SOURCE: Englert, Robert. “Monastic Humility: A Study of Humility in Bernard of Clairvaux and the Author of The Cloud of Unknowing.” Studia Mystica 19 (1998): 36-44.

In the following essay, Englert discusses Bernard's seminal ideas on monastic humility as the theological model for the fourteenth-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing.

This study will deal with the subject, “monastic humility,” as it develops in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. These representative authors of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries exhibit a continuity in doctrine that is characteristic of a monastic theology invoking a common tradition. Since Bernard of Clairvaux's treatment of humility is seminal to monastic tradition, his work is presented here as the theological model that holds together further developments of this doctrine. The works of the Cloud author are presented as verification that Bernard's ideas continued to be developed in...