Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  11. The tension between rest and labor is evident throughout Bernard’s works. See, for example, SC 26.4.6 in OSB 1: 173–75. See also Sermo in festivitate sancti Martini episcopi 17, in OSB 5: 411–12.

  12. OS 2.6 in OSB 5: 347. For some, there are moments of rest on this side: the person who, having eaten the food of good works and having drunk the beverage of prayer, falls asleep in the midst of prayer and dreams of God; SC 18.3.5–6 in OSB 1: 106–8.

  13. OS 2.5 in OSB 5: 378.

  14. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in dedicatione ecclesiae 2.4, in OSB 5: 378 (hereafter Ded in OSB).

  15. OS 3.2 in OSB 5: 350.

  16. Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de diligendo Deo 11.30, in OSB 3: 144–45 (hereafter Dil in OSB; trans. in On Loving God, in G. R. Evans, Selected Works, 197.

  17. On the bed and bedroom, see Dil 3.8 in OSB 3: 125; Dil 3.10 in OSB 3: 126; SC 23.1.2 in OSB 1: 139; SC 23.2.3 in OSB 1: 140; SC 23.6.16 in OSB 1: 149–50; SC 84.1.3 in OSB 2: 304. On the bed as the location of encounter with God, see McGinn, Growth, 188–89. It is not surprising that the bed is also an image of the monastery; see SC 46.1.2. in OSB 2: 56–57.

  18. SC 23.6.16 in OSB 1: 149–50; Hum 7.21 in OSB 3: 32–33. See also McGinn, Growth, 190.

  19. In sermon twenty-three on the Song of Songs, Bernard suggests further the discreteness of each soul’s union with God when he writes: “I feel that the King has not one bedroom only, but several. For he has more than one queen; his concubines are many, his maids beyond counting [Song 6: 7]. And each has her own secret rendezvous with the Bridegroom and says: ‘My secret to myself, my secret to myself’ [Isa. 24: 16]. All do not experience the delight of the Bridegroom’s visit in the same room”; SC 23.4.9 in OSB 1: 144–45; trans. in Song, 2: 33–34. Bernard’s emphasis on the separateness of each soul’s encounter with God from every other soul’s encounter with God, his imagery of separate beds and separate bedrooms, raises interesting questions about privacy in the Middle Ages: the separate bedrooms in heaven contrast with the sleeping arrangements at Clairvaux, where, with the exception of the abbot, all monks slept in a single dormitory; Elphège Vacandard, Vie de saint Bernard, abbé de Clairvaux (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1894; rep. 1927), 70–71.

  20. OS 5.4 in OSB 5: 364. The saints do seem to be aware of the damned; it is not clear if this awareness comes before or only after the resurrection; OS 3.3 in OSB 5: 351–52.

  21. OS 1.3 in OSB 5: 329.

  22. We find little concern for the communal aspect of eating when Bernard uses this image in a sermon for St. Victor. The conscience of St. Victor, resting from his conflicts, is seated at a table with Christ, the angels, apostles, and prophets. Bernard even names some of Victor’s dining companions, it is true—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—but such identification simply underscores the saint’s august company, rather than suggesting interaction among that company. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in natali sancti Victoris 2, in OSB 6.1: 33–34 (hereafter Vict in OSB).

  23. Thus, for example, no clear picture of the saints as particular, specific people emerges in these sermons, and neither emulation of individual saints nor their intercession is the connection between heaven and earth. If we want to know about the relationship between the living and the dead, we have to look elsewhere: indeed, it is in large part the monks’ participation in the heavenly feast that joins heaven and earth. When, in the opening passages of his first sermon, Bernard labors to excite his monastic readers’ (or listeners’) desire for heaven (and not, it is worthwhile noting, their desire for the saints per se), he uses images of spiritual feasting and alludes also to the actual eating practices in the monastic community. Bernard describes himself and his monks as “beggars . . . lying before the door of a very rich king”; OS 1.2 in OSB 5: 328. Like hungry Lazarus, who pleaded with the rich man for scraps from his table, Bernard’s monks, and Bernard himself, long to be sustained by the crumbs that fall from the table of the holy souls. God himself (not the saints) gives this food directly to Bernard, and it is through Bernard’s sermon that his monks eat of these longed-for crumbs of Christ, tasting heaven by eating with their ears the words of Bernard’s sermons. (That Bernard should talk about eating Christ’s words and actions through hearing is not surprising. It is, after all, the flesh of the Incarnate Word that is eaten in communion.) By eating this food, the monk participates in the glory of the saints.

