Letter CCCLXV. To Henry, Archbishop of Mayence

(A.D. 1146.)

He blames a monk named Ralph, who was instigating the faithful to the massacre of the Jews.¹

To the venerable lord and very dear father HENRY, Arch bishop of Mayence, BERNARD, Abbot of Clairvaux, wishes health, and that he may find favour with God.

1. I have received your esteemed letter with the deep respect due to it; but my reply must be brief, on account of the multiplicity of business with which 1 am burdened. The confiding of your complaint to me is a sign and pledge of your affection, and a proof of your extreme humility. For who am I, and what is my father's house, that an Archbishop should refer to me a contempt of his authority and an injury to his metropolitan See? For am I not as a young child, not knowing how to come in and go out? But yet I am not ignorant of those words full of truth which proceed from the mouth of the Highest: // is impossible but that offences come, but woe to him from whom they come (S. Matt, xviii. 7). He² of whom you speak in your letter has received a 9 14 LETTER CCCLXV.

mission neither from men, nor through men, and certainly not from God. If he boasts that he is a monk and a hermit, and that therefore he has full power even to take the office of a preacher, let him learn what he ought to know, that the office of a Religious is that of penitence, not of preaching,³ and that for a true Religious, towns are prisons and solitude a Paradise. It is not so with the man in question, for him it is solitude which is a prison and a town a Paradise. O man without feeling or modesty! whose foolishness has been placed, as it were, on a candlestick so that it may plainly appear to all in the house.

2. There are three things in him most worthy of blame: his usurpation of the right to preach, his contempt of the authority of the Bishop, and finally his inciting to murder. What new power is this? Do you suppose yourself greater than our father Abraham (Gen. xxii.), who laid down his sword at the bidding of him at whose command he had taken it up? Are you greater than the Prince of the Apostles who inquired of the Lord, Lord, shall we strike with the sword? (S. Luke xxii. 49). If you were instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, that is the wisdom of this world which is foolishness towards God (1 Cor. iii. 19), and you reply to the question of Peter in a different manner than He did who said to Peter: Put up again thy sword into its sheath, for he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword (S. Matt. xxvi. 52). Does not the Church triumph a hundred times better over the Jews in convincing them every day of their error and in converting them to the faith, than if it were to exterminate them once for all by the edge of the sword? Does the Church universal from the rising of the sun even to its setting put up to God to no purpose that universal petition on behalf of the unbelieving Jews that our Lord God would take away the veil from their hearts and enable them to pass out of darkness into the light of truth? It would seem useless and vain to pray for them if she had not hope that though now without faith they will one day believe. But she understands with a pious insight that the Lord who renders good for evil and love for hatred has a purpose of grace towards them. Where is then that which is spoken, See that than slay them not (Fs. lix. 11). Or this: When the fulness of the Gentiles shall have come in then shall all Israel be saved (Rom. xi. 25, 26). Or this: The Lord doth build up Jerusalem and will gat tier together the outcasts of Israel? (Fs. cxlvii. 2). Are you not the man who will make the Frophets liars and will render empty and useless all the treasures of the piety and mercy of Jesus Christ? Your doctrine is not yours, but that of your father who sent you. It is not surprising if you are as your master: for he was a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father of falsehood (S. John viii. 44). O frightful knowledge; O infernal wisdom contrary to the Prophets, hostile to the Apostles, a subversion of piety and grace! O unclean heresy, sacrilegious deceiver, filled with the spirit of falsehood, which hath conceived sorrow and brought forth ungodliness (Ps. vu. 15). I would wish, but fear, to say more. In conclusion, to sum up briefly all that I think upon these matters: the man is great in his own eyes, full of the spirit of arrogance. His words and his actions reveal that he is striving to make a name for himself among the great of the earth, but he has not the means to succeed in his object. Farewell.

Footnotes

1. Formerly No. 323; the former No. 365 is now No. 396. ↩

2. Ralph. Martene, Ampliss. Collect. Vel. Scrip/or, p. 744- This RalPh or Rolf is described by Otto of Frisingen, de Geslis Frider. B. i. c. 37, as the author of a bloody persecution against the Jews. His seditious doctrines were resisted by Bernard, and he warned Ralph himself, who was then in extreme favour with the people of Mayence, not to violate all monastic rules by his wandering life, nor yet to assume the functions of a preacher by his own authority. Bernard brought him at length, by virtue of his vow of obedience, to retire to his monastery, much to the indignation of the people, who, if they had not been restrained by S. Bernard's reputation for sanctity, would have certainly risen in sedition against the loss of their favourite. — It-id, c. 39. ↩

3. S. Jerome, adv. Vigilant, c. 6. See notes to Letter 89. ↩