640 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
on almost every page. He has all the books at his command and quotation follows quotation with great rapidity. Bernard enjoyed the highest reputation among his contemporaries as an expounder of the inner life, as his letters written in an swer to questions show. Harnack calls him the religious genius of the twelfth century, the leader of his age, the greatest preacher Germany had ever heard. In matters of religious contemplation he called him a new Augustine, Augustinus redivivus.1
The practical instinct excluded the speculative element from Bernard as wordly ambition excluded the mystical element from Abselard. Bernard had the warmest respect for the Apostle Paul and greatly admired Augustine as "the mightiest hammer of the heretics " and " the pillar of the Church."2 Far more attractive is he as a devotional the ologian, descanting on the excellencies of love and repeating Paul's words, " Let all your things be done in love," 1 Cor. 16 : 14, than as a champion of orthodoxy and writing, " It is better that one perish than that unity perish."3
Prayer and personal sanctity, according to Bernard, are the ways to the knowledge of God, and not disputation. The saint, not the disputant, comprehends God.4 Humility and love are the fundamental ethical principles of theology. The conventual life, with its vigils and fastings, is riot an end but a means to develop these two fundamental Christian virtues.6 Every convent he regarded as a company of the perfect, collegium perfectorum, but not in the sense that all the monks were perfect.6
The treatise on Loving God asserts that God will be known in the measure in which He is loved. Writing to
1 Dogmengesch., III. 301, 305. For Bernard's acquaintance with Scripture, see Ries, pp. 11 sq. 2 Ries, pp. 9, 15.
3 Omnia vestra in caritate fiant, Ep., 221. Melius est ut unus pereat quam unitas, Ep., 102 ; Migne, 182. 257.
4 Non ea disputatio comprehendit sed sanctitas, quoting Eph., III., 18. Sancti comprehendunt. De consid., V. 14 ; Migne, 182. 804.
6 Ep., 142, 2; Migne, 182, 297. Dr. Philip Schaff said that "love and humility were the crowning traits of Bernard's character." Lit. and Poetry, P. 232. e RieS5 pp. 35} sqq.
§ 101. ST. BERNAKD AS A MYSTIC. 611
Cardinal Haimeric, who had inquired " why and how God is to be loved," Bernard replied, " The exciting cause of love to God, is God Himself. The measure of love to God is to love God without measure.1 The gifts of nature and the soul are adapted to awaken love. But the gifts involved in the soul's relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom the unbeliever does not know, are inexpressibly more pre cious and call upon man to exercise an infinite and measure less love, for God is infinite and measureless. The soul is great in the proportion in which it loves God."2
Love grows with our apprehension of God's love. As the soul contemplates the cross it is itself pierced with the sword of love, as when it is said in the Canticles, II. 5, " I am sick from love." Love towards God has its reward, but love loves without reference to reward. True love is sufficient unto itself. To be fully absorbed by love is to be deified.3 As the drop of water dropped into wine seems to lose its color, and taste, and as the iron held in the glowing flame loses its previous shape and becomes like the flame, and as the air, transfused by the light of the sun, becomes itself like the light, and seems to be as the sun itself, even so all feeling in the saint is wholly transfused by God's will, and God be comes all and in all.
In Bernard's eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, we have a continuous apostrophe to love, the love of God and the soul's love to God. As sermons they stand out like the Petite Careme of Massillon among the great collections of the French pulpit. Bernard reached only the first verse of the third chapter. His exposition, which is written in Latin, revels in the tropical imagery of this favorite book of the Middle Ages. Everything is allegorized. The very words are exuberant allegories. And yet there is not a single
1 Causa diligendi Deum Deus est, modus sine modo diligere. De dilig. Deo. 1. Migne, 182. 974.
2 In Cant., p. 919, as quoted by Ries, p. 212.
8 Sic affici deijicari est. Bernard does not shrink from the use of this word as also Origen and Gregory of Nyssa did not, and other Fathers who used it or its Greek equivalent. 2r