Letter CCCXCIX. To Lelbert, Abbot of S. Michael

(Formerly No. 319).

Bernard sends back to him a monk who had quitted his cloister under a false pretext of pilgrimage.¹

To his father and friend, Lelbert, Abbot of S. Michael, Brother Bernard, the unprofitable servant of the servants Of God who are in Clairvaux, health and due affection.

This your son returns to you, having renounced by my advice, the pilgrimage which he had undertaken, a t oug it was with your leave. For on enquiry I find hat the permission to set out upon this enterprise was only asked by him in pure frivolity of mind, and only granted by you because of his importunity: I have sharply reprimanded him, as he deserved, and persuaded him .to return. He is as far as I can tell, sorry for his instability an resolved to correct it. I believe that it is better for a Religious, whatever fault he have been guilty of, to penance in the interior of his monastery, than to go abroad and wander over one province after another. T e object of monks is to attain, not the earthly Jerusalem, but the heavenly: and we reach it, not by wandering upon our feet, but by reaching out towards it by the affections. But you, my father, will I doubt not, make him welcome at his return, even although you suspect the sincerity of his conversion: and will rather rejoice because this your son was dead, and is alive again, he ' was lost, and is found 1 (S. Luke xv: 3*)- tage in Poitou; and S. Michael in Thierache (Terascia) which latter is thought to have been the Abbey of Lelbert He is perhaps confounded with Elbert who conveyed in 1121 o Bartholomew, Bishop of Laon, a piece of ground < " to build a Cistercian Abbey at Foigny. Or it may be tha Gdbert, his successor, is meant. He is mentioned * a Cart y under 1130 and called by the monk Hermann of Laon the Plato of his age. (Mirac. B.V.M. B. hi. c. 19). Af‘erthea of Simon Abbot of S. Nicholas (who is mentioned in. Ep. 83)

Gilbert was recalled to the latter Abbey, whence he had been taken. A diploma of Pope Innocent II. in 1138 is grante W 1 “are similar expressions to those used by Hildebert on the same subject (Ep. 33)- The language of Bernard may

Footnotes

1. There were many Abbeys of this name in France: Mount S. Michael otherwise called in Periculo Maris; S. Michael on the Meuse; S. Michael de Tonnerre in Burgundy; de l’Ermibe compared with that of Abbot Theodomir, in a treatise of Jonas, Bishop of Orleans, against Claude of S. Taurin, about the pilgrimage of monks. ↩