  24. For eating as the occasion of union with others and on the eucharistic overtones of feasting in general in the Middle Ages, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3–5; on the changing perceptions of fast and eucharist from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, see ibid., 33–69. Miri Rubin analyzes the ways in which members of dominant as well as nondominant groups in the Middle Ages used the eucharist to circumvent local loyalties in an effort to achieve unity among those with widely differing social and political allegiances, as well as to buttress dominant ideology and to challenge it; Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 347–49.

  25. SC 71.2.5 in OSB 2: 217; trans. in Song, 4: 51–52.

  26. SC 71.4.10 in OSB 2: 221.

  27. SC 71.3.8 in OSB 2: 220. See McGinn, Growth, 213–15.

  28. Dil 15.39 in OSB 3: 153; trans. in On Loving God, in Selected Works, 205.

  29. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143. For biblical and baptismal sources of water symbolism in medieval writings, see James C. Franklin, Mystical Transformations: The Imagery of Liquids in the Work of Mechthild von Magdeburg (Rutherford, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1978), 64–72.

  30. “Pristina propriaque exutum forma”; Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143.

  31. Dil 10.27–28 in OSB 3: 142–43.

  32. Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1940), 122.

  33. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143. Colin Morris argues (citing Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 134) that, whereas Bernard spoke in On Loving God (written between 1125 and 1141 and perhaps in 1128) about deification as a loss of self in God, he spoke about déification as the fulfillment of self in his sermons On the Song of Songs, which he began in 1135 (see SC 71.4.10 in OSB 2: 221); Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 154–55. Gilson, sensitive to charges of pantheism leveled against Bernard, is at pains to emphasize Bernard’s insistence, throughout his writings, on the permanent distinction between God’s substance and the substance of each soul; Gilson, Mystical Theology, 122–32.

  34. See Gilson, Mystical Theology, 26–28, 128–29 and Morris, Discovery, 152–57. Bynum discusses this idea in the context of twelfth-century thought as a whole; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. 87–88.

  35. SC 82.3.5 in OSB 2: 295. See also Dil 11.32 in OSB 3: 146.

  36. Gilson discusses this in Mystical Theology, esp. 28, 54. McGinn points out that, whereas Bernard argues in On Grace and Free Choice that the soul’s likeness to God has not been lost through sin, he argues in his sermons on the Song of Songs that this likeness has been partly concealed; McGinn, Growth, 168–71.

  37. Ded 1.7 in OSB 5: 374–75.

  38. Ibid. Bernard believes that no created spirit can communicate with another created spirit without the use of bodily senses—God alone can act directly on the mind (OS 5.2.8–3.8 in OSB 1: 24–25), and neither human being nor angel can penetrate the secret intentions of another (Sermones in Psalmum “Qui habitat” 15.3.3–6, in OSB 4: 478). On Bernard’s acceptance of the Augustinian principle of the “inviolability of spirits,” see Adele Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” parts 1 and 2, Citeaux: commentarii Cistercienses 11 (1960): 5–25, 85–103 (quote at 6). This epistemology would militate against the notion of the union of souls’ wills in heaven (and rais
e the question of how, before the resurrection, the bodiless souls of saints communicate with one another). But a different epistemology reigns in Bernard’s heaven, if we take Ded 1.7 to mean that the thoughts of each are accessible to each without going through the medium of sense perception. And see Ded 2.4 in OSB 5: 378. The relation between the self—as image of God—and others is particularly intriguing in the light of the fact that the imago Dei is the same for all people. I have not been able to locate any text that addresses this question directly. For the twelfth-century understanding of “the self” and for the soul as image of God, see Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” 85–88, Morris, Discovery, 64–95, and Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle, de Saint Anselme a Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Letouzey et Ané, 1967), esp. 1: 187–98. See M.-D. Chenu for a new sense of self in the twelfth century; M.-D. Chenu, “Nature and Man: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 23–37.

