Bernard of Clairvaux Part Three: Man in Relation to God
The ontological dependence upon God which was enunciated in the last section serves as the conceptual basis for Bernard’s tripartite description of man’s dignity, wisdom, and virtue: “By dignity I mean free will, whereby [man] not only excels all other earthly creatures, but has dominion over them. Wisdom is the power whereby he recognizes this dignity, and perceives also that it is no accomplishment of his own. And virtue impels man to seek eagerly for Him who is man’s Source, and to lay fast hold on Him when He has been found.” (2). Hence “we must know, then, what we are, and that it is not of ourselves that we are what we are.”
Bernard’s anthropology, against the backdrop of his ontology, notes that a fully functional human being ideally must be a harmonious correspondence of all three parts, and these parts are themselves hierarchically related, reflecting the similar graded constitution in Bernard’s picture of reality: virtue is the highest, then wisdom, then dignity. And the ideal and simultaneous operation of all three has four notable consequences: first the absolute operation of all three means that man achieves the highest level of love “wherein one loves himself only in God,” or in other words “one does not love himself except for God’s sake.” The highest level of Bernard’s anthropology is really primarily a theology, wherein man is a derivative concept “emptied and lost and swallowed up in [love for] God,” and hence understood only from the perspective of an absolute love for God. This is not to be derided as a devaluation of man, but actually is intended by Bernard as a conceptual device to reveal man’s absolute dignity in relation to the Creator and Redeemer.
Second, this means that man’s highest constitution and purification from sin can only be described by Bernard as being incorporated into the divine life:
And again: “It [man’s fourth stage of love] never keeps back anything of its
own for itself. When a man boasts of nothing as his very own, surely all that he has is God’s; and what is God’s cannot be unclean.”
Third, the highest ideal of anthropology is social and interpersonal for Bernard. He writes, “he who shares our nature [i.e. our neighbor] should share our love, itself the fruit of our nature…He may cherish himself as tenderly as he chooses, if only he remembers to show the same indulgence to his neighbor” (8) and “To love our neighbor’s welfare as much as our own: that is true and sincere charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of a faith unfeigned.” (12). Indeed “this is a temperate and righteous love which practices self-denial in order to minister to a brother’s necessity. So our selfish love grows truly social, when it includes our neighbors in its circle.” (8).
We must avoid the anachronism of attempting to read modern personalism onto Bernard, however. The self and other are not defined in any type of I/thou encounter, nor indeed does Bernard really comment on what we are accustomed to see--especially in so-called "Social Trinitarianism" along the lines of Volf, Boff, or Moltman--regarding the sociality or inter-relation in society per se. Rather here social love is seen as essentially an extension of self-love. However just as anachronistic would be the obverse conclusion of above, namely that Bernard is thus a proto-Cartesian or Kantian, speaking of the self's essential constitution nd solidity before all relationships. This is not an egoistic expansion of the self, becoming the hegemonic standard of love for the other, who in this sense would not truly be other or themselves, but a replication or projection of my own ego upon them. We must remember for Bernard the highest concept of the self is one that is displaced and found in God through self-giving: “a man cannot love his neighbor in God, except that he love God Himself; wherefore we must love God first, in order to love our neighbors in Him.” (8). Once the continual gracious giving of God is recognized, “it will not be hard to fulfill the commandment touching love to our neighbors,” for no longer will we fear our own lack, but give out of the presupposed abundance of God’s gifts (9).
Fourth, should there not be a harmony among the three parts, the scope of man’s attention is damaged and reduced to an ontologically deficient myopia which regards limited finite things as their own ends. In this sense each of the tripartite aspects are useless and even sinful without their higher counterpart: “It is plain, therefore…that wisdom without virtue is accursed,” because wisdom perceives “that they [our gifts] are not of ourselves but God, and yet [without virtue] there is no fear to rob God of the honor due unto him…[this] pride is the chief of all iniquities, [and] can make us treat gifts as if they were rightful attributes of our nature.” Analogously, “dignity without wisdom is useless,” since man, “not knowing himself as the creature that is distinguished from the irrational brutes by the possession of reason, he commences to be confounded with them because, ignorant of his own true glory, is led captive by curiosity…concerning himself with external, sensual things [only].” (2).
This reductionism removes man from the unification and wholeness which God provides the world and man in the world, and fragments reality, “for where there is self-interest, there is isolation; and such isolation is like the dark corner of a room where dust and rust befoul.” (12). In this fragmentation, the unity that God provided now must be provided by man: “Each man is a law unto himself, when he sets up his will against the universal law, perversely striving to rival his Creator, to be wholly independent, making his will his only law.”
