Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 6

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St. Thierry

Lesson Transcript

We’re now going to consider the Cistercian reform in the 12th century and with that the contemplative teachings on prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux and his friend and companion William of St. Thierry. Bernard, his dates are 1090–1153 and that of his friend William of St. Thierry are 1085—he was slightly older—to 1148.

To give us a sketch of what was happening in the culture at that time, we can think of this as a hinge period of history when there was a renaissance before the Renaissance. And what we mean by that is a number of things that were happening all at the same time. One of them is a new sense of individuation. We’ve already seen how the influence of Gregory the Great was to individuate a portraiture of a person. And this is developed, as we’ve seen, by Anselm in his prayer life that he again is individuating. And so this process of being an individual, of having distinctive, unique features, is a mark of the 12th century. How it’s been abused since then, of course, is a very different story.

In that context, it was remarkable what the Cistercians did because, basically, the Cistercians was not creating a rival movement. It was a renaissance of the Benedictine movement. As all good things are abused, what had taken place was that in this age of feudalism it was the mark of feudal dynasties that they should marry their children also to feudal lords or heirs of lordships. Now, of course, in a big family you can’t have too many political alliances. You can probably only marry off the older siblings. And so what happens to the younger siblings? Well, there was only one place for them and that was the monastery or the convent and so the monastic movement became a kind of demographic safety valve for the sustenance of feudalism. It’s as simple as that. But, of course, if children are brought up in an environment where this is not their own conviction, it’s just happenstance that I’m now, as it were, being in an orphanage. And the orphanage was, in a sense, what the monastery or the convent had become. For many of these young children the result is, of course, you get a new deadness, a new formality, that develops in the movement. It needs revival. And the step that initiated a whole new vitality was that what Bernard and his friends were doing were saying we’ve come of age. We’re young people with our own passions and our own desires for God. And so this renewal of the monastic movement simply by the recruitment now of young people come of age and, of course, young people always create new vitality for any movement, this is really what the Cistercian movement is all about.

[00:04:13]

And so we think of Bernard as the founder of many foundations. What in fact happened was they appealed to him and said can we be associated with you. So he wasn’t deliberately evangelising and producing them. They were simply like Kentucky Fried Chicken: they wanted to be in the franchise. And so he first of all founded Clairvaux—and that’s why his name is Bernard of Clairvaux—in 1115. Others followed in 1118, 1119, 1121 and almost every year afterwards there were new foundations. And so he himself in his reign as abbot was responsible for 68 foundations. And others that were not directly linked with his name, but wanted to be linked with the order, meant that by the time of his death there were about 350 houses all of which were… well, not all of them, but certainly half of them, 164, were answerable to his personal authority, so he’d been handed enormous power in Western Europe. There’s probably no one in the history of the Church that’s had more political influence than Bernard was to have in the 12th century. Even one of his pupils was the Pope, so you can imagine the power that the man had in all of these different ways.

Of course, my background is in the history of ideas and so I can tell you a lot more of what was happening at that time. Because these monasteries, like what had happened at Monte Cassino with Benedict was that they wanted to be in places of quietude and remoteness from the daily scenes of life, and so they chose the forests of Europe in their remoteness. What was not aware of was that the Mediterranean lands where these Benedictine monasteries had been founded now had moved into the forests of Europe. As I say, there was this axial change that we find with Anselm that now moves monasticism from the Mediterranean world into Western Europe and into England as well. What was not recognised was that the reason why these were dense forests was because their soils were too heavy to be cultivated by the Mediterranean light plough. The light plough, the ard as we call it, is simply pulverising the soil to prevent evapotranspiration in the heat of the summer. So the moisture of dry farming was what was characteristic of the Classical world.

[00:08:03]

But now there was need for a new plough. And this would be a plough that broke the soil profile and was ploughing in order to stir up the nutrients from in the lower profile of the soil. It was a Saxon plough from Eastern Europe that was brought into the West and that revolutionised the agriculture of the West. So we associate this period and the Cistercian houses with a completely new economic revolution, an agricultural revolution. And lo and behold, these remote monasteries didn’t realise that they were sitting on a pot of gold. And so they became very wealthy. And so when we think of Cistercian monasteries as they thrived in the Middle Ages, we think of them as having high technology. They have fish pools for their diet. They have rich soils for farming. And so they became extremely wealthy. And this was all because of this remarkable change of environment and technology that took over in that period. And so again, of course, the monastic movement became a movement with high organisation, sanitation, drainage, irrigation, water. The hydraulics were remarkable and the buildings were remarkable. And so, of course, once again we find that wealth always corrupts, but that’s another story.

