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Appendix (10)

Middeleeuwen: Bernardus van Clairvaux

The influence of Richard of St. Victor, great as it was, is exceeded by that of St. Bernard; the dominant spiritual personality of the twelfth century. Bernard's career of ceaseless and varied activity sufficiently disproves the "idleness" of the contemplative type. He continued and informed with his own spirit the Benedictine tradition, and his writings quickly took their place, with those of Richard of St. Victor, among the living forces which conditioned the development of later mysticism. Both these mystics exerted a capital influence on the formation of our national school of mysticism in the fourteenth century. Translations and paraphrases of the "Benjamin Major," "Benjamin Minor," and other works of Richard of St. Victor, and of various tracts and epistles of St. Bernard, are constantly met with in the MS. collections of mystical and theological literature written in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An early paraphrase of the "Benjamin Minor," sometimes attributed to Richard Rolle, was probably made by the anonymous author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," who was also responsible for the first appearance of the Areopagite in English dress.