Yet:
With a certain nuance, Bernard is following what appears to be the Augustinian tradition of describing man’s sin as an incurvatus in se (being curved in upon oneself): “The eternal law of righteousness ordains that he who will not submit to God’s sweet rule shall suffer the bitter tyranny of the self: but he who wears the easy yoke and light burden of love…will escape the intolerable weight of his own self will.” (13) The highest stage of love for Bernard, wherein man loves God, and loves himself for God’s sake, is not a “mere” spiritual asceticism, but is following his rigorous ontology of being itself (God) as love which is self-deferral and self-giving. To borrow the phrase from John Howard Yoder, “those who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.” In a similar sense for Bernard this self-deferral of man to God is not an abnegation of existence, but the highest affirmation of its identity in the source of all being.
The three stages preceding the absolute love of the fourth stage are here made much more understandable as descriptors of a process of self-renunciation. This is not an isolated case of spiritual asceticism. Rather against the background of the ontology of love, and the tripartite anthropology of dignity, wisdom, and virtue, the process of overcoming the self as described by the stages of love can be seen not as the eventual destruction of the self, but, in Bernard’s view, as the highest form of “self-realization,” as the true self is that which is emptied and rediscovered in God. By this theme Bernard can describe the constant de-centering of the self in its own self, and the reorientation of the believer to God: “They [the Christian] love all the more, because they know themselves to be loved so exceedingly; but to whom little is given the same loves little (Luke 7:47). Neither pagan nor Jew feels the pangs of love as does the Church.” As a matter of fact this re-orientation actually alters the perception of the world:
So too in this alteration and what we might in modern terms describe as the destabilization of the ego (similar to the concepts of destabilization found in Augustine by Michael Hanby and David Bentley Hart), a constant striving for God emerges. “For it is those who are not satisfied by the present who should be sustained by the thought of the future, and that the contemplation of eternal happiness should solace those who scorn to drink from the rivers of transitory joys.” (4). Indeed there is “for those who long for the presence of the living God…no satiety, rather an ever increasing appetite…” The certitudes of this life themselves are de-centered and thrown into disequilibrium: “A generation rather which chooses to trust in uncertain riches, it is disturbed at the very name of the Cross, and counts the memory of the Passion intolerable….O wretched slaves of Mammon, you cannot glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ while you trust in treasures laid up on earth: you cannot taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” (4).
In the de-centering of the subject, what is implicit in this process is a realization of the absolute value of God as God (the fourth stage of love) and in this manner the realization of the distinction and identities of man as man and God as God in the very relation set by the distinction. Man is truly man only when He loves God as God, and then loves himself only for God’s sake. This means that the identity of man can only be set up by distinction to the previously established identity of God and so their unity is established in the fourth level precisely in the differentiation of one from another, man now being properly situated in the context of his creaturehood (though in deification, he is also transformed and purified) in relation to the infinite love of God. Man loves God as God, and so is poured out into God—yet precisely in this way he finds himself again and is transformed (deified). In this increasing realization and procession towards the fourth stage of love, Bernard’s arguments set us up for the recognition of multiple increasing layers of the infinite gratuity of God’s love for us which themselves function as heuristic indicators of the very distance between us and God which establishes also our closest connection, in that man, in the fourth stage, must love God boundlessly.
In the first instance, I owe my whole self to God who created me out of nothing. “Why should [man] not love Him with all his being, since it is by His gift alone that he can do anything?” But, moreover, God redeemed me, and gave me back to myself. Therefore I owe him myself twice. Already we see the distance between God and man increasing precisely in God’s establishing a relation to us, so that the distinctness of our identities—God as infinite, and man as wholly reliant creature who must boundlessly love God—is set up in precisely this manner.
But Bernard does not end at man owing himself twice over. For in redemption, unlike creation, God does not merely speak and by fiat have man spring into being once more, but “what wonders He wrought, what hardships He endured, what shames He suffered…in the first creation He gave me myself; but in His new creation He gave me Himself..what have I to offer Him for the gift of Himself? Could I multiply myself a thousand fold and then give Him all?” Yet even further, though in this we should be obliged to love God infinitely and endlessly, another layer is added in that God gives us benefits for loving Him (7) namely God Himself (as was elaborated on in the first section). It is as if Bernard desires implicitly to paint a picture of multiple enfolding infinities pulling man out of himself through the stages of love up eventually into the fourth and highest stage.
