But before leaving the subject of the monasteries, having looked at them under the generalship of Bernard, it may be well to notice what they had become before his day, and what they were afterward. Most of the old monasteries had become wealthy and suffered from the natural consequences. Some had altogether relaxed their discipline, had long renounced poverty, and disregarded their vow of obedience to the abbot or prior. They had fertilized their immediate territory; and, as though they had now but to enjoy the fruits of their toil, they sank to indolent repose, and idleness brought its ten thousand other sins. Milman speaks of monasticism as tracing the same cycle in all ages. This is so truly and so graphically described that we quote the passage entire. But we must add that he leaves out in this paragraph the fearful immoralities, dissensions, and insubordination, which were always the consequences of wealth.
"Now the wilderness, the utter solitude, the utmost poverty, the contest with the stubborn forest and unwholesome morass, the most exalted piety, the devotion which had not hours enough during the day and night for its exercise, the rule which could not be enforced too strictly, the strongly competing asceticism, the inventive self-discipline, the inexhaustible emulous ingenuity of self-torture, the boastful servility of obedience: then the fame for piety, the lavish offerings of the faithful, the grants of the repentant lord, the endowments of the remorseful king—the opulence, the power, the magnificence. The wattled hut, the rock-hewn hermitage, is now the stately cloister; the lowly church of wood, the lofty and gorgeous abbey; the wild forest of heath, the pleasant and umbrageous grove; the marsh, a domain of intermingling meadows and corn-fields; the brawling stream or mountain torrent, a succession of quiet tanks or pools, fattening innumerable fish. The superior, once a man bowed to the earth with humility, care-worn, pale, emaciated, with a coarse habit bound with a cord, with naked feet, is become an abbot on his curvetting palfrey, in rich attire, with his silver cross borne before him, traveling to take his place amid the lordliest of the realm."
A new order, a new institution, grew up under the hand of Bernard. Clairvaux was the commencement of a new era in the history of monasticism. Men of all ranks were attracted to the Cistercian order, notwithstanding the noted strictness of its discipline; and numbers of monasteries sprang up in the deserts after the pattern of Clairvaux. But all the power of Bernard could not prevent the most bitter jealousies and unseemly dissensions arising between the monks of the new and of the old orders, especially with the once celebrated monastery of Cluny, which had trained Hildebrand for the papal throne.