When we look at Bernard himself, he himself is quite remarkable in writing a great number of books and I would recommend a few of them for your own consideration. The Steps of Humility and Pride, which is one of his early ones in 1121, in which he’s reversing the dream that Jacob had of his ladder. In other words, it’s the steps downward of the incarnate Christ in humility and the steps upward of pride that we have to see as a contradiction of being a Christian. And then again, one of the wonderful little books that he first wrote in 1124, still as a very young man, on loving God, which he again amended in 1136–41. And then, of course, his Homilies on his sermons on the Song of Songs, which he began in 1135 preaching every week on the Song of Songs till 1153. And in that period of time, how far had he got into the Song of Songs? To chapter 3:1. All that life was meditating on each of the verses many times over in his weekly homilies to the novitiates. And one of the remarkable genres of literature for piety in the later Middle Ages was the circulation of commentaries on the Song of Songs. When we think of Calvin, of course, we think of all the commentaries on justification and what a widespread use they were after the Reformation. But no less than 365 different authors in this earlier period were all writing commentaries on the Song of Songs. Can you imagine it? 365 commentaries have been recognised by distinct authors and, of course, there are more to scour in the archives of Europe.

[00:12:50]

So we’re entering then into a very different world from what we’ve seen so far and what remains unique in the history of the Church. And all that the Cistercian movement was doing, of course, was re-emphasising all that Benedict had already taught. So Lectio Divina, this synthesis of an active and contemplative life—reading to act on it—was very much the Cistercian movement. The Opus Dei, the liturgical life: this too was strongly developed in this period. And it’s quite remarkable how there has been even more than with Benedict a remarkable renaissance of Bernardian research in our time. Between 1974 and the turn of the century, there’s been a huge advance in the scholarship of Bernard because the centenary of beatification is one of the steps of celebration of him of 500 years. And many other things have taken place at the turn of the 21st century that have continually revived again and again the influence of Bernard.

[00:14:48]

The Song of Songs that he focused so much attention on was, of course, also something that was a revival in Judaism. So the Song of Songs has long been in this period of time and earlier a movement of revival within Judaism as well as within Christianity. But, of course, the understanding of the exegesis of the Song of Songs was something that the Christians had no access to. And for that reason that explains why Bernard himself could not speak of the Song of Songs exegetically. He spoke of it metaphorically. So there’s this very strong symbolism in his 86 sermons, so-called. They’re not really sermons. They’re simply reflections of meditation. I was very amused a few years ago to discover that one of our scholars at Fuller’s Seminary was writing a commentary on the Song of Songs and for a Californian to do a commentary on the Song of Songs with all the sensate culture that we have today was hugely embarrassing for him and for those who read his work. He was too self-conscious of the culture he was living in. But what we realise is there was a purity of innocence of the true love of God that uses the symbolism of the Song that really our evangelical tradition has never known how to handle.

[00:16:40]

Well, it’s not only, as I say, Bernard, but a whole series of other of his own associates, his disciples, one after the other, they were all writing commentaries on the Song of Songs. And what is it all about? It’s all about having a heart for God. It’s all about our love of God. This is why we find that today, as I was pioneering for some time in the field of spiritual theology, yes, we have a mind for God, but we also need to have a heart for God. God is rational as our faith is rational, but God is far more than being rational. God is personal. And so all our emotions are important as a result of that.

Another thing that was being revived in this period of time was a revival of Cicero’s Treatise on Friendship. And Aelred, who was one of the disciples of Bernard in England, wrote a lovely little classic on spiritual friendship in which he’s encouraging that monks should begin to write letters to each other in friendship and that they should realise that like the letters of the New Testament and the friendship that there is in the New Testament, so there should be in the Communion of Saints a new interest in letter writing. And so we find that Bernard, who 450 letters of his letters which have been recovered so far in the archives of Europe and there may be many more, was busy writing letters all the time. He had said that he would have two amanuenses standing by: one who would write a few sentences of diction while the other was then carrying on. He moved, of course, so quickly in his eloquence and so he needed two to record the letters that he was writing all the time.

