SOURCE: Merton, Thomas. “Saint Bernard's Writings.” The Last of the Fathers: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the Encyclical Letter, Doctor Mellifluus, pp. 47-67. New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1954.

[In the following excerpt, Merton surveys Bernard's best-known writings, which he says offer a coherent doctrine that embraces life. The critic characterizes them as the work of a mystic who emphasizes grace and expresses in lyrical terms his love for Jesus.]

It seems that one of the things Saint Bernard wanted to get away from, when he entered Citeaux, was literary ambition. Profoundly affected by the humanistic renaissance of the twelfth century, his works still bear witness, by their quotations from Ovid, Persius, Horace, Terence, and other classical authors, to the influences he met with when he studied the liberal arts with the canons of Saint Vorles at Chatillon-sur-Seine. He seems to have become afraid of poetry and rhetoric, and to have run away from them. One of the greatest Latin authors of the Middle Ages, he has left a fairly large body of writings, all of which are in a sense “occasional.” He was not one who wrote because he had to. His treatises were usually composed at the request of some fellow monk, some abbot, some other churchman, to answer a question or to meet some particular need. Most of his written works are sermons. Best known, perhaps, are his letters. Finally, not least in quality though they occupy comparatively little space, come his formal treatises. Only one of these, the De Consideratione, exceeds the length of a long article in a serious magazine. Most of these short tracts have not been translated into English, except for the treatises, On the Love of God, On Conversion, and On the Degrees of Humility. These have been not only translated but edited with notes and introductions which are not always as helpful as they seem to be. A new translation of The Canticle of Canticles is promised us shortly in London, and the letters have been excellently done into English, by Father Bruno James. …

Taking a broad, general view of all Saint Bernard's writings, we find that they give us a definite and coherent doctrine, a theology, embracing not merely one department of Christian life but the whole of that life. In other words, Saint Bernard is not merely to be classified as “a spiritual writer,” as if his doctrine could be limited to a certain nondogmatic region of affective intimacy with God. He is spiritual indeed, and a great mystic. But he is a speculative mystic; his mysticism is expressed as a theology. It not only describes his own personal religious experiences but it penetrates into the heart of the “Mystery of God, that is Christ” (Colossians 2:2). It contemplates and expounds the providential economy of man's redemption and sanctification. It is at once a mystical theology and a soteriology. It not only explains what it means to be united to God in Christ, but shows the meaning of the whole economy of our redemption in Christ. It tells us how to recognize the “visits” of the Word to the soul; how to respond to the action of the Holy Spirit Who is the “Law” of the inner life of God, when He comes to bring our faculties under the sway of His divine charity.

In teaching us all this, Saint Bernard does not hesitate to turn aside from contemplation in the strict sense to settle certain difficult questions of theological debate. We know that Bernard was esteemed as one of the most authoritative theologians of his time, and that his action led to the refutation of such important errors as those of Abelard and Gilbert de la Porrée.

Saint Bernard's theology of grace presupposes his Neoplatonic conception of the soul created in God's image and destined by God for a perfect union of likeness with Himself. The conception is more than Neoplatonism. The desire of the soul for God, which is in Bernard's eyes inseparable from the very freedom of the soul itself, must be elevated by grace above the level of a mere frustrated velleity. Human freedom, aided by the power of the Holy Spirit, can aspire to far more than a mere intellectual contemplation of eternal ideas: that, in Saint Bernard's mind, would be little better than frustration. God does not remain cold and distant, attracting the soul but never yielding Himself to it. He Himself both begins and finishes the work of the soul's transformation, and this whole work is an ordinatio caritatis, that is to say the elevation, disciplining, and redirection of all the soul's capacity for love by the actual motion of the divine Spirit. At the center of this work is Christ, in Whom and by Whom it is all effected. Bernard's devotion to the humanity of the Savior must not be regarded merely as a pious discovery intended to aid monastic meditation. It is simply a rediscovery of the Christ of the Fathers and of Saint Paul. Saint Bernard's intense love for Jesus found expression, it is true, in lyrical terms which were singularly effective in making God's mercy real to those who read his pages. But in its substance his Christology is simply the fruit of his ability “to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth: to know also the charity of Christ which surpasseth all knowledge that you may be filled unto the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19). The basic ideas of Saint Bernard's theology are treated in the encyclical and in our commentary on it. It is sufficient here to name the Saint's chief works and to give some idea of their contents. Setting aside the letters, let us consider first his treatises and then his sermons.

