The "things of greater importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Controversy over Monastic Art

Bernard of Clairvaux wrote the Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem in 1125 at the request of William of St-Thierry, in response to criticism that Bernard had been insulting traditional Benedictine monasticism. Probably the most cited medieval text which deals with art, the traditional view of the Apologia has been on the one hand that if Bernard objected to art, it must have been because he objected to artworks, and on the other that it was a simple indictment of art as it existed at the abbey of Cluny in particular, and as at certain other Cluniac and Benedictine monasteries in general. However, the truth is different. Bernard divided his criticisms of monastic excess into the "small things"--which were matters of external observance--and the "things of greater importance"--which comprised the target of Bernard's almost total condemnation of monastic art. As presented in this study, the "things of greater importance" follow a sequence from the economic base of monastic art production (Art to attract donations: the monastic investment), to a discussion of the artistic means by which this was carried out (Art to attract donations: the liturgical artwork), the reception of excessive art on the part of the general public (Art to attract donations: the equation between excessive art and holiness), external social objections (Excessive art as opposed to the care of the poor), to the internal objections of monasticism (Art as a spiritual distraction to the monk). In the end, the "things of greater importance" were not artworks. They comprised an excess, a moral excess, which in threatening the poverty, seclusion, and spirituality of monastic life, threatened its very foundations. As to the direction of the Apologia, it was aimed no less and quite probably more at the "marginal" Benedictines and new monastic and collegial orders than at traditional monasticism. Furthermore, a comparison of the explicit and implict criteria of artistic excess in Bernard's treatise with the capital sculpture of the cloister of Cluniac Moissac and illuminated manuscripts from C(')iteaux shows that the Apologia was just as much directed toward artistically conservative elements within his own Cistercian Order.