Bernard of Clairvaux

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Bernard of Clairvaux was a French Cistercian abbot, reformer, and theologian whose writings on the love between the soul and God became one of the central texts of Western mysticism. Born around 1090 at Fontaine-lès-Dijon, near Dijon, the third of seven children of Tescelin, a lord of the high Burgundian nobility, and Aleth of Montbard, he was given a literary and rhetorical formation by the secular canons of Saint-Vorles at Châtillon-sur-Seine. About 1112 or 1113 — the sources divide on the year — he entered the young and austere monastery of Cîteaux, the house founded in 1098 to restore a literal keeping of the Rule of Saint Benedict, then governed by its third abbot, Stephen Harding. He did not come alone. Bernard arrived with a band of some thirty kinsmen and companions — his brothers among them, an uncle, and a crowd of others he had argued into the cloister before he had crossed its threshold. The persuasion was already the man. In 1115 Stephen Harding sent him with twelve monks to found a new house in the Vallée d’Absinthe, the valley of wormwood, in the diocese of Langres; Bernard renamed it Clairvaux, the clear valley, and ruled it as abbot until his death in 1153. From that one bare foundation the Cistercian order spread across Europe at a speed without parallel in the monastic history of the age — the houses that traced their descent to Clairvaux numbered in the hundreds before he died.

Bernard depicted in a historiated initial B from a 13th-century manuscript of the Legenda Aurea, Keble College, Oxford — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He was, by every account, a man of contradictions held in one frame. The sermons describe a contemplative drawn to silence and the cloister; the record shows a public figure of the first rank — physician of disputes, accuser, recruiter of armies, correspondent of kings. He threw his authority behind Innocent II through the eight-year papal schism that opened in 1130, and his advocacy was decisive in carrying the West for Innocent against the rival claim of Anacletus II. He drove the condemnation of the philosopher Peter Abelard. He preached the Second Crusade across France and the Rhineland in 1146–47, and afterward had to answer for its ruin. A former monk of his own house became Pope Eugenius III, and Bernard wrote him the long counsel De Consideratione on the cares and dangers of the office. The pull between withdrawal and the world’s demands runs through his own complaints of being torn from the quiet he wanted — a chimera of his age, he called himself, neither cleric nor layman, keeping the habit of a monk while the business of the Church kept finding him.

The site of Clairvaux Abbey in the Aube, the house Bernard founded in 1115 and governed until his death — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The Rhineland and the massacres

The Rhineland leg of the crusade preaching had a darker context, and his conduct in it is part of the record. In 1146 a Cistercian monk named Radulf, preaching the crusade along the Rhine without any commission, turned the gathering fervor against the Jews and incited massacres in Cologne, Speyer, and Mainz. The archbishops appealed to Bernard, who wrote against the violence — setting down that whoever lays hands on a Jew to take his life lays hands, as it were, on Jesus himself, and reminding the crusaders that the Jews were a living witness and not to be slain — then crossed into Germany in person, confronted Radulf, and sent him back to his monastery. The Jewish chroniclers of the period, who had no cause to flatter a man summoning Christendom to war, recorded the intervention and stressed that he sought nothing in return for it. The crusade he preached ended in catastrophe in the East; the slaughter on the Rhine he helped to halt. Both belong to the same months and the same man.

Bernard preaching the Second Crusade at Vézelay in 1146, painted by Émile Signol (1840), Galerie des Batailles, Versailles — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Sermons on the Song of Songs

His enduring work is the long, unfinished cycle of sermons on the Song of Songs, the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum. The first was delivered during Advent of 1135, as Brian Patrick McGuire establishes in the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, and the cycle ran on through Bernard’s life until death broke it off in 1153. Eighty-six sermons never carried the commentary past the opening verses of the poem’s third chapter. The text was not being summarized but inhabited, and a man does not hurry through what he means to live inside. In them Bernard reads the biblical love-poem as the map of the soul’s ascent to God, its erotic language transposed into the grammar of union: the soul is the bride, Christ is the Bridegroom, the Word, and the kiss is the instant the human spirit touches the divine. The older ecclesial reading is never dropped — the Bride is also the Church, the one accord of many souls — but the weight falls on the single soul in love.