On the Degrees of Humility (De Gradibus Humilitatis) is one of Saint Bernard's earliest works (1119). It summarizes the commentary of the Abbot of Clairvaux on the central doctrine of Benedictine asceticism—the seventh chapter of the rule, on monastic humility. The tract is made up of two parts, of vastly different importance. The second makes easier reading and is a lively piece of light literature that shows Bernard to be a true Frenchman and a compatriot of La Bruyère. He takes Saint Benedict's degrees of humility, turns them upside down into degrees of pride, and gives us mordant descriptions of monks on each one of the downward steps from “curiosity” to impenitent mortal sin. But the first part of the treatise is the one that matters. It is a formal declaration that the Cistercians, or at least Saint Bernard, interpreted the Rule of Saint Benedict as a preparation for the mystical life, for, says Saint Bernard, when the monk has ascended the twelve degrees of humility, he passes through the degrees of truth, the last of which is contemplation, or the transient experience of God in the raptus of divine love. The fact that Saint Bernard talks of degrees of truth does not mean that this is a tract on epistemology. He is talking about a contact with truth that only begins where epistemology leaves off: for the philosophical justification of our conceptual knowledge of truth or of God has little to say about the experiential grasp of divine things by charity which is the subject of Bernard's De Gradibus.

The treatise On the Love of God (De Diligendo Deo) again shows the unity of Saint Bernard's great conception of man in his relations with God. The love of God is not merely something that can somehow profitably be fitted into man's life. It is man's whole reason for existing, and until he loves God man does not really begin to live. Hence Saint Bernard examines the question of our universal obligation to love God, the reasons why we should love Him (“because He is God”), and the measure of our love (“to love Him without measure”). The four degrees of love which are the heart of the treatise show that it is man's very nature to love. By reason of the fall, he who should love unselfishly now loves himself first of all. But divine grace re-educates man's natural love, reinstates it in its natural purity, extends it to all men, then purifies it and raises it to God. We begin by loving ourselves, pass on to the love of other men and of God for our own sakes, then begin to love God for His own sake. But the fourth degree of love is that in which we love ourselves for God's sake. This is the high point of Bernard's Christian humanism. It shows that the fulfillment of our destiny is not merely to be lost in God, as the traditional figures of speech would have it, like “a drop of water in a barrel of wine or like iron in the fire,” but found in God in all our individual and personal reality, tasting our eternal happiness not only in the fact that we have attained to the possession of His infinite goodness, but above all in the fact that we see His will is done in us. Ultimately this perfection demands the resurrection of the bodies of all the saints, for the consummation Saint Bernard looks forward to is no mere philosophical union with the Absolute. It is the term proposed to us by Christian revelation itself: the resurrection, the general judgment, the summing up of all in Christ so that “God will be all in all.” Written about the same time as the De Diligendo Deo (1126 or 1127), Saint Bernard's tract On Free Will and Grace is fundamental to his whole theology. This is one of the main sources for his doctrine on man's soul as the image of God. Liberty constitutes man in God's image. This is only another way of saying what we have already seen: man is made in order that he may love God. In order to love God with disinterested charity he must first be free. His whole ascent to divine union is a progress in liberty. Our basic freedom, liberum arbitrium or freedom of choice, is only the beginning of the ascent. The capacity to choose between good and evil is only the shadow of true liberty. Genuine freedom is the work of grace. Grace finds the soul of fallen man in a state of captivity to sin. Our freedom spontaneously turns to evil rather than to good, until it is set in order by grace. Then it becomes capable of consistently avoiding evil choices. Finally by glory the soul achieves its ultimate and perfect liberty: the freedom to choose always what is good and to rejoice always in what is best, without ever being turned aside from the good by any inclination to what is less good or formally evil. We are only perfectly free in heaven, according to this doctrine of Saint Bernard.

The Apologia, written in 1127, is seldom translated in its entirety. But it is often quoted in part. The parts quoted are the “purple passages” in which Saint Bernard scathingly criticizes the comforts of Benedictine life at Cluny and the overwhelming splendor of the great Benedictine churches of his time. The book was written at the request of the Benedictine Abbot, William of Saint Thierry, as a reply to Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. Peter had reproved the Cistercians for taking a pharisaical attitude toward their Benedictine brethren. The Apologia was intended to be a defense not of Cistercian poverty but of monastic charity. Saint Bernard begins by praising the qualities of different forms of monastic observance saying that this variety is necessary in the Church. This is not merely a diplomatic opening to a Cistercian manifesto. Bernard is not propagandizing his own Order, but defending the unity of the Church: and her unity demands variety. To compel all monks to follow the same observance would be un-Catholic. Therefore Saint Bernard devotes several pages to severe reprehension of those Cistercians who had, in fact, given the Cluniacs just cause for complaint.

