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AUGUST 20, 2014 BY ANTHONY LILLES

(Memorial of St. Bernard of Clairvaux,

Abbot and Doctor of the Church)

St. Bernard built a way of life that flowed from Chapter 73 of the Rule of St. Benedict. In this final chapter, St. Benedict urges monks to learn the discipline of the Christian life he has presented because it is a good beginning, the minimum needed to make progress in a life devoted to Christ. Once one makes a good beginning, Benedict explains, “You can set out for the loftier summits.”

St. Bernard devoted himself to encouraging contemplatives to go beyond the minimum and progress to the summit of spiritual maturity. This summit is characterized by love. [The first kind of love, love of self for one’s own sake, is foundational for the spiritual life.] This kind of love leads to a love of God. Namely, in order to really love one’s self, we find ourselves turning to God and asking for his help. When we begin to perceive how good He is to us, we come to love Him because of what He has done for our sakes. To live a life out of this kind of love of God is very good. Bernard however sees that the Lord has called us to something even more beautiful. Through the grace of Christ given us, we have the possibility to learn to love not only for our own sakes, but for God’s own sake. In this kind of love, we glimpse the hidden source of Christian contemplation and mission.

What does it mean to love God for God’s own sake? This is to begin to see Him quite apart from anything that He has done for us. Love is beautiful and God is Love.

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To behold Him, to cherish his love in itself is not within our natural power, but we were created to be open to this vision.

When we sit in silence before the Lord, wasting time in his presence, we open ourselves to God’s power to raise us above ourselves. Contemplative prayer is this openness to God. Such prayer is receptive to a subtle movement of the Holy Spirit by which He prays in our hearts. When we permit the Holy Spirit to do this, He communicates a new kind of love, a divine love. It is with this divine love, the love God has for himself, that we begin to see, to contemplate the beauty of the Lord from His own perspective.

St. Bernard describes this kind of prayer as “tasting” the goodness of the Lord. One might think that this was the highest form of love – loving God for his own sake. But Bernard believes that tasting the goodness of the Lord leads to an even more profound kind of love. In this experience, we find ourselves moved no longer by what we think we need for ourselves or those needs we believe those we love suffer. Instead, we are touched by the loving desires in the very heart of God. We find ourselves pierced to the heart by those things for which the Lord himself yearns because His hopes and dreams are beautiful and wonderful to behold. A new passion envelops us and our lives are ignited with the fire of God’s love. As we learn to live fired up by the very passion of the heart of God, St. Bernard says we begin to love ourselves for God’s own sake.

The self for St. Bernard is not the same as the “ego” or “me.” The self he describes is always an “us.” He always understands the human person saved by Christ as being in communion with others. Those who believe in Christ are brought into communion with his whole mystical body.

As a result, loving one’s self always includes loving all those Christ has entrusted to us.

In theheights of love, we learn to love one another with the divine love the Lord has had for us from before the foundation of the world. Just as God yearns for us to thrive in his love, we learn to live with this same passion for ourselves and for one another. We see in each other the beauty of God’s holiness and we yearn with the same desire that burns in the heart of God for that beauty to be fully manifest. Christian charity, its orientation to serve, is not merely a wishful and naive human philanthropy. It burns with something this world cannot contain. In St. Bernard’s mystical theology, the truth of our humanity is realized in this burning divine love within us.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – August 21 1153), abbot of Clairvaux, was a highly influential French churchman, theologian and mystic. He was one of the founders of the Cistercian, or Bernardine, monastic order.

Quotes[edit]

Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis.
- Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.
- Epistola CVI, sect. 2; translation from Edward Churton The Early English Church ([1840] 1841) p. 324.

Among us on the earth there is His memory; but in the Kingdom of heaven His very Presence. That Presence is the joy of those who have already attained to beatitude; the memory is the comfort of us who are still wayfarers, journeying towards the Fatherland.
- From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 3

Liberavi animam meam.
- I have freed my soul.
- Letter to Abbot Suger, Epistles no. 371 (c. 1147)

What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous eternity
- From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 11 .

Seeing that the Scripture saith, God has made all for His own glory (Isa. 43.7), surely His creatures ought to conform themselves, as much as they can, to His will. In Him should all our affections center, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves. And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: ‘Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6.10). O chaste and holy love! O sweet and gracious affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the divine will! To reach this state is to become deified. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory. When will that be? Who will see, who possess it? ‘When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’ (Ps. 42.2). ‘My heart hath talked of Thee, Seek ye My face: Thy face, Lord, will I seek’ (Ps. 27.8). Lord, thinkest Thou that I, even I shall see Thy holy temple?
- From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 10
  - To lose thyself, as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial

“My burden is light,” said the blessed Redeemer, a light burden indeed, which carries him that bears it. I have looked through all nature for a resemblance of this, and seem to find a shadow of it in the wings of a bird, which are indeed borne by the creature, and yet support her flight towards heaven.

The true measure of loving God is to love Him without measure.
- Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 395.

Prostrate, see Thy cross I grasp,
And Thy pierced feet I clasp;
Gracious Jesus, spurn me not;
On me, with compassion fraught,
Let Thy glances fall.
Thy cross of agony,
My Beloved, look on me;
Turn me wholly unto Thee;
“Be thou whole,” say openly:
“I forgive thee all.”Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 398.