And this too he considered as important because the whole of his movement started with a few friends. It’s when he was 20 years old and decided not to be a knight, but to move into the cloister that he brought not one, but 20 friends with him into the monastery including most of his brothers as well as a few other friends. So eventually, five brothers and lots of cousins and other friends all started when this little community at Citeaux, that had only six or ten people, was suddenly transformed overnight when 30 more arrived on the scene. No wonder it transformed that community. but the foundation of it is they were all friends.

[00:20:36]

And so by 1153 when he died, as I say, the order had about 350 houses all over Europe. You find them as far as Lapland, as far as Syria, and they covered everything in between. It’s a remarkable movement that took place at this time. You can’t imagine a greater spread geographically when you think of these intrepid travellers and pilgrims of faith travelling between Lapland and Syria. It’s unimaginable in our world today, but that’s how the order moved. And, as I say, such was his influence in the highest authorities that when you read his book called Five Books on Consideration, he’s writing to the Pope as his pupil and the Pope is saying I’ve got a new job and I don’t know how to make a synthesis of my life as Pope between the active and the contemplative life, which is, of course, what Benedict had already established. And so really the Five Books on Consideration is just one long letter to the Pope, helping him to order his time and the discipline of his spirit in such a way that he’s synthesising within himself this Opus Dei of living actively and contemplatively at the same time.

And here he is; he’s not even a bishop; he has no official authority in the life of the Church. You’re on the fringe of it if you’re in a monastic movement. But it’s sometimes the fringe people that God most uses for His Church. No one has spoken to any Pope like Bernard did to his old friend on the behaviour and advice he should have for himself. So it’s a fascinating study. And again, he’s writing to kings and emperors, to all sorts of people, when he’s writing his letters.

People, of course, will remind you that he got involved in the Second Crusade. Well, he did, but, of course, you have to see it again in the cultural and contextual, political circumstances of the time. It was not that he was pugilant. In fact, what he’s wanting to do is to indicate that the whole purpose of the crusade to act as a knight of Christ, act in compassion, not with a sword, but with love. But when you’re fighting fanatics, of course, you find that you have to have a shield. You have to, in fact, enter into the fight. So what he was aware of was that it was so easy for someone to become a black knight instead. There’s a moral that Bernard tells us and that is that you’re a knight for Christ and so you think you have the purest of motives. And he discovers that one of his companions had charged at him, to his astonishment, and pinned him to the ground and as he was about to thrust his spear through his throat, he gasped out, ‘Why did you do this?’ And for answer, the young white knight was shown his burnished image on his shield. He had become a black knight. Sometimes we’re on a crusade for God; our crusading is blackening our life.

[00:25:20]

We have crusades still. I think of Campus Crusade. And we think of how wacky the sales approach to evangelism really destroyed the lives especially of young women. I remember one young woman at the University of Austin when I was teaching there and she was the campus representative. She came to me and she says I’m having a nervous breakdown. Oh? Why? Well, because I have to report five cases of conversion every week. It was a sales pitch. And of course, I told her this is crazy. And years later, one of the senior women in Washington D.C., she said up and down the East Coast we have a whole linkage of the executive leaders of Campus Crusade who’ve become, they’ve become homosexuals, lesbians. Why? Because when they were teenagers, they were trying to get their father’s approval and the only way to get his approval was to exceed in sports. And so they began to exceed likewise in recruitment. But then when they got a more senor position they could no longer buy recognition because now they were viewed as much on an equal footing with all the executives of the organisation and they discovered that there was no one there to meet their emotional needs and so they grasped each other for support, one of the other. So the spirit of crusades doesn’t belong to a black period of the 12th century. It belongs to the crusading of evangelism in the 20th century as well. It’s a horrifying story when you think about it.

What then do we learn about the prayer life of the Cistercians? We find that again they realise the monastery is a school for spiritual formation where you need new guidance, where you need new direction for your lives. And so Bernard was often teaching his pupils what their prayer life should be. And what he’s saying is that it’s a dialectic between desire and fulfilment and so Bernard is saying the school of prayer is a school of the frustration of our desires. Our desires are long. They need to be reguided. And so this dialectic between desire and fulfilment is a long, long process. And he says the content of prayer is what he calls intentio cordis—it’s the intent of the heart.