There are some in our Order [he says] who are said to criticize other Orders, contrary to the words of the Apostle who said: “Do not judge before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of hearts.” (I Corinthians 4:5.) Desiring to set up a justice of their own they withdraw themselves from subjection to the justice of God. Such men, if such there be, I would say belonged neither to our order nor to any “order.” For although they live by the rule of an order, by speaking proudly they make themselves to be citizens of Babylon, that is, of confusion. Indeed they make themselves sons of darkness, sons of hell itself wherein there is no order, but wherein everlasting horror dwells.¹

If after this Bernard himself goes on to say some rather severe things about Cluniac observance, it is in the interests of the monastic order and of the Church as a whole that he does so. His just criticisms were taken to heart by the Benedictines themselves, although his austere views on art were not accepted by them. In any case he always remained on very good terms with Cluny as his correspondence with Peter the Venerable and other Benedictines can prove. The same esteem for all the different interpretations of Saint Benedict's rule can be found in the tract On Precept and Dispensation (De Precepto et Dispensatione), written in answer to several questions proposed to him by the Benedictines of Saint Peter of Chartres in 1143. This treatise is technically monastic, and is very interesting for its discussion of the value of monastic vows, the obligation to obey the Rule of Saint Benedict, obedience to monastic superiors, silence, stability, and the question of changing from one monastery to another.

Of more universal interest will be the sermon to the university students of Paris, De Conversione.² It is interesting that the full title of the tract reads: Sermon Addressed to Clerics, on Conversion. What he was telling the clerics was not how to convert others but how to convert themselves. Anyone who has read the history of medieval schools and universities will recognize that Saint Bernard's remarks were probably not misplaced. The tract concerns itself first of all with the notion of the Christian conscience, on the action of divine grace in the soul through the instrumentality of the word of God, either preached or read in Scripture. Then Saint Bernard talks of the psychology of unbalanced extraversion that infallibly leads to sin, and the necessary ascetical processes of meditation, recollection, self-knowledge, self-denial, which aid the work of grace. Here he is both vivid and practical, and his observations are not without a characteristic note of satire. The second part of the treatise deals with the ordinatio caritatis, the positive and constructive work of virtue and purification by trial which build up the interior life of the soul in Christ.

Even before this sermon, preached in 1140, Saint Bernard had written a spiritual directory for the newly formed military order of the Knights Templar. He had also had a share in the composition of their rule.

The “directory” for the Templars is called The Praises of the New Knighthood (De Laude Novae Militiae) because in the opening chapters he makes a pointed contrast between the new militia and the old “malice” (malitia). The only fruit of secular warfare, says Bernard, is that both the killer and the killed end in hell.³ The Knight Templar who devotes his strength and his arms to the service of God can become a saint by being a good soldier. To fight in a Holy War is to become an instrument of divine justice, re-establishing the order violated by sin. Nor should the force of arms be used to restore order until all other means have failed. But in making this qualification, Bernard takes it for granted that there is no other way with the “pagans” than the way of war.

The third chapter of this interesting treatise shows the basic assumptions behind Bernard's preaching of the second Crusade, and they bear a striking resemblance to the arguments that also drove the armies of Islam into battle. However, the directory was not written for a crusade, but for a religious army of occupation—men whose vocation it was to patrol and defend the Holy Land and keep peace there. The major part of the little book is devoted to showing the Templars how they can make their residence in Palestine the occasion of a particularly deep life of prayer and meditation. It does not seem that they fully appreciated Saint Bernard's program.

Saint Bernard's tract Against the Errors of Peter Abelard (1140) is important in the history of Catholic theology, most of all because in it Bernard defends the strict, literal, and objective value of Christ's redemptive death for man. For Abelard, the death of Christ on the Cross did not, strictly speaking, redeem man: it only offered him an example of supreme humility, charity, and self-sacrifice. Bernard asserts, against Abelard, that Christ became man precisely in order to redeem mankind from sin, deliver man from the power of the devil, and to become, instead of fallen Adam, the new head of a redeemed and sanctified human race. Jesus, says Saint Bernard, not only taught us justice but gave us justice. He not only showed us His love by dying for us on the Cross, but by the effects of His death He really and objectively causes His charity to exist and act in our hearts.⁴ In doing so, He actually destroys sin in our souls and communicates to us a new life which is totally supernatural and divine. The effect of our redemption is therefore a complete and literal regeneration of those souls to whom its fruits are applied. Without this dogmatic basis the whole mystical theology of Saint Bernard would be completely incomprehensible. The purpose of all his mystical and ascetic teaching is to show us how to co-operate with the action of divine grace so that our redemption and regeneration may not remain a dead letter but may actually influence all our conduct and find expression in every part of our lives until we arrive at that divine union by which the Christ-life is perfected in our souls. It was in order to bring us to this perfect union that Jesus died on the Cross.

