw a revolutionary distinction between the sacred and the profane, a rationalizing of every aspect of intellectual inquiry. It exhibited a new approach to institutional reform and personal piety and the development of a sense of the individual (the ascendancy of interior motivation and individual conscience). In a survey encompassing a range of topics from climatology to vernacular literature, the specialist is bound to discover specific views with which he or she will disagree, but few, I think, would dispute the general lines of an argument which is truly a tour de force. The title of Arnold Angenendt's paper,Die Zisterzienser im religiosen Umbruch des hohen Mittelalters (pp. 54-69), is misleading, for the Cistercians occupy only a small place in his survey of that religious transformation. Nevertheless. the article is an excellent summary of the change in the notion of religious perfection from the death of Hugh of Cluny (1109) to the century-later emergence of the mendicant orders. Angenendt's thesis is that the traditional view of perfection as a monastic life of unremitting prayer and absolute obedience in community was slowly but surely altered by the new orders. Endless community prayer was replaced with a new sense of social responsibility; an individual's conscience became more important than unquestioning obedience; the focus of religious activity became less the desert than the teeming towns. The humiliati even attempted to transform the married state into an apostolic life style. …