Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444)

Birth at Massa Marittima (1380)

Bernardine was born on 8 September 1380, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, at Massa Marittima, a small mining town of the Maremma then subject to the Republic of Siena, where his father held an office of governor.^[8][9] He belonged to the Albizzeschi family, a noble lineage of Siena; his full baptismal name was Bernardino degli Albizzeschi.^[10]

That he was born on the very day of the Marian feast is no decorative detail for hagiography: Bernardine's whole spirituality would be marked by a filial tenderness for the Virgin Mary, whom he honoured as his own heavenly mother.

An orphan child raised by his aunts

Bernardine's childhood was marked by mourning. His mother died when he was three, his father when he was six.^[11][12] Left an orphan, he was taken in and "brought up with great care by his pious aunts", in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia.^[13] This fervent feminine upbringing — an aunt, Diana, taught him devotion; a cousin, Tobia, formed him in penance — early impressed upon him a solid piety and a keen sense of purity.

As a youth he stood out by an ardent devotion to the Virgin and a horror of coarse talk: his biographers report that he blushed and silenced licentious conversation, which earned him among his companions a respect mingled with affectionate awe.^[14]

Law studies and entry into the confraternity of Santa Maria della Scala

Around 1391, the young Bernardine was sent to study at Siena. There he followed the course of the liberal arts, then a course in civil and canon law.^[15][16] Gifted, wealthy, promised to a fine career, he chose instead to join charity to study: in 1397, he enrolled in the Confraternity of Our Lady attached to the great hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, facing Siena cathedral, to serve the sick and pilgrims there.^[17][18]

This twofold formation — juridical rigour on the one hand, service of the poor on the other — was unknowingly preparing the future preacher, able both to argue as a theologian and to speak the language of the people.

Four months at the head of the hospital

In 1400, the plague struck Siena again with appalling violence: on some days as many as twelve or twenty died in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala alone, whose staff was decimated.^[19][20][21] Bernardine was twenty. Far from fleeing, he "left the life of retirement and prayer he had embraced in order to succour the plague-stricken", writes the Catholic Encyclopedia.^[22]

With a dozen young companions whom he rallied, he took effective charge of the hospital for about four months, organizing care, burying the dead, watching over the dying.^[23] Tradition reports that he acquitted himself of this heroic task with such composure that he saved the institution from collapse.

Health broken for good

The price of this devotion was heavy. Exhaustion and contagion permanently ruined the young man's constitution: the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that "the heroic labour demanded by this task so shattered his health that he never fully recovered".^[24] Bernardine himself fell gravely ill after the epidemic and remained bedridden for several months.

This experience of mass death, lived at twenty at the bedside of the dying, proved decisive: it completed Bernardine's detachment from the world and turned him towards total consecration.

The Franciscan vocation (1402–1404)

After the plague, Bernardine distributed his goods to the poor and knocked at the door of the Friars Minor.^[25][26] He took the habit in 1402 — tradition retains 8 September, the day of his birthday and of the Nativity of Mary — and joined the reformed branch of the order, the Observance, which sought to return to the primitive rigour of the rule of Saint Francis of Assisi.^[27]

He made profession the following year and was ordained priest on 8 September 1404, once again sealing his consecration on the Marian feast.^[28] He was twenty-four.

Twelve years of silence and contemplation

Contrary to what one might expect of a future tribune, Bernardine did not rush into preaching. For some twelve years he led a hidden life, divided between prayer, study of Scripture and the Fathers, and interior formation, notably in the hermitages of the Sienese countryside such as Colombaio and the island of San Francesco del Deserto in the Venetian lagoon.^[29]

This long time of maturing explains the doctrinal density of his later preaching: when Bernardine began to preach, he was no improviser, but a contemplative formed by years of silence.

The Observance, a reform from within

The choice of the Observance was no trifle. In the fifteenth century, the Franciscan order was divided between the Conventuals, who had softened the ideal of poverty, and the Observants, who sought to restore it in its rigour. Bernardine ranged himself resolutely on the side of the latter, and would become the chief artisan of their growth.^[30][31]

His reform was never a schismatic break: its aim was to regenerate the order from within, in fidelity to the Church, by the example of lived poverty, serious study and preaching.

Taking to the roads (from 1417)

It was around 1417 that Bernardine received, according to his biographers, the inward conviction that his mission was itinerant preaching.^[32] Gifted with a voice at first weak and hoarse — which a pious tradition reports was healed by the Virgin — he set out to travel Italy from north to south: Siena, Lombardy, Milan, Venice, Romagna, Umbria, Latium, as far as Rome and the Abruzzi.^[33][34]

For nearly thirty years he preached almost daily, often at dawn, in the public squares, for no church could hold the crowds that flocked to hear him.

A voice for immense crowds

Bernardine's success rested on a new art of oratory. He abandoned the learned sermon in Latin for a living speech, studded with concrete examples, anecdotes, dialogues, onomatopoeias and direct addresses to his hearers. He made them laugh, weep and tremble; he called out the merchant, the coquette, the usurer, the gambler.^[35][36]

His themes returned like hammer blows: peace between the factions of the Italian cities, the fight against usury, against gambling and superstition, the defence of the family, the constant call to penance and to God's mercy.^[37][38] Wherever he passed, enemies were reconciled, ill-gotten goods restored, the instruments of vice burned.