  39. On the twelfth century’s emphasis on the boundaries between people, see Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” 85–86.

  40. SC 26 in OSB 1.

  41. SC 26.6.9 in OSB 1: 177; trans. in Song, 2: 69.

  42. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2: 61.

  43. Ibid.

  44. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2: 62.

  45. Bernard of Clairvaux, Preface, The Life of Saint Malachy, in The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Cistercian Fathers Series 10 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1978), 13.

  46. The Life of Saint Malachy, 93.

  47. Sermo in obitu domni Humberti 1, in OSB 5: 440, (hereafter Humb in OSB); trans. in Sermon for the Feast of Blessed Humbert, in Sermons for the Seasons, 1: 61.

  48. Jean Leclercq, “La joie de mourir selon saint Bernard de Clairvaux,” in Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 200–201.

  49. Humb 6 in OSB 5: 445–46; trans. in Blessed Humbert, in Sermons for the Seasons 3: 68–69.

  50. In these five sermons, Bernard expresses little interest in the complexity of the inner (or outer) life of the saints (on earth or in heaven), and he does not detail the diversity of the lives lived by the saints, of which we are given little if any sense at all: the saints remain, throughout, an anonymous, undifferentiated group. On the question of grouping, see “The Orders of Society,” in Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: An Interpretation of Mary and Martha, The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, The Orders of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  51. SC 26.3.5 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 63. It is important to note that I have not located traces of this preoccupation in other writings by Bernard. If we consider Bernard’s own preference for withdrawing in union with the Word, it is not surprising that he should be fearful of being forgotten by Gerard. In sermon eighty-five on the Song of Songs, Bernard writes that in spiritual marriage the soul may give birth in two ways. On the one hand, she may give birth to others, in consideration of the joys of her neighbor; on the other hand, the soul may give birth to spiritual insight. It is this latter bringing to birth that Bernard relishes: “A mother is happy in her child; a bride is even happier in her bridegroom’s embrace. The children are dear, they are the pledge of his love, but his kisses give her greater pleasure”; OS 85.4.13 in OBS 2: 316; trans. in Song, 4: 209. No wonder Bernard is worried. Fracheboud and Bynum have drawn attention to the conflict Bernard felt over the competing claims of service and solitude, over preaching and prayer; M. André Fracheboud, “Je suis la chimère de mon siècle: le problème action-contemplation au coeur de saint Bernard,” Collectanea Cisterciensium Reformatorum 16 (1954); Bynum, “The Cistercian Conception of Community,” in Jesus as Mother, 71.

  52. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2:61.

  53. SC 26.3.5 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 63. Bernard writes similarly about the love that Humbert, now in heaven, houses for those on earth; Humb 7 in OSB 5: 446–47.

  54. Vict 3 in OSB 6.1: 33—35.

  55. Bernard of Clairvaux, De consideratione ad Eugenium papam 5.7.26 in OSB 3: 488. It is interesting that (in at least some instances) it is Bernard’s need to be remembered by the dead that prompts him to discuss the question of memory in heaven, indicating that the concern for the continuity of relationships established on earth is an impetus for his discussion of memory. See his sermon on St. Victor (Vict in OSB 6.1: 29–37), whom Bernard did not know, and his sermon on Gerard (SC 26 in OSB 1: 169–81).