Less important than the tract against Abelard is the short treatise On Baptism (De Baptismo), which Bernard wrote, at the request of Hugh of Saint Victor, to answer several technical arguments that had been raised on the subject.

Finally, not the least charming and readable of Saint Bernard's short works is his biography of Saint Malachy of Armagh. The saintly primate of Ireland died at Clairvaux in 1148 and Bernard wrote his life to console the Cistercians of Malachy's native land. It is amusing to notice that many of the concise and vivid expressions with which Bernard described the qualities of his holy friend have found their way into antiphons of Saint Bernard's own feast. The Church uses them to celebrate the virtues of the biographer himself.

We need only make a passing mention of Saint Bernard's work on Gregorian chant, which was not actually composed by him. The work was done under his guidance by a commission of abbots appointed to supervise the revision of the Cistercian choir books. He also composed a liturgical office for the martyr Saint Victor.

We have on earlier pages seen something of the De Consideratione (Tract on Meditation), the last and perhaps the most celebrated of Saint Bernard's formal treatises. The five books of this concise and powerful spiritual directory were composed during the last ten years of Bernard's life. He wrote the book for Pope Eugene III, and, as a modern writer has observed, in addressing Pope Eugene, Bernard was really writing for all who would ascend to the papacy. “Valuable for all prelates,” says the same writer,⁵ “and for all men, the De Consideratione is at the same time a valuable document on Bernard himself. … To all clerics, in the person of the highest among them, Bernard proposes a program inspired by the monastic tradition by which he himself lives.”

The importance of the De Consideratione lies in its stress on the interior life and on the essential primacy of contemplation over action. The Pope must remember, says Bernard, that the interior life ought, by rights, to be preferred to exterior action.⁶ Action is a necessity, and we are in fact prevented from remaining always in silence, contemplation, study, and prayer. But action is only valid if it is nourished by a deep interior life. It should not absorb so much of our time and energy that meditation, prayer, and silent reflection become impossible.

Saint Bernard begins then by insisting on the need for prayer above all in the life of those who have the highest and most responsible positions in the Church. He warns the Pope against a false zeal that might allow him to be carried away in the strong current of great and important affairs. The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and necessary, but too much of it renders the soul insensitive to spiritual values, hardens the heart against prayer and divine things. It requires a serious effort and courageous sacrifice to resist this hardening of heart. Therefore Saint Bernard warns Pope Eugene against the danger that confronts him if he lets himself be carried away by affairs of state, and keeps no time for himself, for prayer and for the things of God.

In giving this advice, Bernard was not thinking only of the Pope's own soul but of the whole Church. His vision always extended to horizons broad enough to encompass the world and the whole Mystery of Christ. All his spiritual direction was orientated toward this Mystery. Whether he guided a pope, a bishop, a king, or a simple monk, Bernard always thought of that soul's interests in relation to its place in the Church. His direction, therefore, always centered on duties of state and on one's place in the providential plan of God. The practical advice he gives to Pope Eugene on the administration of the Roman Curia does not make this book a tract on papal policies, as is sometimes thought. Bernard soon returns to the theme of contemplation, and the whole fifth book is a profound and succinct handbook on meditation and mental prayer.

Turning to Saint Bernard's sermons, we find ourselves in fertile country. There exist about a hundred and thirty sermons of Saint Bernard preached on the various feasts of the liturgical calendar—whether the feasts of the seasons or of the saints. Then we have about a hundred and twenty more sermons, On Diverse Subjects (De Diversis), which cover practically the whole field of Bernard's theological interests and are too little studied even by monks, who would profit much from the meditation of them.