[00:29:22]

And so in one of his sermons on how to pray, he teaches that a sinner should approach the Creator as a sick person approaches a physician. As a sick person approaches a physician, so should the sinner’s attitude in prayer be before God. But the prayer of the sinner is impeded in two ways: it’s by a lack of light, or by too much light. In other words, one who neither sees nor confesses sin is impeded by a lack of light. Whereas, one who despairs of pardon indicates he’s got an excess of light. So the healing of our lives, of our souls, requires us to move from complacency and despair to a middle ground where we realise that God does heal, does hear, our contrition and repentance and we don’t need to despair about it.

[00:30:44]

So neither in complacency, on the one hand, nor in despair, can someone really pray. The light has to be so moderated that the sinner sees sins and confesses them hopefully, praying that they will be forgiven. And what keeps us from despair is the love of God that we don’t see ourselves so blackly and so starkly that we despair of it. But on the other hand, we don’t pray complacently. We pray ardently. We’re sick. We need a physician and this requires an attitude of simplicity. And of course, that requires also a purity of heart. So we approach Him confidently and remember, as Anselm does, Mary Magdalene as the woman who washes the feet of Jesus with tears and dries them with the hairs of her head. And many sins are forgiven her because she loved much.

Then he says again in our approach to prayer, we should have an attitude of large- heartedness. Our hearts need to be enlarged. It’s what Paul prays for in 2 Corinthians 7: O Corinthians, I’ve not restricted myself to you, but enlarge your hearts. And so this is what Bernard is saying is so important. And then from these three stages he then suggests that the fourth stage is prayer, is fervency and ardour and strong affection mingling with thanksgiving and the pouring forth of purity of heart. It’s the kind of response that Lazarus had when the grave clothes were taken off him and he discovered he was alive in a remarkable way.

[00:33:09]

And so we can hear the echoes of Bernard’s injunctions later when Aelred is also addressing his monks and he says, ‘Lord, look at my soul’s wounds. Your living and effective eye sees everything. It pierces like a sword even to part asunder soul and spirit. Assuredly my Lord, you see in my soul the traces of my former sins, my present perils, my motives and occasions for others yet to be.’ In other words, past, present, future in my sinful proclivity, you see it all, Lord. And again he goes on praying, ‘You know well, O searcher of my heart, that there’s nothing in my soul that I would hide from you even had I the power to escape your eyes. So see me, sweet Jesus. See me.’ In other words, take account of who I am and of my condition. ‘And Lord, may your good, sweet spirit descend into my heart and fashion there a dwelling for himself.’

One of the things then that we find so beautiful about these Cistercian writers is that they’re all saying prayer is the abiding of the lover with the beloved. Dwell there. This is, again, another quote of Bernard: ‘Fashion there a dwelling for himself, cleansing it from all defilement both of flesh and spirit in pouring into it the increments of faith, hope and love and disposing it to penitence and love and gentleness.’ Later in the history of spirituality, gentleness in the life of the saints in the 17th century, as we find with Fenelon, takes on a new focus: be gentle with yourself as God is gentle with you. And so Bernard closes his prayer by saying, ‘And may He give me power and devotion to order every act and thought according to your will and also perseverance in these virtues until my life’s end.’

Well, these are beautiful quotations that are Bernardian and, as I say, they’re all echoed very much by Aelred. So this is their teaching. Begin with your sickness as a sinner. Have an attitude of simplicity in the directness and openness of confession. Pour it all out in an enlarged heartedness with fervency and thanksgiving and when you are really in the school of love, it’s a school about the redirection of desire for God and His love. So this question of conversion that we’ve sought so much to make a once-for-all experience is not so for them. Conversion is ongoing all through our life. If you were to ask Bernard as a monk, what is a monk? He’s one of the conversi. But the conversi are the ones who are in the process of a lifelong conversion. They’re saying it’s a long process that never ends, this converting of the heart. And, of course, if you’re taking this seriously, you need the appropriate environment. That’s why it was so important to build another monastery and yet another one. That’s where you needed the shelter of that environment, which we all need. So when he was preaching in Paris on the subject of conversion, he wasn’t simply recruiting people to go to a monastery. He was simply evangelising.

