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Saint Bernard is the founding abbot of Clairvaux Abbey in Burgundy and was one of the most commanding Church leaders in the first half of the twelfth century as well as the one the greatest spiritual masters of all times. He died at Clairvaux on August 20, 1153. He was canonized by Pope Alexander III on January 18, 1174. Pope Pius VII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1830.
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Bernard taught that love is itself a knowing. For Bernard, the light by which we see God will always be love. In his treatise ‘On Loving God,’ Bernard presents his theology on the soul’s journey toward God and describes the experience of God that is possible in this life.
Bernard begins by asserting that the reason for loving God is God. And this is because God is the efficient and final cause of our love. God is love and cannot be other than love.
Creation linked God who is the image to man who is made in the image. But because of the fall, man’s nature, originally graced at creation, is weakened through sin. But because it in its very creation the soul is like God, human nature is oriented to God and hungers for God. The soul is naturally drawn to God.
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According to Bernard, man desires what satisfies more his mind and will. He is never satisfied with things that lack the qualities he thinks it should have. Thus, the restless mind tires itself out in endless pursuit of life’s pleasures but is never satisfied. Realizing that nothing can satisfy man except God, desire advances to God. For God is the satisfaction of human desire.
Bernard considers love as a natural passion of man. For him, love is planted in our nature. In his construct on the ascent of the soul to God, Bernard describes the unfolding of desire in human experience through four stages of love.
In the first degree of love, man is only aware of himself because of his weakened nature. This is the beginning of love. Man loves himself above all for his own sake because he is carnal and sensitive to nothing but himself. But because man shares the same nature as his neighbor, carnal love advances from self to neighbor. When man realizes that he cannot subsist by himself, he begins his ascent to God by faith and to love him as necessary to himself.
In the second degree of love, man is moved by a desire for God’s gifts. Man therefore loves God for his own benefit and not yet for God’s sake. When forced by his own needs he begins to honor God by praying to him, reading about him and obeying him. God reveals himself gradually in this kind of familiarity and thus becomes lovable. A new grade of love is reached and the heart comes into play. This ascent to loving God for God’s sake represents a softening of a resistance in the human heart.
In the third degree of love, the frequent recourse to God brings about an intimacy in which man experiences the love of God or what Bernard describes as tasting and discovering the sweetness of the Lord. At this stage, man comes to love God not for his sake but for God’s sake. Man abandons his reliance on himself, and he is pulled by God’s love. Tasting God’s sweetness entices man more to pure love than the urgency of his own needs. Bernard believes that this stage is the highest degree of love that can be attained in this life.
In the fourth degree of love, man reaches the ultimate advance in loving God in this life in which he no longer even loves himself except for God. At this stage, man experiences union with God as he loses himself, as if he no longer existed. Man reaches this highest degree of love when he is no longer preoccupied with wordly desires, and he rests completely in God. The love of the flesh is absorbed by the spirit and our weak human nature is transformed into divine. According to Bernard, this experience is not obtained by human effort but is freely given by God to whom he wishes. This experience is rare in life and lasts but for a fleeting moment.
In summary, Bernard’s treatise on love is a witness to God’s presence in human life. His work demonstrates that love, not knowledge, can attain to God. His construct on the four degrees of love points to love as the very action by which God draws us out of ourselves toward him, in whom we are all loved. God always initiates love, and this love is given freely to the creature that God made in his own image.
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