" Both the great
scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the
same opinion. "They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly
Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of
their hearts." And "They seek God in external objects, neglecting to
look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine."
And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical
religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age.
Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way: "It is not
because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to
protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve
legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the
Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to
serve Him." In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea
can already be traced. Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and
Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the
Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed
through the whole of France, inciting all hearts to fanatical
enthusiasm.
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