To Love Because We Are Loved

Part I: Introducing St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Apr 29, 2025

“The reason for loving God is God Himself. As to how He is to be loved, there is only one measure: It is immeasurable!”

Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God

Let me take a slight detour from the Neptic Fathers and turn to the great Medieval monastic reformer St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).1 To some, my interest in Bernard might seem eccentric. I am, after all, an Orthodox priest. But this man Pope Pius XII called “the last of the fathers” and the “Doctor Mellifluus” (“Doctor Mellifluus (May 24, 1953) | PIUS XII”) has much to teach us about the inner life and can serve as a welcome counterpoint to the desert fathers and the Philokalia.

So, who is Bernard of Clairvaux, and why do we care about what he has to say?

I care because of the Cistercian fathers of the Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and New Melleray Abbey. These contemporary monastic brothers of Bernard were my professors in college and graduate school. These men are sterling examples of intellectual excellence, fidelity to Christ, holiness, and above all charity. Their witness led me to Bernard.

My fondness for Bernard and the Cisterians aside, let me suggest that we should care about his work because it is true and because he practiced what he preached; he loved sacrificially.

Building on our Lord’s teaching of the two greatest commandments (Matthew 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27), St. Bernard teaches that the interconnected nature of love of God, neighbor, and self. He touches on this in sermons and letters and at length in his treatise On Loving God (2016). For Bernard, love is not transactional; it is “not a contract” but “an affection of the soul.” It is not rooted in “mere agreement” but arises spontaneously in response to the beloved. Love’s true reward is not any external benefit but the beloved (Bernard, p. 26).

A keen psychologist of the spiritual life, Bernard identifies four stages or “degrees” in our formation in love:

I love myself for the sake of myself.
I love God out of a recognition of my need for Him.
I love God in gratitude for His many gifts to me.
Finally, I come to love myself because God first loved me.

As we will see, there is a self-referential aspect to all four degrees of love. The frank narcissism of the first stage gives way in time to the humility of the second, the eucharistic character of the third, and culminates in an act of obedience that is a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The self-interested character of all four stages of love need not disturb us or compel us to doubt the sincerity of, especially the opening movement, as the soul comes to understand the eschatological nature of love. To transcend the constraints of a “nature… soft and weak,” the soul “has to love itself first” (p. 30). Only then can one gradually ascend to the love of God and eventually come to love “oneself only for God’s sake” (p. 34). Seen in the light of the last stage, the narcissism of the first is revealed as the seminal presence in the soul of the Kingdom of God. Across all stages, self-love within the limits of the moral law is not an act of mere formal or external obedience but rather a gradual process of the believer becoming a co-worker with Christ (1 Corinthians 3:9) in his or her salvation, of conforming the self to Christ (Romans 8:29), and of taking every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Given the limits of human nature—and the wounds inflicted on us by sin—love’s last stage is only glimpsed in this life; it is “something [we] may [only] hope to possess… or rather to be possessed by” in heaven (p. 36). Rather than seeing this as negative, Bernard sees it as the source of compassion for self and others. This side of heaven, we have only a superficial view of our worth and the depth of God’s love for us.

In addition, this unfulfilled longing is a reminder of the joy that awaits us in the Kingdom of God. This, in turn, is the source of both fidelity and patience. Finally, we can conclude that desire is a source of hope.

Sacrificial Love.

“God Himself,” writes Bernard, “is the motive of our love for Him.” As for “the measure of love,” we owe God the answer is “clear enough” to those who have studied the Scriptures; we are to love Him “without measure.” To say this is to say that needs to be said. But because he is the abbot of a monastery made up of both the “learned and the unlearned,” he realizes he must remember the latter even if he has already “said enough for the former.” And so, the love of neighbor requires that he “unfold [his] meaning and perhaps add somewhat to it” for the benefit of all (p. 9).

This is not merely a moral or institutional obligation for Bernard. Faithful to the example of Christ Who “gave Himself to us in spite of our unworthiness, and, being God, what could He give us of greater worth than Himself,” his catechesis on love is also his own, personal act of self-offering. His treatise is a sacrifice of his interiority for the sake of his spiritual sons and, as it happens, for us too.

Sacrificial service for others is a central theme of Bernard’s life. Though a nobleman, he renounces his privilege to pursue intimacy with Christ in a life of prayer, fasting, obedience, and manual labor in the new, obscure, and poor monastery at Cîteaux. Soon, though, he would leave the peace and fellowship he found here to be the founding abbot of the monastery at Clairvaux.

Bernard’s life at Clairvaux would frequently be interrupted—sacrificed, really—as he was drawn into the various ecclesiastic and geo-political controversies of the Middle Ages. Papal schisms, theological arguments, the crusades, and the petty jealousy of his brother monastics would all at one time or another intrude upon his solitude. Each time he is called to do so, the abbot of Clairvaux sacrifices the quiet of monastic life and the fellowship of his brother monks. He does so because love requires that we sacrifice ourselves first to God and then for our neighbor’s good. We “are bound to love God,” Bernard writes, because “He first loved us” (p. 9).

This obligation is not simply bound up with God’s love for us and ours for Him. Created as we are in the image of God Who is Himself love, our love for Him and our neighbor is intrinsic to who we are as Christians and human beings. Failure, or worse, the refusal, to love God or my neighbor is not only a moral failing. It also inflicts a deep wound on my identity.

In our next conversation, we will turn to St. Bernard's On Loving God and see what we might see.

References

Bernard of Clairvaux. (2016). On Loving God. Gideon House Books.

Pius XII, “Doctor Mellifluus (May 24, 1953), Vatican.va, 23 May 1953, www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_24051953_doctor-mellifluus.html. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.

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