The architecture is a ladder of three kisses, drawn from the poem’s opening cry to be kissed with the kiss of the mouth. The kiss of the feet is penitence, the sinner prostrate; the kiss of the hand is progress, the soul lifted into the labor of virtue; the kiss of the mouth is the height, the contemplative union in which the Word is, for a moment, present. Around this run the other figures of the cycle — the right ordering of love, the ordo caritatis; the bedchamber and the storerooms of the King; and above all the alternation Bernard returns to again and again, the comings and goings of the Bridegroom, who is felt and then withdrawn, so that the soul lives by an absence that teaches it to long. He is careful about what the kiss is and is not. It is not a fusion of the soul into the deity; it is the unreserved infusion of the Spirit, a giving that leaves the two who are joined still two.

What governs his reading of the poem is not method but experience. Bernard tells the monks of Clairvaux that only those who have loved can understand the song of love, and that the book to be studied is the book of their own experience — the liber experientiae, the inner record each one carries. Knowledge of God, on this account, is reached more by longing than by reasoning; experientia and affectus, the felt disposition of the heart, open a text that argument leaves shut. This is the hallmark of what later scholarship would call the Cistercian affective reading, and it sets Bernard against the temper of the rising Paris schools even as he writes. His deep substrate is Origen, whose Song commentary — surviving in the Latin of Rufinus and Jerome — first fixed the double reading of the Bride as both Church and soul and the theme of mystical ascent; behind Origen stand Gregory the Great’s affective exegesis and, for the doctrine of love and the restless heart, Augustine, whose account of caritas and the ordo amoris Bernard carried into the cloister and made the engine of his whole spirituality.

On Loving God and the four degrees

Alongside the sermons stands De Diligendo Deo (On Loving God), the first treatise in the tradition devoted wholly to the love of God, written first around 1124–25 and re-edited some years later for the papal chancellor Haimeric (per the manuscript notice at Les Enluminures). Its keynote is that the cause of loving God is God himself and the measure of loving him is to love without measure. The treatise sets out four degrees by which love climbs. The first is love of self for self’s sake, the carnal love that begins in every creature. The second is love of God for self’s sake — God loved for what he gives. The third is love of God for God’s own sake, disinterested at last, the love that wants the beloved and not the gift. And the fourth, the rung most summaries omit, is love of self for God’s sake: the self loved only because God loves it, the creature regarding even itself through God’s eye. Bernard attaches a sober reservation to that fourth degree. He doubts whether it can be held steadily in this mortal life at all; it comes, if it comes, in moments that do not last, and is given whole only in the resurrection. The whole movement is the slow conversion of cupiditas, self-seeking desire, into caritas, charity — a love that must start with the self and is, degree by degree, turned toward God. The standing English of the treatise is the public-domain rendering printed as Edmund G. Gardner’s The Book of Saint Bernard on the Love of God (Dent / Dutton, 1915), whose text is freely readable online.

For all the heat of the bridal imagery, what he teaches about union is exact, and the exactness is the safeguard. Union with God, in his account, is an unitas spiritus, a unity of spirit grounded in the Pauline word that whoever is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him — an embrace of wills so complete that the two share a single act of loving, a sharing of likes and dislikes that makes of two one spirit. It is emphatically not an unitas substantiae, a fusion of substance: the creature does not become God by nature, and the distinction of natures stands. Two persons remain, unequal and distinct, joined in what they will and not melted into one being. This is the Western nuptial union in its precise form, and it marks the line that separates Bernard’s path from the stronger deification-vocabulary of the Greek East — the theōsis and unitas substantiae direction of the Byzantine fathers — where the language of the soul’s transformation into the divine reaches further than Bernard’s communion of wills ever does. He hedges the union about with discipline. In De Gradibus Humilitatis et Superbiae (The Steps of Humility and Pride) he maps the twelve degrees of humility and their mirror in the twelve degrees of pride, and makes humility the gate to the truth that ends in love. The ecstatic excessus is real, but it is rare, brief, and held under charity and obedience; the soul that would be a bride is first made small.

This affective, nuptial current — soul as bride, Word as Bridegroom, love as the organ of knowing — became one of the deep channels of Christian devotion and ran forward into the later mysticism that drew on it: into Bonaventure’s Franciscan contemplation, the visionary writing of Hildegard of Bingen’s century and the bridal language of Julian of Norwich, the German preaching of Meister Eckhart, and the ecstatic-affective piety of later Doctors such as Catherine of Siena. Bernard’s closest collaborator in shaping it was his friend William of St. Thierry, who gave the same nuptial spirituality a more systematic, trinitarian form — holding that love itself is a mode of understanding, that God is known insofar as he is loved — and who began the Vita Prima, the first life of Bernard, before either of them died.

