Bernard was born in 1090 into a Burgundian noble family at Fontaines-lès-Dijon, the third of seven children. Around 1112 he entered the newly founded monastery of Cîteaux, bringing with him some thirty companions he had persuaded to join him — an early sign of the personal magnetism that would shape his entire career. Three years later he was sent to found a daughter house at Clairvaux, where he served as abbot until his death in 1153, never seeking the higher ecclesiastical offices that were repeatedly pressed upon him.
Bernard lived through a period of intense ecclesiastical turbulence. He intervened in the disputed papal election of 1130, championing Innocent II across years of schism. He preached the Second Crusade at the Council of Vézelay in 1146 with such effect that recruits overwhelmed expectation, though the campaign ended in disaster — a failure Bernard acknowledged with pain. He also led the charge against the theological method of Peter Abelard, whose rationalistic approach to doctrine Bernard regarded as a danger to the faithful, securing Abelard's condemnation at the Council of Sens in 1140. These controversies have shaped his reputation in ways that can obscure the interior life from which his public labors drew their energy.
That interior life is most fully on display in his eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, a work he never finished, and in his treatise *On Loving God*. In both, Bernard traces a movement of the soul from self-interest toward a love that finally desires God for God's own sake alone. His Christology is notably affective, dwelling on the humanity of Jesus as the entry point for contemplation. The phrase he returned to again and again — that the measure of loving God is to love without measure — captures the temper of his entire devotional vision.
He was canonized in 1174 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1830, and his writings on contemplative love have continued to nourish Christian readers far beyond the Cistercian tradition he helped to define.