Letter 330

Summary

To the most beloved father and lord Innocent, Bernard, styled abbot of Clairvaux, the little that he is.

‘Weeping’ the Bride of Christ ‘hath wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks; there is none to comfort her among all them that are dear to her’. ‘While the Bridegroom tarries’, a Sunamite woman has been entrusted to you, lord, in the place of her pilgrimage. To no one does she more familiarly avow the wrongs done her, to no one does she more intimately relate her anxieties and her groans, than to a friend of the Bridegroom. For since you love the Bridegroom, ‘you do not slight’ the Bride when she cries out to you ‘in her wants, in the time of trouble’. Amid all these varieties of enemy by whom the Church of God is besieged, ‘as the lily among thorns’, nothing is more dangerous, nothing more vexing than when she is torn inwardly by those she holds to her bosom, and whom she succours with her breasts. On behalf of such men and concerning such men are spoken the words of one groaning in pain: ‘My friends and my neighbours have drawn near, and stood against me.’ No plague is more effective in harming than an intimate enemy. This is proved by the friendship of Absalom and by the kiss of Judas. ‘Another foundation is being laid for us, but that which is laid.’ A new faith is being forged in France: Of virtues and vices there is no moral discussion, of the sacraments of the Church no discussion according to the faith, of the mystery of the Holy Trinity no straightforward or sober discussion. No, the discussion is beyond what we have been taught. Master Peter, and Arnold from whose plague you cleansed Italy, ‘have stood and met together against the Lord and against His Christ’. Scale ‘is joined’ to scale, ‘and not so much as any air can come between them’. ‘They are corrupt, and are become abominable in their ways’, and from the ferment of their corruption they corrupt the faith of the simple, disturb the order of morality, defile the chastity of the Church.