On Loving God

The abbot of Clairvaux

Bernard was born in 1090 into a noble family at Fontaines, near Dijon in Burgundy. In 1112 or 1113 (the sources differ) he entered the monastery of Cîteaux, bringing with him, as the story is told, some thirty brothers, kinsmen and friends. Cîteaux had been founded in 1098 by monks who wished to keep the Rule of Benedict more strictly and simply, and from it grew the Cistercian order. In 1115 Bernard led a band of monks to found Clairvaux, in a valley of Champagne, and he was its abbot until his death in 1153.

He did not stay behind the cloister wall: his letters reached popes and kings, and in his lifetime the Cistercians spread across Europe. In the papal schism of 1130 he worked for years on behalf of Innocent II, and at Sens in 1140 or 1141 he opposed Abelard, a story told in Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology. At the call of Eugenius III, a former monk of Clairvaux for whom he wrote On Consideration, he preached the Second Crusade in 1146. Its failure darkened Bernard's last years. When a monk stirred up attacks on the Jews of the Rhineland in those same months, Bernard went there himself and silenced him.

The church remembers him longest as a preacher of the love of God. In his eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs, begun around 1135 and unfinished at his death, he read the Song as the love of Christ and the church, and of Christ and the soul. He was canonized in 1174, and in 1830 the Catholic Church named him a Doctor of the Church.

On Loving God is addressed to Haimeric, cardinal deacon and chancellor of the Roman Church dedication, who, like Bernard, took Innocent's side in 1130. Haimeric had sent him questions; Bernard takes up only the question of loving God, "for it is sweetest, it can be handled most safely, and it will be most profitable" ded.2. When he wrote is not known: the treatise is often dated around 1128, though some scholars place it in the 1130s.

Two questions, four degrees

Haimeric had asked why God is to be loved, and how much. Bernard answers both in his first paragraph: "the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love" 1.1. The Latin plays on ‘modus’, measure: the measure of our love is to love sine modo, without measure.

Chapters 1 to 7 unfold that answer: God loved us first; all owe him love for his gifts, and Christians, who know the cross, far more; and love's reward is God himself. At the end of chapter 7 Bernard turns from where love ends to where it begins 7.8, and chapters 8 to 11 give the four degrees. Chapters 12 to 15 repeat part of an earlier letter to the Carthusian brothers, because, Bernard admits, "it is easier to copy than to dictate anew" 12.1. The library holds the whole treatise in two parts, the dedication with chapters 1 to 7, and chapters 8 to 15.

The reason is God

"Why should I love God?" may mean what is lovely in God, or what I shall gain by loving him; either way the answer is God himself 1.2. His first claim on us is that he loved first. Think, Bernard says, "who loved, whom He loved, and how much He loved" 1.4: God loved his enemies, to the giving of his Son.

We love because He first loved us.

1 John 4:19

Even those who do not know Christ owe God love for food, light and air, and for free will, wisdom and virtue 2.1. To boast of such gifts as one's own is worse than ignorance: "Ignorance is brutal, arrogance is devilish" 2.4. Yet no one can give God his due alone: "it is hard, nay rather, impossible, for a man by his own strength or in the power of free-will to render all things to God from whom they came" 2.6.

Christians owe more. In chapters 3 and 4 Bernard takes up the Song of Songs: the church is the bride who looks on her Bridegroom, crucified and risen, and the Song's left and right hands are the memory of his love that holds us now and the vision of his presence to come 4.4. Then he weighs creation against redemption: "In the first creation He gave me myself; but in His new creation He gave me Himself, and by that gift restored to me the self that I had lost" 5.2.

Chapter 7 asks what love gains. "Love is an affection of the soul, not a contract" 7.1: no one would hire a hungry man to eat or a mother to nurse her own child 7.2, and whoever truly loves God asks no reward but God. Those who join field to field are never satisfied, for they try creatures one by one instead of coming to the Creator. "Rest is in Him alone" 7.4. Augustine's restless heart is heard again Confessions 1.1.1, and Bernard turns to the psalm:

Whom have I in heaven but You? And on earth I desire no one besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:25-26

Even the longing is God's work. He is "as well the efficient cause as the final object of our love" 7.7, and so Bernard states a paradox: "no one can seek the Lord who has not already found Him" 7.7.