[00:38:08]

Any Calvinist looking at Bernard’s understanding of the Bible would be terribly frustrated because where is he quoting a single verse? Nowhere. And yet, as we now know from computer science, in his sermons and homilies he has over 30,000 references to the scriptures, but they’re all masticated. It’s the echo of a word here and a short phrase there, but it’s not a quote. The linear rational mind that developed late in our consciousness is not the Bible of Bernard because it’s not in his head. It’s in his stomach. He swallowed it. He’s eaten it. He’s masticated it. It’s just the echo of a thought, the echo of a word or two that says yes, this must be in Timothy or it must be perhaps in the Psalms. And so one of the great skills of contemporary monastic understanding of Bernard’s use of the Bible is just simply trying to get these echoes. And so the additions of the Cistercian publications have done a wonderful job in re-identifying in their footnotes these echoes. You have to be a detective to find out his recitation. And this, of course, is all expressive of Lectio Divina. But you see what it is. It’s so much more personal: this is what I’ve digested; this is what I’ve eaten.

And so what we find so articulated in Anselm and again in Bernard and his friends is that really the Christian life is so much richer as a personal life. It’s being enriched by relationships with each other and above all with Christ. And again, what is so Augustinian about Bernard is that it’s all about the humanity of Christ. It’s this profound understanding of the incarnation and discovering that unabashedly we know him as our lover. So we discover that in this prayer life of these wonderful saints of God it’s a vocabulary of desire of how Christ reshapes our desires for the rest of our life. We might say that the theology of Bernard is the theology of desire.

[00:41:29]

So what is desire? Desire is the experience of absence. You desire something because you don’t have it. It’s not there. But to desire is neutral, so the quality of what we desire is dependent on the quality of the object of our desires. How tragically so many young people today are desiring drugs and it’s destroying their life because of the wrong quality of what their desire is—a quick fix for a momentary pleasure. And so this is the significance of the Song of Songs, that one is desiring the absent lover. The song is all about the absence of the beloved and the longing and desire and the whole drama is a drama of presence and absence, or absence and presence. He also is showing how the experience of love is the experience of the right will. It’s not located in the intellect, certainly not for Bernard. Augustine had thought perhaps it was connected with the intellect, but Bernard sees much more clearly that beyond the cognitive intelligence is this conative intelligence: the conative faculty of willing and desiring.

Again, thirdly, what Bernard is aware of so profoundly is that the desires of our hearts is the desire for God. As Jean Leclercq was to write a classic later on this very theme as the desire of our hearts as an infinite desire. Not just immediate desires, for there’s an ultimate reference. There’s a fundamental need because He’s our Creator/Redeemer and we’re made in His image and likeness. We could say the DNA of being human is God. As the Palmist exclaims, ‘Whom have I in Heaven without thee? And on Earth all my desires are towards thee.’ So the movement towards God is imperative if we’re to be true to our own constitution, to our own human nature. But at the same time, the desire for God finds its consummation in the eternal states. So we have to have the necessity of an eschatological orientation. Our lives are not being lived for the present. They’re being lived in the light of the future. So when we’re looking to see in terms of how to direct the souls of others as Bernard does, or as the whole Cistercian movement does, it’s to live in past and the present and the future, all conjoined in one synthesis of life.

[00:45:27]

Isn’t that interesting to think of living in the past, the present and the future? The past is connected with the things that we’re no longer in control of. We need forgiveness for the past. We’re sinners because of the past and yet we were called to be different from our past. So the past is beyond us and so really the Christian life, as Bernard sees, is a life for the present moment. It’s the present that we can alter. It’s the present that can make decisiveness for the future. But the completion of it all is that good thing which God has begun in us is still to be completed in Jesus Christ. He will complete unto the day of Jesus Christ. So desire lives in the present. It’s educated by the past, but is directed by the future. And desire, we can say then, is the compass of our behaviour.

[00:46:40]

I remember as a teenager my father making up a little doggerel. He wasn’t a poet, but he said this very profoundly. He didn’t realise how Bernardian it was, I’m sure. ‘Time’s past we can’t recall. Time’s future is not ours. Time present can we only claim and use its fleeting hour. Yes, now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation.’ One of the things that we therefore find in Bernard is that when you see something very central, you don’t have one word for it. I’m reminded that if you go up to the Inuit in the Arctic, you don’t live with one word for snow. You have 40 words for snow. And if you live in a Cistercian monastery, you don’t live with one word called desire. Desiderium isn’t enough. And so what you discover is that Bernard has a whole range of words that he talks about for the organ of desire.

