Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

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THE HOME AT FONTAINES. 151
VIII., the last of the great Imperial Popes, held with great
pomp and splendour the Universal Jubilee, and from that
hour the Papacy began visibly and rapidly to decay.
There are five great
acts in the drama of Bernard s life.
His sweeping with him every member of his family, the
married and the unmarried alike, into the monastic pro
fession the ; campaign, can call it nothing else, by which
he seated Innocent II. in the Papal Chair ;
his struggle
with the great free-thinker Abelard and his signal conquest ;
his preaching the second Crusade ;
his battle with the
heretics in Provence, shortly
before his death. The inter
vals were filled up by attention to everything above average
importance which took place in Christendom, by incessant
correspondence, some of it of remarkable power,
with all
sorts of men and women, and on all sorts of themes. Nothing
indeed came amiss to him, from the squabbles of Yorkshire
monks to the struggle for the Papacy, from ruling the con
duct of counts, kings and popes
to contentions about some
unhappy pigs l all was within the scope of his interest. It
is more than possible that his greatest achievement in
point of difficulty was his first ;
and to that, that we may
understand the man Bernard himself, we will now proceed.
Towards the close of the eleventh century there was a
knightly household living
in the Castle of Fontaines in Bur
gundy. The province
is the richest, the most splendid, the
most joyous, the most vital of all the regions of France.
The men are like its wines, full of colour and fire. It is
the country of great orators ;
Bernard and Bossuet were
born in Burgundy, and many a masterful spirit beside.
Fontaines was the home of a very noble, but by
rare, specimen
of the feudal household of the times. Tesselin
no means
was at the head of it ;
a man who strove hard in a stormy
time to be the knight of Christ ; fighting
with such cou-
1
See for the incident. Morison s Life of St. Bernard, Lond. 1863, p. 492.