The most important of all Bernard's collections of discourses is the group of eighty-six sermons on the Canticle of Canticles (Sermones in Cantica), which forms his greatest and most important single work. The commentary is incomplete. Saint Bernard died when he was about to begin explaining the third chapter, and the work was continued by an English Cistercian abbot, Gilbert of Hoyland, who was also unable to finish the work. The peculiar importance of all the sermons is in fact due to the way Saint Bernard uses them to penetrate and manifest this central fact of Christianity: the mystery of God's love revealed to men in the incarnation of His Son and in their redemption. It is the “great mystery (or sacrament) of Godliness” (magnum pietatis sacramentum) that occupies him before all else. What is that mystery? Not an idea, not a doctrine, but a Person: God Himself, revealed in the Man, Christ. How is this doctrine understood? When the Person is known. How is He known? When loved. How loved? When He lives in us and is Himself our love for His Father. Loving the Father in us, He makes us one with the Father as He Himself is. Therefore Saint Bernard can logically say, “Truly I must love Him perfectly, in whom I have my being, my life and my knowledge. … Clearly, Lord Jesus, that man is worthy of death who refuses to live for thee: indeed he is already dead. And he who does not know thee by love [sapit] knows nothing. And he who cares to be for anything else but thee, is destined for nothingness, and is become nothing.”⁷

I think it would be well to define the whole issue Saint Bernard's sermons raise, by two quotations from Gerard Manley Hopkins which will help the modern reader to understand something of what Saint Bernard meant by the mystery of Christ. First, writing to Robert Bridges, the poet remarks on the meaning of the mystery of Christ to a non-Catholic and to a Catholic. To a non-Catholic, the mystery of Christ is a puzzle. To a Catholic it is a Person.

To you [says Hopkins to Bridges] it comes to: Christ is in some sense God and in some sense He is not God—and your interest is in the uncertainty; to the Catholic it is: Christ is in every sense God and in every sense man, and the interest is in the locked and inseparable combination, or rather it is in the Person in whom the combination has its place.

These were exactly Saint Bernard's sentiments toward Abelard's treatment of the dogma of redemption.⁸

The second quotation from Hopkins illustrates Saint Bernard's idea that we fulfill the end for which we were created when, by conformity to Christ, we fully realize our own identity by becoming perfectly free and therefore by loving God without limit. Hopkins says: “This [conformity to Christ] brings out the nature of the man himself as the lettering on a sail or the device upon a flag are best seen when it fills.”

All Saint Bernard's sermons more or less fit into the scope defined by these two statements. The scope is, of course, practically limitless. But these are his two great themes: the mystery of Christ in Himself and in those who are conformed to Him in the Holy Spirit. In other words: Christ and the Church.

The finest and most characteristic pages of Saint Bernard on this doctrine are probably to be found in his Advent and Christmas sermons, his sermons on the Virgin Mother (Homiliae super Missus Est) and on some of her great feasts, as well as in some of the more important sermons on the Canticle.

Advent and Christmas seem to have exercised a more powerful attraction over Saint Bernard and the early Cistercians than any other phases of the liturgical cycle. Here the emphasis is on the Incarnation—on the redemption as it is seen from the viewpoint of the Incarnation rather than from that of the Passion. The “Sacrament of Advent,” as Saint Bernard calls it, is the mystery of Christ's presence in the world. It is an important concept, for the Incarnation is not a mere matter of history but a present reality, and the most important reality of all. For it is the one reality that gives significance to everything else that has ever happened. Without it, nothing in history has any ultimate meaning.

If Christ is present, if His Kingdom is “in the midst of us,” it is because of the infinite mercy of God. Only a divine decree could decide His coming, His descent into the darkness of a world which, without Him, would be doomed to everlasting despair. Bernard, in his characteristic emphasis on freedom and charity, sees this mystery of divine mercy above all as a supremely free and gratuitous act of God: but it is not a purely arbitrary act, since it depends on the “law” of goodness which rules all God's acts.

In the contemplation of this mystery, Bernard is never abstract. He is always talking about the great concrete facts revealed to us in the Bible, and his sermons are alive with images and figures out of the Scriptures. Color, music, movement, fire, contrasts of light and darkness, impassioned dialogue between the poverty of man and the greatness of God, between the mercy of God and His justice, flights of allegory, realistic examples sketched from life in the cloister—all these elements make Bernard's sermons extraordinarly alive. Indeed the very wealth of them sometimes oppresses the reader who has lost his sense of symbolism, or never had one. All the opulence that Bernard criticized in the plastic arts here runs riot in his prose, but without the exaggeration, the caricature, the grotesque, the crudeness that he reproved. At the heart of all this is the beautiful simplicity of his doctrine itself, in which there is nothing difficult, nothing esoteric, nothing complicated: only the depth and the lucidity of the Gospel. “It does not behoove thee, O man,” says the Saint, “to cross the seas, to penetrate the clouds, or to climb the Alps [in search of God]. No great journey is necessary for thee. Seek no further than thy own soul: there wilt thou find thy God!” Usque ad temetipsum occurre Deo tuo.⁹

