A Teacher
Bernard of Clairvaux
Mystical love — the degrees of love and bridal union
The transmission
Bernard of Clairvaux lived from 1090 to 1153 and was the most influential churchman of the twelfth century. As a young nobleman he entered the reforming Cistercian order and soon founded the abbey of Clairvaux, which he led for the rest of his life, becoming a preacher, reformer, and counsellor to popes and kings.
Amid this public activity he produced a body of intensely contemplative writing, above all his treatise On Loving God and his unfinished Sermons on the Song of Songs, works that made him the medieval West’s pre-eminent theologian of love.
For a mind-power lineage, Bernard matters as the great codifier of love as the engine of the soul’s ascent. In On Loving God he traces the soul’s progress through degrees of love, rising from love of self toward a love of God so pure that the self is at last loved only for God’s sake.
Reading the Song of Songs as the courtship of the soul (the bride) and God (the bridegroom), he gave the tradition its enduring language of “bridal mysticism” — union as intimate, affective, transformative encounter.
His insistence that the deepest knowing of the divine is a knowing through love, not intellect alone, shaped centuries of devotional and contemplative inwardness.
What they gave
The degrees of love: Mapped the soul’s ascent as a progression of love, from self-love toward selfless union, modelling inner transformation as the purification of desire.
- Bridal mysticism: Cast union with God as the intimate meeting of bride and bridegroom, giving the tradition its enduring vocabulary of loving union.
- Knowing through love: Held that the divine is reached most truly by love rather than intellect, dignifying the affective heart as the organ of contemplation.
- Experience over speculation: Grounded mystical teaching in lived interior experience (“only the touch of the Spirit can teach”), prizing direct encounter.
In their words
I answer, the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love.
God deserves to be loved very much, yea, boundlessly, because He loved us first, He infinite and we nothing, loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Augustine’s theology of love and desire; Origen’s allegorical reading of the Song of Songs; the Cistercian reform; and the Song of Songs itself.
- Taught / Influenced: the later traditions of bridal and love mysticism; Bonaventure; Dante (who gives Bernard the final guiding role in the Paradiso); Martin Luther; and the broad stream of affective devotional Christianity.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- On Loving God (De Diligendo Deo)c.1126
- Sermons on the Song of Songsc.1135