Bernard of Cluny

Bernard of Cluny, also called Bernard of Morlaix, Morlas, or Morval in later sources, was a twelfth-century Benedictine monk associated with the great Abbey of Cluny. Very little secure biographical information survives. Even his place of origin is disputed: medieval manuscript forms of his name have been interpreted in several ways, and modern scholarship cautions against treating the older Morlaix identification or the claim of English parentage as certain. His connection with Cluny, however, is firm, and his principal poem was dedicated to Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156.

Bernard's enduring work is De contemptu mundi, composed around 1144–1145. The poem extends to nearly three thousand Latin verses in an exceptionally demanding form of dactylic hexameter with internal and end rhyme. Its three books combine eschatological expectation, moral satire, criticism of ecclesiastical and social corruption, and vivid contrasts between the instability of the present world and the beauty of the heavenly country. Surviving medieval manuscripts and later printed editions show that the poem circulated long before its nineteenth-century revival in English hymnody.

Bernard's modern hymnological importance comes from selected passages rather than from the whole satire. Richard Chenevix Trench printed portions of the Latin in the nineteenth century, and John Mason Neale translated and expanded selections that later yielded several English hymns, including The World Is Very Evil, Brief Life Is Here Our Portion, For Thee, O Dear, Dear Country, and Jerusalem the Golden. Through those extracts, a medieval Cluniac poem entered a remarkably broad range of later Anglican and Protestant hymn traditions.