The bonfires of the vanities

From these great preachings was born the spectacular rite of the "bonfires of the vanities" (falò delle vanità). At the end of his missions, Bernardine invited penitents to throw into the fire the objects of sin: cards and dice, wigs, cosmetics, luxurious finery, licentious writings, instruments of sorcery.^[39] This public gesture, which lastingly impressed contemporaries and which Savonarola would later take up in Florence, expresses the radicality of the conversion he called for.

The language of the people: the prediche volgari

The most precious legacy left by Bernardine is not from his own hand, but from a hearer's. During Lent and the summer of 1427, at Siena, a craftsman, Benedetto di Maestro Bartolomeo, a cimatore di panni (cloth shearer), noted down word for word, on wax tablets, the sermons the saint preached on the Piazza del Campo.^[40]

He thus transcribed forty-five sermons, preached in August and September, some lasting three or four hours.^[41] These prediche volgari ("sermons in the vernacular"), written in the most popular Tuscan, are at once a spiritual and a linguistic monument: they are one of the major sources for knowledge of the spoken language and customs of fifteenth-century Italy.^[42][43]

The effect of these preachings is attested by his biographers: where Bernardine passed, the quarrels of the cities subsided and the instruments of gambling ended in the fire.^[44][45]

The trigram IHS

The emblem by which Bernardine entered history is the trigram IHS, formed of the first three letters of the name of Jesus in Greek characters (IHΣΟΥΣ).^[46] The saint had it painted in letters of gold on a radiant sun, set on an azure ground — twelve rays figuring the spread of the Name by the apostles.^[47][48] Introduced around 1424, this devotion met with overwhelming success.^[49]

At the end of his sermons, Bernardine raised before the crowd a wooden tablet bearing this monogram and invited the faithful to venerate it:

"He was accustomed to hold before him, when preaching, a tablet on which the holy monogram was painted amid rays, and then to expose it for veneration." — Paschal Robinson, Catholic Encyclopedia^[50]

A weapon of peace against the factions

The stake was not only devotional, but civic and peacemaking. The Italian cities were torn by the rivalry of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, each party displaying its coats of arms on facades and even on house doors. Bernardine proposed replacing these partisan badges, sources of hatred, with the single Name of Jesus, a sign of unity above all parties.^[51]

Many cities agreed: the IHS trigram was carved on the pediments of public palaces — that of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena still bears it. The spiritual gesture thus became a concrete instrument of social reconciliation.

"Apostle of the Holy Name"

Behind the emblem lies a true theology of the Name. For Bernardine, the name of Jesus is no magic formula but the acting presence of the Saviour, light of the preacher and strength of the soul. His great Sermo de glorioso Nomine Iesu Christi develops this doctrine, of which the Church's liturgy has retained a passage for the office of 20 May:

"The name of Jesus is the glory of preachers, because the shining splendor of that name causes his word to be proclaimed and heard." — Saint Bernardine of Siena, Sermon on the glorious Name of Jesus Christ^[52]

It is this tireless preaching of the Name that earned him his second title: the "Apostle of the Holy Name of Jesus".^[53] The devotion he launched was taken up by his disciples and by the whole Franciscan order, and found its liturgical crowning in the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

The charge of idolatry

The very success of the devotion to the Holy Name aroused suspicion. Opponents — notably among the clergy and certain theologians — accused Bernardine of fostering a form of idolatry or superstition, by having an object and an image adored instead of God.^[54][55] He was reproached with introducing a new cult and diverting popular piety.

The matter went up as far as Rome, and Pope Martin V was seized of it.

Before Martin V in Rome

In 1427, Martin V temporarily forbade Bernardine to preach and to display his tablets, "until his conduct had been examined", reports the Catholic Encyclopedia.^[56] Far from rebelling, the preacher submitted at once and went to Rome to answer the charges.

A contradictory examination of his doctrine was conducted, in which the theologian Paul of Venice notably took part.^[57] Bernardine showed that the cult was addressed not to the tablet, but to the Christ whom the Name designates — the classic theological distinction between the veneration of the sign and the adoration due to God alone.

John of Capistrano's defence

In this trial Bernardine found a decisive defender in his disciple, the future Saint John of Capistrano, a jurist by training, who pleaded his cause vigorously.^[58] Tradition reports that, to remove all ambiguity, it was agreed to add a small cross above the letter H of the trigram, manifestly showing that the Name venerated is that of the Crucified.^[59]

Rehabilitation and preaching in Rome

The outcome was a triumph. Bernardine was fully acquitted, and Martin V, far from condemning him, was so impressed that he asked him to preach in Rome — for some eighty days, according to several sources.^[60][61] Twice more, under Martin V and then under Eugenius IV, cardinals attempted to revive the accusation: both popes acquitted Bernardine almost at once.^[62]

This repeated rehabilitation by the Magisterium illustrates the prudence of the Church: it seriously examines a new devotion, yet knows how to recognize the orthodoxy of an authentic piety. The cult of the Holy Name, far from a superstition, was to become a universal devotion.