So let’s explore some of the ways in which Bernard uses this word. Bernard first of all says recognise that a desiring heart needs patience. Holy desire is lived out of patience. You might say that holy desire is lived out of the school of frustration because eventually these earthly, carnal frustrations are going to be transformed by angelic ministrations. So think about that. And then he goes on to say that desire’s like a flame, like a fire that sears the soul. Desiring becomes ardour, ardere. And the word ardere literally means to burn in a warmth of fervency and of aspiration. So this is another, a third word in the element of desire, is adspirare, which is to aspire, to anticipate. And then there’s the word suspirare, for which there’s no adequate English word for it, but it’s a deep sighing of the heart. We sigh in desire. We can’t articulate it. And so in Sermon 31:5 Bernard says to such a sighing soul who prays frequently and without interruption and who distresses itself because of its desire, He comes sometimes, who is the object of that desire. He takes pity on the one who is seeking him so earnestly. So he says that our tears and our groans are not hidden from the lover of our hearts.

[00:50:24]

But you see, what Bernard is saying is that if Jesus is the lover of my soul, I’m talking about the one who pays more attention to me than anyone else in the world. We forget that. He’s paying far more attention because he loves so much. And so exhaustively in Sermon 75, he explores the attentiveness of our divine lover. He says, of course, the way that you will desire correctly is if you’re desiring to seek the Word of God. It’s what Calvin is later to say about his prayer life, that your prayers and God’s Word need to be attuned together. This was the essence of Calvin’s teaching. It’s the essence of Bernard’s understanding.

So we have then different words for desire. Now of course, we also have different words for love. Amor is that spontaneous force that energises our life. It’s natural affection. When duly ordered, it has the right end, which is calitas: what we might call being charitable. Because I’m in love, I can love you. I can let it spread abroad and be shared abroad to others socially as well. Whereas, the wrong direction of amor—like desire because it’s neutral—it depends on what you love. You can love wrongly. And what you love wrongly is cupitas. It’s cupidity. It’s significant that it’s Cupid that we’re loving. Because Cupid as the god of love is the one who is the god of narcissism, of self-love. And one of the things that doctors have discovered, as I learned in a paper of the Harvard Journal of Medicine, that is produced for practitioners every month, it says in February 2004 that of all the mental diseases that psychiatrists are coping with today the one that they throw their hands up about is the incurable nature of narcissism. You can deal with schizophrenics. You can deal with bipolar disorders. You will never cure narcissism. So let it be caritas and not cupiditas.

Another word that Bernard uses is affectus or affectio. That is to say that in the process of loving and being loved one is infectiously loving others. We call it affection. So this influencing, spreading abroad, then can, of course, be an affection that is compassionate; that is to say, it’s given with compassion for the wellbeing of others. It can be devotio. The very notion of devotion is this subjective state where we have such deep feelings of the love of God. To have a devout heart is truly to have a heart that is focused on this one thing: the love of the other. And, of course, with such is intentio; that is to say, an inner disposition that we fundamentally align our life in intention, deliberate intention, to seek the face of God.

[00:54:28]

And so we come now to the last words that Bernard uses, which is, of course, an old friend to us because we’ve seen it in Anselm and that’s the word compunctio, compunction. That the more we’re close to God in His love, the more wounded we are in love. It’s what we’re going to see later in John of the Cross. We’re wounded, we’re pierced to the heart. But it’s the pierce wound of love. So when one of our Archbishops of Canterbury recently wrote his book about the history of spiritual writers in the history of the Church, he called it the Wound of Knowledge. It’s the compunctio of conviction, sometimes rebuke, but also simply the sheer ardour of being in love with God. God’s mystics are the wounded.

Well, as we conclude on Bernard, he devotes his thinking to four principles. The first principle is that of intermediacy. Just as Augustine had triads or different trinities between creation, reconciliation, restoration, adoption and glorification, or between his understanding of intellect, memory and love, there’s always a middle term that we’re focusing on about bringing a synthesis and a balance of the other terms. And so for Bernard, focusing on the middle term is always focusing on our present experience. Understanding present experience is central to Bernard’s pastoral theology.

