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The legacy of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to 20th-century Christians, as multifaceted as it is, lies most significantly in his profound human psychology of self-esteem and self-awareness grounded in the mercy and love of God.

Bernard would be amused to find us talking about the characteristics of his spirituality, for his whole effort was directed at faithfulness to the traditional spirituality he had learned in school and at the monastery. This traditional medieval theology taught that men and women were created in the image and likeness of God, but that this image has been corrupted, tarnished, and distorted—but not destroyed—by sin. Because God shared our human nature in Jesus Christ, we can begin the journey from the “land of unlikeness” toward the “land of likeness,” toward the complete integration and reformation of the divine image from which we have fallen.

The journey will be complete only in heaven, but those who devote themselves to it with special intensity can, by the sheer grace and mercy of God, experience a fleeting foretaste of its heavenly destination on earth.

Monks and nuns give themselves to this reformation under the guidance of the monastic rule and the leadership of experienced spiritual directors. Precisely because they recognize their own limits and weaknesses, monks and nuns place the direction of their lives in the hands of others, who draw on the wealth of collective experience—tradition—to act as guides on the journey from the land of unlikeness.

Bernard belongs to this tradition. He was nourished and shaped by the language of the Bible. Monks understood their lives as a tasting of the sweetness of God’s Word as it came to them through “chewing on,” “rechewing” (ruminating), and “digesting” the honey of the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the past commentators on Scripture, the Church Fathers.

Guido II, head of the Carthusian monastic order (c 1176–1180) describes the process of reading (placing the grape of scripture in one’s mouth), meditating, or studying it in a variety of ways (crushing and chewing it), being drawn by the hint of its sweetness to beg God in prayer for an experiential encounter with the text, and finally, knowing Scripture’s Author in the loving embrace called contemplation. Contemplation, later called “mystical union,” is simply the experience of the love of God: the experience of God loving us, which in turn is what our love of God consists of.

Bernard is but one of the remarkable group of monastic authors from Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, and other traditions, whose collective legacy places the 12th century alongside the fourth and 16th centuries as a truly outstanding epoch in Church history. Among Bernard’s Cistercian contemporaries, we should acknowledge Aelred of Rievaulx (1109–1167), whose writings, such as The Mirror of Charity, and On Spiritual Friendship, breathe a warm, humane, wise spirit that unfailingly moves the reader to a love of God and to human friendship.

We should also mention William of St. Thierry (c1085–1148), whose Golden Epistle, and The Nature and Dignity of Love, are only two of the profound explorations of the human soul and spirit from the 12th century. The insights into human psychology, and into the life of the spirit hidden in the mystery of Christ that are found in these writings can be studied and digested with profit by 20th-century Christians, if they are willing to slow down to thoughtfully read, ponder, chew, and savor these books until their wisdom melts in the mouth.

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