St. Bernard tells monks his care is 'useless' and angels guard them

CLAIRVAUX, France, Lent, twelfth century AD — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux told the monks of his abbey, in a sermon one Lent, that God had not thought an abbot’s care enough for them and had put them in the keeping of angels as well. St. Bernard asked the monks to respect their angels, to love them and to trust them. He gave the monks words to call out to their angels when temptation was at its worst.

St. Bernard was the abbot of Clairvaux, a monastery in France, in the twelfth century. The men listening were his own monks, who lived in the abbey with him and under his authority. On the weekdays of that Lent he was explaining Psalm 90 (Psalm 91 in many Bibles) to them, whenever business and guests left him free.

St. Bernard told them the Church prayed this psalm so often in her seasons of fasting because the devil had used its words to tempt the Lord in the desert after his long fast. The twelfth sermon began from this verse of the psalm: “For He hath given His angels charge over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways.” The Church reads a passage from this sermon in her daily prayer on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, October 2.

St. Bernard spoke first about his own care of the monks. “He has entrusted you to my care as a most precious deposit, the fruit of His cross, and the price of His Blood,” he told them. “But He is not content with such poor protection for you, so unsafe, so useless, so weak, so inadequate”.

St. Bernard went back to the verse and said God had given his angels charge of the monks. From there he spoke as though to one monk, calling him “my brother.” The monk was to respect his angel in quovis diversorio, in quovis angulo (in whatever lodging, in whatever nook or corner). St. Bernard told him: “Walk therefore with caution, remembering that the angels of God accompany thee in all thy ways, as the Lord has commanded them. In every place, whether public or private, show respect for thy angel. Surely thou wouldst not dare to do in his presence what thou wouldst fear to do in mine.”

“But perhaps thou dost doubt the presence of him whom thou canst not see?” St. Bernard asked the monk. “What if thou wert to hear him? or to touch him? or to scent him?” Seeing, St. Bernard answered, was not the only way to know that someone was there, and the monk’s faith told him that the angel was. “The angels are present, therefore, and they are present to thee: not only are they with thee, but they are with thee to defend thee,” he said.

The angels guarded the monks at God’s command, and “with so much charity,” St. Bernard went on, that the monks owed thanks to the angels as well as to God. “Let us give them love for love,” he said. He told the monks to love the angels, “and love them tenderly, since we are destined as ‘joint-heirs’ with them to share in their glory.”

St. Bernard said he and the monks were “little ones” who still had a long and dangerous road to travel, and asked: “why should we be afraid under the protection of such powerful guardians?” Of the angels he said: “They are faithful, they are prudent, they are invincible”. In the psalm’s next verse the angels carry a man in their hands so that he does not strike his foot on a stone. St. Bernard said a little one on such a road needed “a guide, or rather a carrier.” When the stone lay in the monk’s way, he said, the angels “will take thee up in their arms, and lift thee over.” He added: “How easy one finds it to swim, when (according to the vulgar saying) another holds one’s head over water!”

St. Bernard then told each of the monks what to do: “Therefore, my brethren, I say to each one of you: as often as thou feelest the pressure of violent temptation, as often as bitter tribulation threatens to engulf thee: invoke thy guardian, call upon thy guide, cry to thy ‘helper in due times in tribulation.’” “Call out to him and say,” St. Bernard went on. He gave the monk the words Domine, salva nos, perimus (Lord, save us, we are perishing). The disciples used those words when they woke Christ in a boat that the waves were swamping.

St. Bernard then named the more common trials, “of which, I am sure, most of you have had experience.” He asked the monks to picture a man under violent temptation: “He is severely tried either by bodily infirmity, or by temporal misfortune; or is assailed by spiritual sadness, or suffering from a fainting of soul.” St. Bernard said the angels often supported men in that state so strongly “that they pass over, almost unconsciously, the obstacles which had occasioned them the utmost alarm.”

St. Bernard ended the sermon speaking to all of the monks: “Dearest brethren, make the angels of God your familiar friends; frequent their society by constant remembrance and fervent prayer; for they are always nigh to you with comfort and protection.”