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This paper attempts to understand the abbot Stephen Harding’s (1108–1133/34), and the Cîteaux community’s vision of the Church using some Cîteaux miniatures dating around 1100–1133. An image in Stephen Harding’s Bible (1108–1111) representing King David within a crenellate city wall defended by armed warriors is a very complex and ingenious iconographic construction, representing the Earthly Church fighting against her enemies. The idea of the Church as a militant institution is also present in the saints’ miniatures in the so-called "first collections of saints’ lives" from Cîteaux. In this manuscript, most of the saints trample on human characters, animals, or hybrids. Some miniatures in the Bible make it possible to identify some of the Church’s “enemies”: dialecticians and Jews. The same conception of the Church underlies the actions of Bernard of Clairvaux and the second generation of Cistercians. The first community therefore seems to have had a great importance in the construction of the Cistercian order.