Bernard’s anthropology, against the backdrop of his ontology, notes that a fully functional human being ideally must be a harmonious correspondence of all three parts, and these parts are themselves hierarchically related, reflecting the similar graded constitution in Bernard’s picture of reality: virtue is the highest, then wisdom, then dignity. And the ideal and simultaneous operation of all three has four notable consequences: first the absolute operation of all three means that man achieves the highest level of love “wherein one loves himself only in God,” or in other words “one does not love himself except for God’s sake.” The highest level of Bernard’s anthropology is really primarily a theology, wherein man is a derivative concept “emptied and lost and swallowed up in [love for] God,” and hence understood only from the perspective of an absolute love for God. This is not to be derided as a devaluation of man, but actually is intended by Bernard as a conceptual device to reveal man’s absolute dignity in relation to the Creator and Redeemer.
Second, this means that man’s highest constitution and purification from sin can only be described by Bernard as being incorporated into the divine life:
O sweet and gracious affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the divine will! To reach this state is to become godlike. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as the be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory. (10)
And again: “It [man’s fourth stage of love] never keeps back anything of its
own for itself. When a man boasts of nothing as his very own, surely all that he has is God’s; and what is God’s cannot be unclean.”
Third, the highest ideal of anthropology is social and interpersonal for Bernard. He writes, “he who shares our nature [i.e. our neighbor] should share our love, itself the fruit of our nature…He may cherish himself as tenderly as he chooses, if only he remembers to show the same indulgence to his neighbor” (8) and “To love our neighbor’s welfare as much as our own: that is true and sincere charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of a faith unfeigned.” (12). Indeed “this is a temperate and righteous love which practices self-denial in order to minister to a brother’s necessity. So our selfish love grows truly social, when it includes our neighbors in its circle.” (8).
We must avoid the anachronism of attempting to read modern personalism onto Bernard, however. The self and other are not defined in any type of I/thou encounter, nor indeed does Bernard really comment on what we are accustomed to see--especially in so-called "Social Trinitarianism" along the lines of Volf, Boff, or Moltman--regarding the sociality or inter-relation in society per se. Rather here social love is seen as essentially an extension of self-love. However just as anachronistic would be the obverse conclusion of above, namely that Bernard is thus a proto-Cartesian or Kantian, speaking of the self's essential constitution nd solidity before all relationships. This is not an egoistic expansion of the self, becoming the hegemonic standard of love for the other, who in this sense would not truly be other or themselves, but a replication or projection of my own ego upon them. We must remember for Bernard the highest concept of the self is one that is displaced and found in God through self-giving: “a man cannot love his neighbor in God, except that he love God Himself; wherefore we must love God first, in order to love our neighbors in Him.” (8). Once the continual gracious giving of God is recognized, “it will not be hard to fulfill the commandment touching love to our neighbors,” for no longer will we fear our own lack, but give out of the presupposed abundance of God’s gifts (9).
Fourth, should there not be a harmony among the three parts, the scope of man’s attention is damaged and reduced to an ontologically deficient myopia which regards limited finite things as their own ends. In this sense each of the tripartite aspects are useless and even sinful without their higher counterpart: “It is plain, therefore…that wisdom without virtue is accursed,” because wisdom perceives “that they [our gifts] are not of ourselves but God, and yet [without virtue] there is no fear to rob God of the honor due unto him…[this] pride is the chief of all iniquities, [and] can make us treat gifts as if they were rightful attributes of our nature.” Analogously, “dignity without wisdom is useless,” since man, “not knowing himself as the creature that is distinguished from the irrational brutes by the possession of reason, he commences to be confounded with them because, ignorant of his own true glory, is led captive by curiosity…concerning himself with external, sensual things [only].” (2).
This reductionism removes man from the unification and wholeness which God provides the world and man in the world, and fragments reality, “for where there is self-interest, there is isolation; and such isolation is like the dark corner of a room where dust and rust befoul.” (12). In this fragmentation, the unity that God provided now must be provided by man: “Each man is a law unto himself, when he sets up his will against the universal law, perversely striving to rival his Creator, to be wholly independent, making his will his only law.”
Yet:
It [man’s attempt at autonomy] is [still] subject to the law of the Lord [that is, to the nature of love that God is]. For though they can make laws for themselves, they cannot supplant the changing order of the eternal law…What a heavy and burdensome yoke upon all the sons of Adam bowing down our necks [this is] so that our life draws near unto hell. ‘O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Rom. 7:24). I am weighed down, I am almost overwhelmed, so that ‘If the Lord had not helped me, it had not failed but my soul had been put to silence (Ps. 94:17). Job was groaning under this load when he lamented: ‘Why have you set me as a mark against You, so that I am a burden to myself?’ (Job 7:20). He was a burden to himself through the law, which was of his own devising; yet he could not escape God’s law, for he was set as a mark against God. (13).