The man of affairs

Two more episodes fix the public profile. Bernard took a leading part at the Council of Troyes in 1128/29, where the new order of the Knights Templar received its rule, and he afterward defended the experiment in De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) — monks vowed to poverty and to war at once, a paradox he met head-on rather than softened. And when Abelard, the sharpest dialectician of the age, sought a public disputation at Sens in 1140 (a date some sources give as 1141), the council condemned nineteen propositions drawn from his works before any debate could open. Abelard appealed to Rome, was ordered to silence, and died two years later under the protection of Peter the Venerable at the great abbey of Cluny — where, by the accounts that survive, the two men were brought to a reconciliation. Bernard’s hostility to Abelard’s method was of a piece with his whole temperament: the suspicion that the speculative dialectic of the schools would dissect the mysteries it should adore, and that theology rises from prayer and reading, not from the disputation hall.

Scholarship has long set the two Bernards side by side — the mystic of the sermons and the man who hounded Abelard and summoned an army to the Holy Land. Historians read him as the last great voice of the older monastic theology, rooted in scripture and the slow chewing-over of the text the cloister called lectio divina, written in the very years the schools of Paris were turning theology toward the systematic method that Thomas Aquinas would bring to its height a century on. Whether to read Bernard as the last of the Fathers, prolonging the patristic mode against the new learning, or as a thoroughly twelfth-century innovator who psychologized and dramatized the bridal reading as none before him had, is a question that admits of both answers at once: continuous with Origen and Gregory in method, and original in the interior heat he brought to the old images.

Reception, scholarship, and texts

He was canonized on 18 January 1174 by Alexander III, barely two decades after his death, and in 1830 Pius VIII named him a Doctor of the Church. Later tradition gave him the title Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing teacher, for the sweetness of his prose; Pius XII made it formal in the 1953 encyclical Doctor Mellifluus, issued for the eighth centenary of his death, which opens by calling him the last of the Fathers but in no way inferior to the earlier ones — a phrase the encyclical takes from the seventeenth-century Maurist editor Jean Mabillon. In the Paradiso, Dante gave Bernard the last office of all, replacing Beatrice as the pilgrim’s final guide and leading him, through a prayer to the Virgin, to the vision of God — a tribute to both his contemplative authority and his Marian devotion, set down in the early fourteenth century, in the high Middle Ages his theology helped to form.

The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard by Filippino Lippi (c. 1482–86), Badia Fiorentina, Florence — photograph by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The unfinished Song cycle did not stay unfinished. The Cistercian abbot Gilbert of Hoyland of Swineshead in Lincolnshire (d. 1172) carried the commentary forward from where Bernard stopped, and when Gilbert too died with the work incomplete, John of Ford (c. 1140–1214) brought it at last to the close of the poem — the three together composing one of the longest sermon-commentaries of the Middle Ages. The wider Cistercian affective school ran alongside, with Aelred of Rievaulx extending the tradition into a theology of spiritual friendship and Guerric of Igny preaching in the same key.

The modern recovery of Bernard rests on the critical Sancti Bernardi Opera edited by Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Editiones Cistercienses, Rome, 8 vols., 1957–77), still under copyright; the older Latin remains accessible in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Latina, with the Song sermons at PL 183. The standard public-domain English of the sermons is the translation by Samuel J. Eales, Cantica Canticorum: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon (Elliot Stock, 1895; reissued as volume IV of his Life and Works of Saint Bernard, ed. Mabillon, John Hodges, 1889–96), and On Consideration survives in George Lewis’s translation (Clarendon, 1908). The twentieth-century scholarship that re-established Bernard as a serious theologian, after the Baroque cult of the honey-sweet doctor, runs from Étienne Gilson’s The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (French 1934 / English 1940), organized around the structural terms Regio Dissimilitudinis and Unitas Spiritus, through Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (1957), to Bernard McGinn’s The Growth of Mysticism (1994), the major synthetic treatment of Bernard, William, and the Cistercian school.

What he left was less a system than a temperature: a way of writing about God in which the decisive thing is not what the mind grasps but what the heart is drawn toward.

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