Anselm also added the passion of repentance and the exhilaration of praise to the bare texts, involving the supplicant in an intensity of feeling and a deepening of understanding. In the intensity of sorrow for sin, he is the heir of Augustine of Hippo, and the language of the Confessions is very close to Anselm's self-revelation and repentance.
(McGinn, Meyendorff, and Ledercq 202)
So, in City of God the textual concepts from his earlier works became the stuff of reformative language that would apply itself not only to the personal but to how the person was meant to build upon the institutions that surrounded him, influenced him and in turn was influenced by him. Bernard of Clairvaux was a direct descendant of Augustine in his ideas. He strove to recreate the church not as a calling of finery and social stratification but of one that encompassed a monastic tradition of subsistence means, as to set and example for good living to monasteries, as well as the laity, who looked to the church for answers in all things. Clairvaux then carried these ideas to real reformation of the monastic as well as the lay life. Furthering Augustine's observations in City of God. Though it is clear that this transformation of faith, persona and institution was not met with rapid embrace or that Augustine's works were not questioned, they were significantly influential in the ability of the church and its teachers and reformers to build a case for the kind of finery and opulence that was literally burgeoning at the seams of the church institutions previously to be eliminated through reform, as these characteristics demonstrated the ability to sway even the most ardent believer to sin, Augustine's personal challenge as proof.
The great successor to Anselm in this kind of prayer was Bernard of Clairvaux. Augustine presented a spirituality of knowledge which is love; Bernard, a spirituality of love which is knowledge. Bernard was the heir to Anselm's distinction between love and knowledge, and he gave a new and minor place to knowledge in prayer. It is no longer the sapientia of Augustine that is diminished, but the scientia of the schools. The emotional use of language reached new heights in Bernard. In many specific ways he popularized and expanded the piety presented by Anselm. For instance, the devotion to the name of Jesus so strongly associated with Bernard is expressed by Anselm in his First Meditation.
(McGinn, Meyendorff, and Ledercq 202-203)
Bernard sought to bring back the traditions of the early church, by holding even those in high office of the church to a standard that was not representative of wealth and privilege but was a representation of the life of Jesus, who became during this period the central figure in monastic and educational traditions.
But these are minor abuses. I shall go on to major ones which seem minor because they are so common. I say nothing of the enormous height, extravagant length and unnecessary width of the churches, of their costly polishings and curious paintings which catch the worshipper's eye and dry up his devotion, things which seem to me in some sense a revival of ancient Jewish rites. Let these things pass, let us say they are all to the honor of God. Nevertheless, just as the pagan poet Persius inquired of his fellow pagans, so I as a monk ask my fellow monks: "Tell me, oh pontiffs," he said, "what is gold doing in the sanctuary?" I say (following his meaning rather than his metre): "Tell me, poor men, if you really are poor what is gold doing in the sanctuary?" There is no comparison here between bishops and monks. We know that the bishops, debtors to both the wise and unwise, use material beauty to arouse the devotion of a carnal people because they cannot do so by spiritual means. But we who have now come out of that people, we who have left the precious and lovely things of the world for Christ, we who, in order to win Christ, have reckoned all beautiful, sweet-smelling, fine-sounding, smooth-feeling, good-tasting things-- in short, all bodily delights -- as so much dung, what do we expect to get out of them? Admiration from the foolish? Offerings from the ignorant? or, scattered as we are among the gentiles, are we learning their tricks and serving their idols? (Bernarc of Clairvaux trans. Burr NP)
Abelard on the other hand stresses the importance of repentance, partly as a result of his not so...
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