Vigils Reading – SS Warren & Amadeus

ST AMADEUS OF LAUSANNE1

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Amadeus’ religious formation began, in fact, well before the days of his

youth. He was only a few years past the days of his babyhood when his father, Lord

Amadeus d’Hauterives of the ancient and noble house of Clermont, turned apostle

of monastic life and, sometime around 1119, brought to the newly founded

Cistercian abbey of Bonnevaux, near Vienne, not only himself but his ten-year old

boy, Amadeus junior, and seventeen knight-companions as well.

Whatever else the senior Amadeus had given up in coming to the poor,

struggling community of Bonnevaux, he had not given up the idea that his son

should receive a solid education. At Bonnevaux the lad did begin receiving an

education, but hardly of the sort deemed suitable by his concerned father. The

philosophy of education held by the saintly Abbot John was that the anointing of

the Paraclete could teach the lad more in a second than the teachings of an apostate

grammarian like Priscian in a stretch of many years. The force of the argument

was lost on Amadeus senior. In a moment of depression, he apostatized; and one

day, probably in the year 1122, he took his son and rode off with him to the great

abbey of Cluny, with its tradition of enlightened humanism.

The account of Amadeus senior’s brief, unhappy life as a monk of Cluny, his

anguished repentance, and his return to Bonnevaux, belongs to another story. But

if Bonnevaux could not provide Amadeus junior with a suitable education, neither

could Cluny; for almost immediately the lad was sent for further studies to the

court of his kinsman, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Emperor Conrad. The

three years Amadeus spent in Germany could hardly have sufficed to complete the

education of the adolescent, but we nevertheless find him in 1125, shortly after

having fulfilled the minimum age-requirement for acceptance as a Cistercian

novice, knocking at the gate of Clairvaux…12

For fourteen years young Amadeus had the joy of living under the tutelage

of Saint Bernard himself; and it was in this setting of Clairvaux, with all its

contagious enthusiasm, devotio iocunda, and seriousness of purpose, that the

stripling Amadeus grew to full manhood. The attainments of the mature Amadeus

must have impressed even Saint Bernard, who, in 1139, deemed him ready to

become abbot of the Savoyard abbey of Hautecombe. This monastery had been

founded much earlier in the century, but had become affiliated with the Cistercian

Order only in 1135. Amadeus’ abbacy coincided with the change of location of the

original abbey and the construction of the monastic buildings; and it was also

under Amadeus that the consolidation of the Cistercian ideals in the recently

affiliated community took place.

The young abbot’s gifts as administrator and spiritual father were

considerable enough to draw attention to him well outside the immediate sphere

of the Cistercian family. For when the deplorable Guy de Maligny finally resigned

his episcopal dignity in 1144, it was the thirty-four-year-old Abbot Amadeus of

Hautecombe whom the clergy and faithful of Lausanne chose to succeed Bishop

Guy. Accepting the burden of the episcopal office only at the insistence of Pope

Lucius II, Bishop Amadeus remained very much Amadeus the monk. At no time

during the troubled fourteen years of his episcopacy did the faithful of Lausanne

find reason to regret their choice of pastor; and when Amadeus died on 27 August

1159, those who were with him were well aware that they were attending the

deathbed of a saint.