Bernard was the most influential Christian voice of the twelfth century. As abbot of Clairvaux he reshaped the Cistercian order, preached the disastrous Second Crusade, served as advisor to popes and kings, and across all of it kept up a steady output of contemplative writing that made him the central spiritual teacher of his age.
His most enduring work is the eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs. The biblical Song is a frank love poem between two human lovers; Bernard reads it as a map of the soul’s progressive intimacy with the divine. The kiss of the mouth, the embrace, the search for the beloved through the night streets, all become stages of contemplative experience. Bernard’s reading was not original but his depth and patience made it the canonical treatment for the next four centuries.
Bernard’s mysticism is affective. Where Augustine emphasised intellectual ascent and Eckhart would later emphasise apophatic stripping, Bernard placed love at the centre. The soul does not arrive at union by knowing more or stripping further but by loving more completely. His treatise On Loving God lays out four degrees of love, ending in a love so pure that the self is forgotten in the beloved.
He died at Clairvaux in 1153 and was canonised twenty-one years later. His influence on every subsequent Western mystic, from the Rhineland masters to Teresa of Avila to the modern Trappists, is direct.