A second principle is that Bernard is operating with a theme of alternation: that spiritual growth is always pitted against negative influences; the negative influences of sin that drag us back from the positive into the negative, from a faith-inspired desire for God to perhaps sloth, lassitude or even despair. We’re always living, says Bernard, between fear and hope, between trusting and yet hoping. And so there’s a dynamic in Bernard’s spiritual life as he always lives in the vicissitudes of life. He sees that subjection to change is essential for spiritual growth, that we’re on the move . We’re living inauthentically when life is still the same. Later, a well-known existential philosopher in Spain, Unamuno, at the beginning of the 20th century speaks about the two conditions of the Christian: viewing life from the balcony. where everything remains the same and viewing life from the road, where there’s change at every turn. That’s Bernard.

[00:58:23]

And he’s aware that this movement of change is not without pain. It’s full of it. He’s aware that it’s not easy because otherwise we would be fools to think so. And so he sees seven ways in which alternations occur in our experience. First of all, we’re dealing with the unpredictable, with unsearchable interventions of God. God, why in the world did you do that in my life? We don’t know. We can’t predict. And for many of us to take Christianity seriously is to embrace a blizzard of problems. We never got so caught up in the complexities of our own emotions than we’re brought closer to God.

[00:59:27]

Secondly, he sees the contingency and the changeable nature of our human condition. We’re always living with contingencies. And so we need, thirdly, to navigate between the effects of sin in concupiscence and the desire to be free to move towards true love, caritas. And at the same time as Gregory has given us a profile and Anselm has given us a profile, so Bernard builds on this profiling of what we may do to have the special character that we have so that our individual traits, our vocation, our destiny, are unique. He sees, fifthly, the balance of acts that are required in the context of a single life. This balance that we’ve seen, that is so Benedictine, of the active and the contemplative. And he sees, sixthly, the variety of vocations within the life of the Church. He sees the place of the secular canon as well as the monastic canons. He sees the importance of the life of Rome as well as the life of the monastery. Life is beginning to show a lot more diversity in the 12th century with the division of labour and the rise of urbanisation and the rise of a new series of classes of people. And so he’s aware in his culture that there is great diversity of the way that God calls us in different ways of life.

And as we’ve already seen, there is the eschatological principle: it’s heavenly-minded; it’s moving from the not yet to fulfilment. And there are four specific spheres where Bernard says we’re moving towards the heavenly. First, there’s the heavenly reality that he calls the paradise of a good conscience. Conscience is for Bernard the dwelling place of God. It’s truly consciensia, having the same mind together. It’s a shared knowledge with God. It’s not introspective. So the practice of virtue is in awareness of a reconcile of a forgiven life. We’re not being virtuous to be reconciled. We’re given the gift of reconciliation to be virtuous.

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Secondly, he speaks of the enclosed paradise of the prayerful life, that ideal life that he saw in the monastery. When you go through its portals, you are resigning the ways of the world; the ambitions of the world are forgotten. And you’re entering, thirdly, into the contemplative experience of prayer, which he associates with Paul’s understanding of entering into the third heaven. You are forgetting yourself totally in the transcendence of God. You’re like the two disciples in the transfiguration scene. You’ve temporarily forgotten yourself. Though in the case of Peter, he very quickly discovered himself again. So it’s temporary. It’s something that we tend to have as a fleeting glance and a hint, but not a way of life. That has yet to come.

And in this state, you’re now so occupied with the love of God that you have this wonderful awareness that you’re walking with Jesus. We can think of it in that beautiful hymn that is almost Bernardian: ‘O walk with Jesus, wouldst thou know how wide, how deep his love can flow. They only fail, his love to prove, who in the ways of sinners rove. Walk thou with him. That way is light. All other pathways end in night. Walk thou with him. That way is rest. All other pathways are unblessed.’ And so this great Bernardian adoration and ardour is expressed in this final verse. ‘Jesus, a great desire have we to walk life’s troubled path with thee. Come to us now in converse stay.’ You see how the immediacy of the moment is present. ‘O walk with us day by day.’ This is deeply Bernardian and you can say this is a summary of what we understand of his prayer life.