I - Biography.
Born in 1090 C.E., Bernard of Clairvoux was the son of a noble family in France. Bernard was well educated and became a monk and then Abbot. He helped to oversee and establish over sixty monasteries and wrote the wonderful piece, On Loving God. Bernard grew in reputation and was involved heavily in the turbulent political times during the early 1100's, when there was a dividing rivalry for the position of Pope. His involvement in the leadership of the church as well as his significant contributions to the theological development later (in 1830 C.E.) earned him the title of “Doctor of the Church,” which was bestowed upon those who were seen to be monumental figures of positive impact on the church. Bernard was also involved in the military exploits, specifically the first two crusades to the Holy Land against the Turks and Islamic hold in that region.
II - Bernard in Historical Context.
During the time period in which Bernard lived, the East of the Mediterranean grew in power and influence with the rise of Islam. During Bernard’s childhood, the First Crusade occurred from 1096-1099 C.E. when Pope Urban II called for a recapture of Israel, and specifically to capture Jerusalem from the control of Muslim powers. It was around this time that the Knights Templar military order was established, and Bernard came to support the order significantly. Bernard was commissioned by the Pope to be an official voice preaching in support of the Second Crusade, which occurred in the years 1146-1149 C.E. It may be difficult for us to look back upon Bernard and see the apparent contrast between his passionate writings on the love of God and his support for military campaigns. It is moments like these where we must recognize how very different our time and our context is from Bernard’s. For him, it may have seemed like a natural result of God’s love for us which drives him to fight what he believed to be forces against God’s love.
III - Bernard in Historical Theological Context.
This age of the church theology focused in on the character of God as a loving God, and our development as a people of love. Genuine and growing love was depicted in Bernard’s time as a way to free our minds and our bodies from worldly attachments or concerns and bring us into a transcendence of life through the reality of love. A few generations after Bernard, Dante published his famous work The Divine Comedy in which Bernard is featured as a character who gives a monologue on God’s love and it dove-tails well with Bernard’s work on loving God. Dante’s work contributed to the perception that growing in God’s love was like a journey or a pilgrimage where we develop and run into hardships rather than just wake up one day in the full love of the Divine, which is a theme also present in Bernard’s On Loving God.
IV - More about On Loving God.
Bernard writes, "You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer, the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love. " Bernard delves deeply into what it means for God to be love (1 John 4:16) and how we journey with God in love. Through his writing, Bernard brings a magnitude to the reality that a God as great as ours should love us. He expounds on the previous quoted statement when he writes, “Admit that 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. This is why I said at the beginning that the measure of our love to God is to love immeasurably. For since our love is toward God, who is infinite and immeasurable, how can we bound or limit the love we owe Him? Besides, our love is not a gift but a debt. And since it is the Godhead who loves us, Himself boundless, eternal, supreme love, of whose greatness there is no end, yea, and His wisdom is infinite, whose peace passeth all understanding; since it is He who loves us, I say, can we think of repaying Him grudgingly?”
Bernard describes our journey with God and our growth in love as a development of four stages, which he calls “degrees.” The four degrees of love progress as we grow in our love. We gain understanding and capacity for genuine love and our motives to love also change and grow as we journey through the degrees. The four degrees are laid out as follows:
1: Love of ourselves, motivated by ourselves. To understand love, we must first learn to love ourselves. This starts of selfishly, but as we begin to understand self-love, we can grow into a better understanding of what it means to love God and others, since we have figured out what it means to both give and get love from ourselves. So we grow in our love and direct in from the selfish ways into “loving our neighbors as we love ourselves” (Leviticus 19:18 and Mark 12:31). This is described in Chapter VIII of On Loving God.
2: Love of God, motivated by ourselves. In Chapter IX, Bernard describes how we then grow into the second degree of love, when we learn to love God because we are motivated by how we benefit from loving God. We grow into the understanding that God supports us and gives us strength, so we turn to our love of God so that we might gain the support and comfort that comes in that relationship. An example of this degree might be someone who turns to God because they are going through a really tough time, and they are desperate for a source of strength and hope. They love God out of a necessity based in themselves.
3: Love of God, motivated by God’s nature. Also in Chapter IX, Bernard describes how we then grow into the third degree of love in which we learn how to love God simply because we have experienced the nature of God, and we realize God’s character is so pure and good that it call us to love Him because of who He is. In the third degree, we are not so concerned with what we receive from the relationship we have with God, but we come to know God and to have a relationship which coaxes love from us just because we are in a relationship of love.
4: Love of our self, motivated by God’s nature. In Chapter X, Bernard shows that we grow into the fourth degree of love when we learn to love ourselves because we have come to understand the reality that God loves us. In this degree, we do not love ourselves or God so that we can gain anything from that relationship, but rather, we love ourselves because we love God. We understand that God loves us and gave Jesus Christ for us, so we love ourselves and each other to bring the fullness of God’s goodness and glory into the world, not so that we can see our own lives improved in earthly or selfish ways.
V - Resources I used and for your further study.
The book Christian Spirituality: The Classics, edited by Arthur Holder.
This book is very well done and can be a slow read, but it is very informative and well organized. It has information on many of the important Christian authors throughout the ages.
A great overview article on Bernard and his involvement in the Second Crusade and the Church:
You can read Bernard’s inspiring and relevant work On Loving God here:
This is a short video that does a great job introducing Bernard:
And that video is paired with this article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
There is a section on Bernard’s thoughts concerning the free will of humankind in this article: https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewi-m/#SH2c
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