He was the son of Tesselin, a wealthy feudal baron of Burgundy, remarkable for his courage, piety, justice and modesty.  Alith, his mother, was earnest, loving and devout, and full of humility and charity.  His earliest years were passed amid the European fervour of the First Crusade; and as he grew from boyhood into youth—­at which time his mother died—­he made choice of the monastic profession.  His friends vainly tried to tempt him aside into the pursuit of philosophy; but his commanding personal ascendancy brought his brothers and friends to follow him instead into the religious life.  Having assembled a company of about thirty chosen spirits, he retired into seclusion with them for six months, and then, in 1113, at the age of twenty-two, led them within the gates of Citeaux.

This community, founded fifteen years before, and now ruled by Stephen Harding, an Englishman from Dorsetshire, was exceedingly austere, keeping Saint Benedict’s rule literally.  Here Bernard’s uncompromising self-mortification, and his love of, and communion with, Nature, showed themselves as the chief characteristics of his noble spirit.  “Believe me,” he said to a pupil, “you will find something far greater in the woods than you will in books; stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.”  The arrival of Bernard and his companions was a turning-point in the history of Citeaux; and the monastery had to send out two colonies, to La Ferte and Pontigny, and in 1115 a third, under Bernard himself, to Clairvaux.  Here, in a deep umbrageous valley, traversed by a limpid stream, the thirteen pioneers built a house little better than a barn.  Their privations were great.  Beech-nuts and roots were at first their main support; but soon the sympathy of the surrounding country brought sufficiency for their frugal needs.  Bernard was consecrated Abbot of Clairvaux by the Bishop of Chalons, the renowned William of Champeaux, with whom he established a deep friendship.

His labours, anxieties and austerities had well-nigh brought Bernard to the grave, when the good bishop, finding him inflexible, went to Citeaux, and, prostrating himself before Stephen Harding, begged and obtained leave to direct and manage Bernard for one year only.  The young abbot obeyed his new director absolutely, and lived in a cottage apart from the monastery “at leisure for himself and God, and exulting, as it were, in the delights of Paradise.”

William of St. Thierry and other chroniclers, telling of Clairvaux at this time, are fervid in their reverence and praise.  “Methought I saw a new heaven and a new earth” ... “the golden age seemed to have revisited the world” ... “as you descended the hill you could see it was a temple of God; the still, silent valley bespoke the unfeigned humility of Christ’s poor.  In this valley full of men, where one and all were occupied with their allotted tasks, a silence, deep as that of night, prevailed.  The sounds of labour, or the chants of the brethren in the choral service, were the only exceptions.  The order of this silence struck such a reverence even into secular persons that they dreaded breaking it even by pertinent remarks.”