Love and only love
Bernard's mystical theology
Bernard of Clairvaux enters the monastery at Cîteaux at twenty-two years old, bringing with him thirty of his relatives and friends whom he has personally persuaded to join. It is his first and most revealing act: even at the threshold of the contemplative life, he cannot stop drawing people toward what he has found.
At Clairvaux, the monastery he founds in 1115 AD in a valley so bleak and cold it was called the Valley of Wormwood, he develops the mystical theology that becomes the central current of medieval Western spirituality.
It is a theology of love. Not of knowledge, not of argument, not primarily of virtue — though all of these matter — but of love. The soul is made for union with God, and the path to that union passes through the progressive purification of love: from the lowest stage, loving self for self's sake, through loving God for self's sake, to loving self for God's sake, and finally to the highest stage — loving God for God's sake alone, finding in God all that one needs, the soul dissolved in the divine love like a drop of water in wine.
The Sermons on the Song of Songs — eighty-six sermons preached over eighteen years on the first two chapters of one book of the Bible — are the record of this journey. They are among the most intimate pieces of theological writing ever produced, the record of a soul in love with God working out, in public, before his monks, what that love actually means.
He never finishes the commentary. He dies with most of the Song of Songs still unaddressed.
“You wish me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer: the reason for loving God is God himself; the measure of love due to him is to love without measure.”
— Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God I.1, c. 1127 AD
“We love Him, because he first loved us.”
The reason for loving God is God himself. The measure is to love without measure.
Bernard strips the question of its complexity and finds the irreducible core. Not: love God because of what he has done for you. Not: love God because the law requires it. Not: love God as a means to something else.
Love God because he is loveable. Love him because love, when it reaches its proper object, cannot stop.
This is the destination toward which all Bernard's theology moves — not a doctrine, not a practice, not a moral achievement, but a person, loved for himself, more and more, with less and less held back.
Are you moving in that direction? And what is still held back?