The feudal fighting, plundering and slaying seemed to spectators of that time, and doubtless to Bernard also, as fixed and unalterable, part of the nature of things.  Louis VI., King of France, had spent his life in a succession of sieges, forays and devastations, as one feudal lord among others often more powerful than he.  But generally he was in the right, and his enemies in the wrong; he generally fought for justice and mercy, and they for power and for plunder.  The feudal aristocracy was now at the zenith of its power, and the peasant was oppressed by injustice, taxation and forced labour.  Only the Church, and she only on grand occasions, could stand up for the poor; but now the royal power made common cause with Church and poor, and was rewarded by a gain in extent and in influence.  Yet even Louis, whose whole life showed respect for the spiritual power, had some disagreement with the Bishop of Paris and with the Archbishop of Sens, so that the two ecclesiastics placed the kingdom under interdict, and fled to Citeaux.  Thence Bernard, with an astonishing tone of authority, called upon his king to do justice; and Louis was on the point of restoring the stolen property.  Pope Honorius, however, sent letters to the king, raising the interdict, and thereupon Bernard turned his fearless indignation upon the supreme pontiff himself.  “We speak with sadness; the honour of the Church has been not a little blemished in the time of Honorius.”

The same intrepidity is shown in Bernard’s controversy with the monks of Cluny, an abbey of pre-eminent power and moral authority, so that Louis had called it the “noblest member of his kingdom.”  Pontius, its abbot, having fallen into ways of pride and extortion, had been induced from Rome to resign his abbacy, and to promise a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; but soon afterwards he fell upon the monastery with an armed force, and ruled there like a robber chieftain.  This scandalous outrage was soon reported at Rome, and the sacrilegious usurper was excommunicated and banished.  Bernard seized the moment when laxity of observance of the rule had produced its bitterest fruit to break out in remonstrances and warnings, as well to his own Cistercians as to the Cluniacs, on the decline of the genuine monastic spirit.  The invective of what he calls his “Apology” spares neither the softness, nor the ostentation, nor the avarice, of religious houses.  It condemns even their stately sanctuaries.  “The walls of your church are resplendent, but the poor are not there.”  It recalls the erring monasteries to real mortification.  In another early treatise, “The Degrees of Humility and of Pride,” the modes of pride are exhibited forcibly, and with not a little humour.  Curiosity, thoughtless mirth, mock humility, and other symptoms of the protean vice are painted by a master.