Improvisation as a theological method, part 3. Bernard of Clairvaux

 

In the history of the Western idea of love,  Bernard of Clairvaux holds a major position. Beside his 85 sermons on the Song of Songs, his treatise On Loving God is of a particular interest. Still today recognizable ideas of romantic love emerged in the 12th century in the songs of troubadours. At the same time, theologians discussed the theme of love, to a certain degree in the same vein. However, Bernard did not consider love as a languishing emotion, it was the view of his antagonist, Abaelard (1079-1142). In Abaelard’s opinion, pure love does not expect its fulfillment. Whoever loves God does not think of anything else, not even one’s own salvation. I love God, without considering whether I find my bliss in him or not. Although this idea has some poetic vigor and it surfaces now and then in the history of mysticism, it has the disadvantage of portraying God as a capricious lover who escapes us and plays with our emotions. Bernard’s approach to love in his On Loving God is quite different.

In his treatise Bernard presents a four-degree-design of love. These degrees start from the lowest and end to the highest, the last one being hardly attainable during our earthly life. Yet these degrees presuppose and follow each other in a virtually inevitable fashion, provided that one does not “block” the advancing of love. Hence the usefulness of the image of musical improvisation. The first degree of love is the “carnal” one, where humans love themselves for their own sake. Although Bernard calls this type of love carnal, there is basically nothing wrong with it – it is merely insufficient. According to the first commandment, one should love God above all. Being weak humans, we need to love ourselves first. The love of neighbor emerges, in Bernard’s view, immediately from the self-love. When I understand that the neighbor shares the same human nature that I have, I am prompted to love him/her as myself. This belongs still to the first, lowest and carnal stage of love. At closer scrutiny there seems to be actually five stages of love, since at the bottom of this very basic form of love underlies the love of God. Love for the neighbor is the perfect justice. However, “one must first love God to love one’s neighbor in God.” Therefore it is proper to state that God’s love is actually the first (latent) degree of love.

Various experiences of life usually lead humans to realize their dependence on God and move them into the second degree of love, where they love God for their own sake, i.e. “not without reward”. Loving God selfishly means that we expect help from God. We realize that everything that is worth attaining is possible to attain “in God”. Bernard describes the rise to the third degree of love as follows:

"But then when she begins to worship him, and to keep coming to him because she needs him, God gradually begins to make himself known to her through her thinking, reading, prayer, and obedience. By this growing familiarity God causes her truly to feel his sweetness. In this way, when she has tasted how sweet the Lord is, she passes to the third stage, where she loves God, not now for herself, but for God’s sake."

Loving God for God’s sake (and not for the reward or the gifts of God)  is the third degree of love. There God is no longer just the answer to my questions or the solution to my problems – that would still belong to the second degree. Reaching there requires a lot of self-discipline and attentiveness (“thinking, reading, prayer, and obedience”). Bernard’s words illuminate the fact that, although the process of love is gratuitous and wholly based on God, who first loved us, it is also a demanding endeavor that commands us entirely, with all our forces. Loving God for God’s sake is probably the highest degree of love in this life. For the fourth degree of love, Bernard levels suspicion whether it is possible at all in via, during our sojourn here. However, the fourth degree of love is the most interesting one, and Bernard dedicates the longest section of his work to it.

Bernard imagines the fourth and final stage of love as a place where humans love themselves for God’s own sake. The definition is logical, considering the previous stages that introduced love for oneself for the sake of oneself, love for God for the sake of oneself, and love for God for God’s sake. Nevertheless, the fourth degree of love does not follow as surely from the third degree, as does the third follow from the second, just as if there were a chasm between the final stages. No wonder, then, that Bernard falters when depicting the fourth degree and bursts into ecstatic utterances:

"O holy and chaste love! O tender and sweet affection! O pure and sinless intention of the will - the more pure and sinless in that there is no mixture of self-will in it, the more sweet and tender in that everything it feels is divine. To love in this way is to become like God!"

Sic affici, deificari est. The fourth degree of love is theosis, becoming divine. What does deification imply according to Bernard? Bernard states repeatedly that this experience is utterly rare “even for the single instant” and declares that “to me it seems impossible.” Bernard applies multiple traditional images of deification: a drop of water disappearing into wine, iron that becomes indistinguishable from the glow of fire, and air suffused with the light of the sun. Ultimately, Bernard’s idea of loving oneself for the sake of God could be understood as a peculiar aesthetic vision that envisages the whole universe to be full of God:

"We must make this our desire: that as God willed that everything should be for himself, so wee, too, will that nothing, not even ourselves, may be or have been except for him, that is according to his will, not ours. The satisfaction of our needs will not bring us happiness as does the sight of his will being fulfilled in us and in everything that concerns us."

The logical connection between the third and the fourth degree of love seems to be that the goodness of God makes humans to love God for God’s sake until one loses oneself and becomes inebriated by God’s love. What is the difference between this vision and Abaelard’s view of love that requires no fulfillment? The answer is that, in Bernard’s vision, God is the beginning and the fulfillment of love. Interestingly, Bernard’s vision does not exclude corporality and physicality. Humans do not attain the final degree of love without their bodies. Therefore the resurrection of the body is an inseparable part of the Christian faith. To be in perfect unity with God’s will does not mean that our human personhood, not even the physical side of it, should disappear. Speaking about love is common to Christians and non-Christian alike. Yet this adherence to the physical reality of resurrection is peculiar to Christianity.  It is possible to assert that we need our soul and body, if for nothing else, to embrace God, our loved one.

At the end of his treatise Bernard incidentally speculates a difficult problem. How are we affected by the wretchedness of the damned, while we are in eternal bliss ourselves? Do we feel pity for them? Bernard seems to think that there is no possibility for such emotions in heaven. Bernard answers with a play of words miseria, misericordia and miseratio:” There will be no place for wretchedness, no time for mercy; there will then surely be no feeling of compassion.” Pity (misericordia) is a powerful feeling, though. In a letter, Bernard describes the operation of pity as follows: “I am moved to pity not because of my own interest, but it is the sight of my neighbor's wretchedness, a brother’s misery, which smites my heart. Pity cannot be induced by the will and it is not subject to reason. Rather, it is a force that imposes itself naturally on a sensitive and compassionate heart, to such an extent that even if it were a sin to feel pity, I could not help feeling it in spite of appealing to all the powers of my will.” Pity is not a weakness of mind but something divine. How does one reconcile these two attitudes toward pity? On the one hand, pity is excluded from heaven because there can be nothing that disturbs eternal peace. Yet it is difficult to comprehend how pity, the very thing that makes life on earth less hellish, has fully vanished from the hearts of the blessed in heaven. Bernard’s vision asks for further development or improvisation.
 

To sum up, Bernard thinks that love may begin as a selfish endeavor, but it does not naturally remain as such. Unless ‘blocked’, love has the power of fostering the human soul into divine vision, to look at the world as God does. Pity is also a powerful emotion that breaks the bondages of what is morally proper behavior. In the last part of this survey, we may enter into a discussion whether love is more important than truth.

(to be continued)