Does Society Need a St. Bernard?

You all know the big dogs that carry rum to save Swiss or alpine skiers caught in a storm or some other trouble. That is not the St. Bernard I am contemplating but you might think this St. Bernard to be an even bigger dog once you get to know him.

"The intellectual and institutional evolution of these reform movements during the almost exactly one thousand years between Benedict of Nursia (who founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in about 529) and Martin Luther (who entered the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt in 1505) is a story of inestimable importance for the history of Europe and of the world. (13) Over and over, it was the primitive model of Christ as Monk, and of the monk as the imitator of the model, that animated these reform movements. There is in some ways a depressing repetition of pattern, as each monastic reform in its turn protests against decline and stagnation in the monasteries, sets up new administrative and disciplinary structures to reverse the downward trend, prevails for a century or two, and then proves itself vulnerable to the same tendencies of stagnation and decline. Benedict of Aniane in the Carolingian period; Odo of Cluny and the Cluniac reform movement a century or so later; about a century after that the monastic reformation that began at Citeaux, which through the powerful life and Christocentric thought of Saint Bernard spread the Cistercian message throughout Europe; then the friars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in their new dedication to the renewal; and, in reaction to the Protestant Reformation and under the inspiration of an intensified Christ-mysticism in sixteenth-century Spain, the Society of Jesus." (14)

How much is Pelikan aware of in regards to the Alumbrados, Hibernian (Cathar/Troubadour), Iona Druidic sell-out and other higher order intrigues within the Luciferian or Heliopolitan through line since Tuthmosis III? I have addressed these things in many ways in other books and this book is going to try to flesh some of it out in greater detail. But clearly the Reformation did not just happen when the anti-Semite Luther saw a problem with popery and the other trappings of power. His image of Christ as monk is similar to the far more disciplined Monastic Order of Iona or 'The Isle of Druids' which had large operations in the area of Greece as well as Ireland where the likes of St. Columba were taught. Iona maintained this high discipline over four centuries at least and I would not be surprised if it was then co-opted into the Cistercian Order. But John Dominic Crossan points out that Christ was a Cynic and wore the garb of the Cynic. Still one can see the Cynic is like the Druid too. In all cases they are indeed more mystical.

13) From Jesus Through The Centuries, op. cit.{Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale}, pgs. 116-7 we have, The chapters "The Religious Orders" and "Fringe Orders and Anti-Orders" in Richard W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 of the Pelican History of the Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). pp. 214-358, occupy nearly half of that small book.

14) Ibid.

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com