Bernard began the Sermons on the Song of Songs in 1135 and was still working on them when he died eighteen years later. The completed cycle covers only the first two chapters of the biblical Song. The pace is unhurried because the project was never to comment on the text in the modern academic sense. It was to use the text as an occasion for the soul’s interior progress, sermon by sermon, year by year, with the monastic community of Clairvaux as the primary audience.
The biblical Song of Songs is, in its plain sense, a frank love poem: a man and a woman seeking each other through the streets of Jerusalem, finding each other, losing each other, finding each other again. Bernard reads the lovers as Christ and the soul, or alternatively as Christ and the Church. Either reading, the journey is the same: the soul’s discovery, loss, and recovery of the felt presence of the divine.
His map of the path takes the form of three kisses, drawn from the opening verse of the biblical Song. The kiss of the feet is repentance and self-knowledge. The kiss of the hands is the doing of good and the embrace of action. The kiss of the mouth is union with the divine, beyond word and image. The architecture is simple. The depth is achieved through Bernard’s patient repetition.
Sermon one — On the title of the book
1.1
The instructions which I address to you, my brethren, will differ from those I should deliver to people in the world, or at least, the manner of giving them will be very different. The teacher who desires to follow Saint Paul’s method of instruction will give them milk to drink, not meat to eat.
1.5
Come, then, in greeting and in song. Let none of us be backward in this. Sing the new song; sing it to the Lord. He gives the song. He himself is the singing.
[ The first of Bernard’s sermons on the Song. Eighty-five further sermons continue the commentary, never reaching the third chapter of the biblical text. The complete Eales translation is at the source linked above. ]