Three mitres refused

Bernardine's renown caused him to be proposed, three times, for the government of a diocese. Three times, faithful to Franciscan humility, he refused the episcopal office:

These three refusals remained famous: iconography figures them by three mitres laid at the saint's feet.^[63] To those who marvelled, Bernardine is said to have answered that the whole of Italy was his diocese — a way of saying that his mission was universal preaching, not the government of a single Church.^[64]

Vicar general and the rise of the Observance (1438)

In 1438, Bernardine accepted another office, no longer for honour but for service: he became vicar general of the Italian Observants.^[65][66] Under his impulse, the reform enjoyed spectacular growth.

"Instead of the one hundred and thirty friars the Observance numbered when Bernardine entered the order, it numbered more than four thousand shortly before his death." — Paschal Robinson, Catholic Encyclopedia^[67]

He founded or reformed at least three hundred convents, extending the Observance well beyond Italy.^[68] From a marginal reform, the Observance became, thanks to him, the most dynamic current of the Franciscan order.

Love of study

Far from opposing fervour and knowledge, Bernardine made serious study a pillar of his reform. He encouraged young Observant friars to study theology and law, founded houses of study, and ensured that evangelical poverty never became ignorance.^[69] He thus formed a whole generation of preachers.

Among his disciples were several future saints and blesseds who would carry on his work across Europe: Saint John of Capistrano, Saint James of the March, Blessed Albert of Sarteano and, in the following generation, Blessed Bernardine of Feltre, preacher of the Monti di Pietà against usury.^[70][71]

A mysticism of the Name of Jesus

Bernardine's whole spirituality gravitates around the Name of Jesus, which he presents as remedy, light and strength. For him the Name is the summary of the whole Gospel: to pronounce it with faith is to make memorial of salvation and to invoke a presence. This devotion, profoundly Christocentric, preserves popular piety from any drift into sentimentalism: it always leads back to the person of the Saviour.

The promoter of Saint Joseph

Bernardine is one of the great artisans of devotion to Saint Joseph in the Christian West. His Latin sermon De sancto Ioseph, sponso beatae Mariae Virginis ("On Saint Joseph, spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary") is one of the founding texts of the theological promotion of Mary's spouse and foster-father of Jesus.^[72] Long left in the shadows during the first millennium, the cult of Saint Joseph spread in the fifteenth century under the joint influence of Bernardine of Siena and the Parisian chancellor Jean Gerson.^[73]

In it Bernardine develops the idea that Joseph's dignity flows from his unique closeness to Christ and the Virgin: chosen to watch over the incarnate Word, he holds a singular place in the economy of salvation. This intuition anticipates the later developments of Josephine devotion.

Mary, mother and model

Born and several times consecrated on the day of the Nativity of the Virgin, Bernardine nourished an ardent Marian piety. In his sermons, Mary appears as the maternal mediatrix, associated with the work of grace, a model of purity and humility. His Marian devotion belongs to the great Franciscan tradition which, from Saint Bonaventure to the theologians of the Quattrocento, prepared the ground for the later Marian dogmas.

The last journeys

In the evening of his life, despite age and the exhaustion of forty years of apostolate, Bernardine took to the road again to preach in the Kingdom of Naples.^[74] On the way to L'Aquila, in the Abruzzi, fever struck him down. He reached the city in a hopeless state.

Eve of the Ascension, 20 May 1444

Bernardine died at L'Aquila on 20 May 1444, the eve of the Ascension, "worn out by forty years of laborious apostolate", according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.^[75] He was sixty-three. His remains, kept in the Abruzzi city, at once became the object of an immediate cult; the great basilica of San Bernardino would later be raised for him, and still houses his tomb.^[76][77]

A lightning canonization (1450)

Popular fervour and the miracles attributed to his intercession hastened his cause. Only six years after his death, Pope Nicholas V canonized him on 24 May 1450, during the great Jubilee, making Bernardine one of the saints canonized most rapidly after death.^[78][79][80] His feast is celebrated on 20 May.^[81]

Iconography and patronages

Art has fixed an image recognizable above all others: a thin, emaciated religious, his face hollowed by fasting and sickness, holding the tablet with the radiant IHS trigram, often with three mitres laid at his feet — the three refused sees.^[82] The greatest have portrayed him: El Greco^[83], Pinturicchio, Sano di Pietro, Vecchietta.

By a just return of things, this master of word and sign has become the patron of advertisers and communications workers; he is also invoked for chest diseases and hoarseness, in memory of the voice he wore out in the service of the Gospel.^[84]

• Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) — the founder whose rule Bernardine restored within the Observance.
• Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) — the Dominican who, it is said, noticed the young Bernardine in the crowd and foretold his glory.
• Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) — the great mystic of the same city, a figure of the Sienese reform.
• Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) — the Franciscan doctor whose theology nourished the Marian and Christocentric devotion of the Observance.