Early in Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Songs of Solomon, the mellifluous doctor and abbot associates mystical ascent with the experience of a geyser erupting from a fountain hidden behind a garden wall. The paradise he references is inaccessible to mere mortals and thereby signals a complicated relationship between the natural environment, the church father's community, and the transformation of both.

The hagiographical accounts of the founding of Cistercian monasteries suggest that the monks who inhabited them emulated an ascetic ideal by building their cloisters in uninhabited wastelands. However, the available evidence contradicts these claims. In these stories, remaking a desert into an imaginary Heaven on Earth serves a tropological purpose. The metaphorical changes revealed the possible reconfiguration of the world as a model for their behavior.

The construction and repair of the church wall, as an analog of the garden wall, fulfills a similar role in Bernard's sermons. By associating a location for Heaven beyond the wall with “a sealed fountain to which no stranger has access,” Bernard implies a familiar trope for medieval thinkers. To live in the world was to live as if a foreigner exiled from God. For Bernard, acts of love and good work function, metaphorically, as the maintenance of the wall that separates earthly from celestial life.