The four degrees of love

Love begins in nature, and nature is too weak not to love itself first: "this is carnal love, wherewith man loves himself first and selfishly" 8.1. When it overflows into pleasure, the command to love one's neighbour as oneself "checks the flood, as if by a dike" 8.1. But a neighbour is loved rightly only in God, and God teaches us our need of him through trouble; rescued by his hand, a man who loved only himself "begins to love God by reason of that very self-love" 8.3. This is the second degree, and Bernard does not despise it: it is something to know how little we can do alone and how much with God's help 9.1.

As trouble drives us to prayer again and again, we come to taste God's goodness.

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

Psalm 34:8

Like the Samaritans who told the woman, "we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man truly is the Savior of the world" (John 4:42), we can say: "No longer do we love God because of our necessity, but because we have tasted and seen" 9.1. This is the third degree, "to love God on His own account, solely because He is God" 9.1. Its means are plain, "meditating on God, reading God's Word, praying and obeying His commandments" 15.1, and Bernard thinks we stay in it long.

The fourth degree is to love oneself only for God's sake. A soul may taste it for a moment even now, but this life soon weighs it down, "and above all brotherly love calls him back to duty" 10.1. Bernard pictures it as a drop of water lost in wine, iron glowing in the fire, air flooded with sunlight, and asks with Paul (1 Corinthians 15:28): "For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man?" 10.2 At once he draws a line: "The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory" 10.2. Nor is this a summit to be climbed, for "to this degree no human effort can attain: it is in God's power to give it to whom He wills" 10.3. Its fullness waits for the resurrection body; of this life Bernard writes, "I confess it seems beyond my powers" 15.1.

So chapter 11 honours the body: "The flesh then is a good and faithful comrade for a good soul" 11.3. Bernard reads the Bridegroom's invitation in the Song (5:1) as a feast in three courses: "Eat before death; begin to drink after death; drink abundantly after the resurrection" 11.5. At its end God himself is "the everlasting reward of an everlasting love" 11.5. See The resurrection.

The letter to the Carthusians walks the same road in other words. "The first is a slave and fears for himself; the second is greedy, desiring further benefits; but the third is a son who honors his Father" 12.2. Only love converts the soul, and since God is love, "love is at once God and the gift of God" 12.3. In those who have received the "Spirit of adoption to sonship" (Romans 8:15), love does not abolish the law of the slave and the hireling but fulfils it 14.2.

Reading it well

Bernard is loved across the traditions. The Catholic Church honours him as a saint and a Doctor, and when he speaks of "that divine and deifying joy of His presence" 4.4, Orthodox readers hear something close to their own teaching of theosis. The Reformers read him with respect. Calvin quotes him often; against the schoolmen he writes, "How much better is Bernard" 3.2.41, and on justification he sets beside Augustine Bernard's saying, "Not to sin is the righteousness of God, but the righteousness of man is the indulgence of God" 3.11.22. Luther, writing to Leo X, says he imitates Bernard's On Consideration, "a book which ought to be known by heart by every Pontiff" Letter 20. Melanchthon later told how an old monk at Erfurt comforted the troubled young Luther with the creed's article on the forgiveness of sins, pointing him to Bernard's sermon on the Annunciation, the one Calvin quotes.

Evangelicals read some pages with care. The fourth degree's language of being swallowed up in God can sound as if the creature melted into the Creator. But Bernard says the substance endures, and the union he means is the one Paul names: "he who unites himself with the Lord is one with Him in spirit" (1 Corinthians 6:17), a oneness of will and love. It is best read in the light of union with Christ and the glorification Scripture promises. On how far love may be perfected in this life, Wesley taught that perfect love may be given here Wesley, The Scripture Way of Salvation I.9, while the Reformed confess that sanctification stays imperfect until death Westminster Confession 13.2; Bernard's caution gives both something to weigh.

The book also assumes the cloister. It takes Christ's command to sell all and give to the poor as the counsel that "shortens the search" 7.6, and it says that true love "does not demand a reward, but it deserves one" 7.1. Protestant readers will notice a different view of the religious life and of merit, and may remember that Bernard puts both the beginning and the end of love in God's grace. He quotes Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom as Scripture; Protestants count them among the Apocrypha. Many preachers after the Reformation shared his allegory of the Song as Christ and the church; many interpreters today read it first as a song of human love.

The English is William Harman van Allen's of 1909. Charity is love (the Latin caritas), conversation is a way of life, to prevent is to go before ("He prevents, He sustains, He fills thee" 7.6), and carking means anxious. Van Allen's heading to chapter 8 speaks of loving God for self's sake, but the chapter, like chapter 15, makes the first degree the love of self for self's sake. Read slowly and as prayer, for the sentences are woven from Scripture; the Song of Songs pages of chapters 3 and 4 may be taken lightly at first.