  56. The depth and ardor of Bernard’s attachments triggered conflicting emotions in him. In sermon fourteen on the Song of Songs, he recounts the near despair by which he was several times overcome “in the beginning of his conversion,” when he was unable to find and love the God whom he sought and when he could discover no friend who might loosen “the chilling winter that bound” his “inward senses (sensus internos)”; SC 14.4.6 in OSB 1: 79. But he also remembers that at a sudden and chance utterance, “or even at the sight of a spiritual and excellent man, and occasionally at the memory alone of someone dead or absent, the wind blew and the waters flowed [Ps. 147: 18],” and Bernard’s tears fell almost day and night; ibid. Bernard acknowledges that he was disappointed not to have come to this experience of God without the mediation of fellow human beings and writes of the shame he feels at having been “moved more by the memory of a human being than by God”; ibid. As Fiske has remarked, a “friend can communicate to him [Bernard] what he cannot get for himself directly from God, even from the humanity of Christ”; “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 13. Bernard has been singled out as a pivotal example of a twelfth-century person who placed an enormous value on friendship and cultivated friendships with energy and passion. On the importance of the twelfth century for the history of friendship, see Morris, Discovery, 96–107. For the role Bernard played in the subsequent identification of the twelfth century as “the age of friendship,” see Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship & Community: The Monastic Experience c.350–c.1250, Cistercian Studies Series 95 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988), 231–95. For the influence of Cicero’s ideas about friendship on Bernard—and on the twelfth century as a whole—see Gilson, Mystical Theology, 8–13. Fiske shows the enormous importance of friendship to Bernard, considers the friendships Bernard had with William of St. Thierry and Peter the Venerable, and discusses the way in which Bernard’s reflections on friendship figure into his theological reflections; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship.”

  57. Hum 4.14 in OSB 3: 27; trans. in Steps of Humility, in Selected Works, 112–13.

  58. Fiske has argued that Bernard held two different positions regarding love of others. First, Bernard expressed the belief that authentic love is grounded in a true perception of the person whom one loves. Second, Bernard considered authentic love to be without proportion to the merit of the person loved; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 21–23. Fiske’s insight is important for my topic. To pursue it might very well shed further light on Bernard’s understanding of whom and how we love in heaven.

  59. OS 5.6 in OSB 5: 365.

  60. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143.

  61. This “leveling” of all human beings may take place while we are alive, but with a different outcome; it creates a sort of solidarity among sinners. While we are alive, the ecstasy that the soul enjoys when she is carried away from herself and adheres to God ushers in the compassionate realization that all human beings are weak, wretched, and powerless. This realization causes the soul to cry out: “Every man is a liar”; Hum 4.16 in OSB 3: 28.

  62. SC 26.3.6 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 64.

  63. SC 82.2.2–3.8 in OSB 2: 293–98. On the soul made in the image of God and the soul’s likeness to
God, see Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1: 187–98.

  64. OS 2.7 in OSB 5: 347–48.

  65. OS 3.3 in OSB 5: 351.

  66. OS 3 in OSB 5: 349–53. With their bodies back, the saints’ love might spill outward into new sorts of relationships with others; after all, the return of their bodies to them frees them to love God fully for the first time. Moreover, there might be a connection between the establishment of the whole person and the nature of relationship with others. In addition, Fiske has drawn attention to Bernard’s zest for the corporeal presence of his friends. Bernard expressed his preference for the corporeal presence of his friends, regarding it as “far more desirable than the spiritual bond alone”; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 87–88. Finally, if embodiment more completely establishes the identity of each saint, might these new selves usher in a new kind of community?

  67. The Life of Saint Malachy, 93.

  68. SC 26.8.12 in OSB 1: 179; Humb 1 in OSB 5: 441.

  69. OS 3.1 in OSB 5: 349–50. Simon Tugwell discusses Bernard’s insistence on complete reward going only to complete people—not to bodiless souls; Simon Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 133.

  70. Bynum has remarked on the rarity in the late Middle Ages of considerations of “the social implications of resurrection,” and she has pointed to the lack of a communal dimension in the medieval discussions of the resurrection; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 249, 287.