The practical details of the interior life and of this search for God are elaborated with greater finesse in a series like the Lenten sermons on Psalm Ninety, preached to the monks of Clairvaux in the year 1139. But the greatest richness and variety of all are found in the sermons on the Canticle. Saint Bernard was more than explaining the text of this Song of Songs. He lived it, and blended the traditional mystical interpretation of the Canticle with the experience of his own union with God. As we see in Doctor Mellifluus, it is in these sermons that Saint Bernard's mystical doctrine reaches its most perfect elaboration. But there is also much in them besides mysticism. There is the lament for the death of his brother, Gerard (Sermon 26). There are attacks on the Manichaean heresy (Sermons 64-66) and on the trinitarian errors of Gilbert de la Porrée (Sermon 80). There are remarks on monastic observance, on the chanting of the divine office in choir, on the relations of the active and contemplative lives, as well as on all the Christian virtues.

Above all, the sermons on the Canticle are a magnificent treatise on the union of Christ and His Church. The mystical union of the Word with the individual soul is simply an expression of the union of the Incarnate Word with His Church. And this, as the encyclical demonstrates, brings us to the real inner unity that binds everything together in the life and work of Bernard of Clairvaux. In all that he writes, in all that he says, in all that he does, Bernard has only one end in view: the integration of nations, dioceses, monasteries, and individuals into the life and order of the Church.

Bernard is a builder, a man at once of liberty and of order, a man who builds individual liberties into a universal order, that all may be more perfectly free. In other words, Bernard is a man of the Church, Vir Ecclesiae. This fact, and this alone, explains the miraculous resources which enabled him to become the greatest man of his time.

Notes

1. Apologia ad Gullielmum, n. 10; P.L., 182:904.

2. “On Conversion,” translated by Watkin Williams, London, 1938.

3. “Quis igitur finis fructusve saecularis hujus, non dico militiae sed malitiae, si et occisor letaliter peccat et occisus aeternaliter perit?” De Laude Novae Militiae, n. 5; P.L., 182:923.

4. Contra Errores Abaelardi, n. 17; P.L., 182:1067.

5. Dom Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., Saint Bernard Mystique, pp. 197, 198.

6. Nam si liceret quod deceret, absolute per omnia et in omnibus praeferendam … quae ad omnia valet, id est pietatem irrefragibilis ratio monstrat. Quid sit pietas, quaeris? Vacare considerationi. De Consideratione, Bk. I, c. vii, 8; P.L., 182:736.

7. In Cantica, Sermon 20, n. 1; P.L., 183:867.

8. Contra Errores Abaelardi, n. 17; P.L., 182:1067.

9. Sermon 1, Advent, nn. 10-11.

Works Cited

Bernardi, Sancti, Opera Omnia, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vols. 182-185

Bernard, P., moine de Sept Fons, Saint Bernard et Notre Dame (anthology), Paris, 1953

Chatillon, Jean, ed., Prière et Union à Dieu, Textes de S. Bernard, Paris, 1953

Commission d'Histoire de l'Ordre de Citeaux, Bernard de Clairvaux, Paris, 1953

Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Paris, 1932

Dimier, P. Anselme, moine de Chimay, Saint Bernard, Pêcheur de Dieu, Paris, 1953

Dumontier, P. Maurice, moine de Chimay, Saint Bernard et la Bible, Paris, 1953

Gilson, Etienne, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, New York, 1940

———, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, New York, 1936

———, Saint Bernard, Textes Choisis, Paris, 1949

James, Bruno Scott, trans., The Letters of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Chicago, 1953

Leclercq, Dom Jean, Saint Bernard Mystique, Paris, 1948

Luddy, Fr. Ailbe, monk of Mount Melleray, The Life and Times of Saint Bernard, Dublin, 1927

Roschini, P. Gabriele, Il Dottore Mariano, Rome, 1953

Temoignages, “Cahiers de la Pierre Qui Vire,” Saint Bernard, Homme d'Église, Paris, 1953

Vacandard, Abbé, Vie de Saint Bernard, Paris, 1910

William of Saint Thierry, Vita Sancti Bernardi, Migne, P.L., Vol. 184

Williams, Watkin, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Manchester, England, 1953

———, Saint Bernard, The Man and His Measure, Manchester, England, 1944