With a certain nuance, Bernard is following what appears to be the Augustinian tradition of describing man’s sin as an incurvatus in se (being curved in upon oneself): “The eternal law of righteousness ordains that he who will not submit to God’s sweet rule shall suffer the bitter tyranny of the self: but he who wears the easy yoke and light burden of love…will escape the intolerable weight of his own self will.” (13) The highest stage of love for Bernard, wherein man loves God, and loves himself for God’s sake, is not a “mere” spiritual asceticism, but is following his rigorous ontology of being itself (God) as love which is self-deferral and self-giving. To borrow the phrase from John Howard Yoder, “those who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.” In a similar sense for Bernard this self-deferral of man to God is not an abnegation of existence, but the highest affirmation of its identity in the source of all being.
The three stages preceding the absolute love of the fourth stage are here made much more understandable as descriptors of a process of self-renunciation. This is not an isolated case of spiritual asceticism. Rather against the background of the ontology of love, and the tripartite anthropology of dignity, wisdom, and virtue, the process of overcoming the self as described by the stages of love can be seen not as the eventual destruction of the self, but, in Bernard’s view, as the highest form of “self-realization,” as the true self is that which is emptied and rediscovered in God. By this theme Bernard can describe the constant de-centering of the self in its own self, and the reorientation of the believer to God: “They [the Christian] love all the more, because they know themselves to be loved so exceedingly; but to whom little is given the same loves little (Luke 7:47). Neither pagan nor Jew feels the pangs of love as does the Church.” As a matter of fact this re-orientation actually alters the perception of the world:
She [the Church] sees the Sole-begotten of the Father bearing the heavy burden of His Cross; she sees the Lord of all power and might bruised and spat upon, the Author of life and glory transfixed with nails, smitten by the lance, overwhelmed with mockery, and at last laying down is precious life for His friends. Contemplating this the sword of love pierces through her own soul also and she cried aloud…She sees death dying, and its author overthrown; she beholds captivity led captive from hell to earth, from earth to heaven…the earth under the ancient curse brought forth thorns and thistles; but now the Church beholds it laughing with flowers and restored by the grace of a new benediction. (3).
So too in this alteration and what we might in modern terms describe as the destabilization of the ego (similar to the concepts of destabilization found in Augustine by Michael Hanby and David Bentley Hart), a constant striving for God emerges. “For it is those who are not satisfied by the present who should be sustained by the thought of the future, and that the contemplation of eternal happiness should solace those who scorn to drink from the rivers of transitory joys.” (4). Indeed there is “for those who long for the presence of the living God…no satiety, rather an ever increasing appetite…” The certitudes of this life themselves are de-centered and thrown into disequilibrium: “A generation rather which chooses to trust in uncertain riches, it is disturbed at the very name of the Cross, and counts the memory of the Passion intolerable….O wretched slaves of Mammon, you cannot glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ while you trust in treasures laid up on earth: you cannot taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” (4).
In the de-centering of the subject, what is implicit in this process is a realization of the absolute value of God as God (the fourth stage of love) and in this manner the realization of the distinction and identities of man as man and God as God in the very relation set by the distinction. Man is truly man only when He loves God as God, and then loves himself only for God’s sake. This means that the identity of man can only be set up by distinction to the previously established identity of God and so their unity is established in the fourth level precisely in the differentiation of one from another, man now being properly situated in the context of his creaturehood (though in deification, he is also transformed and purified) in relation to the infinite love of God. Man loves God as God, and so is poured out into God—yet precisely in this way he finds himself again and is transformed (deified). In this increasing realization and procession towards the fourth stage of love, Bernard’s arguments set us up for the recognition of multiple increasing layers of the infinite gratuity of God’s love for us which themselves function as heuristic indicators of the very distance between us and God which establishes also our closest connection, in that man, in the fourth stage, must love God boundlessly.
In the first instance, I owe my whole self to God who created me out of nothing. “Why should [man] not love Him with all his being, since it is by His gift alone that he can do anything?” But, moreover, God redeemed me, and gave me back to myself. Therefore I owe him myself twice. Already we see the distance between God and man increasing precisely in God’s establishing a relation to us, so that the distinctness of our identities—God as infinite, and man as wholly reliant creature who must boundlessly love God—is set up in precisely this manner.
But Bernard does not end at man owing himself twice over. For in redemption, unlike creation, God does not merely speak and by fiat have man spring into being once more, but “what wonders He wrought, what hardships He endured, what shames He suffered…in the first creation He gave me myself; but in His new creation He gave me Himself..what have I to offer Him for the gift of Himself? Could I multiply myself a thousand fold and then give Him all?” Yet even further, though in this we should be obliged to love God infinitely and endlessly, another layer is added in that God gives us benefits for loving Him (7) namely God Himself (as was elaborated on in the first section). It is as if Bernard desires implicitly to paint a picture of multiple enfolding infinities pulling man out of himself through the stages of love up eventually into the fourth and highest stage.
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