The Church recently celebrated the Memorial of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth century Cistercian abbot and Doctor of the Church. It seems to me St. Bernard isn’t too well-known among local Catholics, but his wisdom deserves to be highlighted. My attention was first drawn to him about twenty years ago, when my wife gave me a rosary from the Vatican that had been blessed by Pope St. John Paul II on August 20, the feast of St. Bernard. More recently, I read his short treatise On Loving God, which I found to be very insightful.
In his book On Loving God, St. Bernard of Clairvaux explains that there are four degrees, or stages, through which we ought to progress as we learn to love God. Thinking about these four degrees of love can help us move from our natural selfishness to the heights of Christian charity.
The most natural form of love that we as humans experience is love for ourselves, for our own sake. This carnal, self-preserving love motivates us to take care of ourselves. As St. Paul says, “For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it…” (Ephesians 5:29).
The trouble is that our love for ourselves can easily become selfish. It’s a good and holy thing to desire and work for the necessities of life, but we can cross into selfishness if turn in on ourselves and begin to demand far more than we really need. As St. Bernard points out, Jesus puts a check on such selfishness by commanding us, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Bernard advises that we can love ourselves as generously as we want only if we show the same generosity to our neighbors.
Life presents us with many challenges. Difficulties in health, finances, relationships, and more are often greater than we can handle on our own. These struggles often drive us to our knees, as we discover that we need God’s help to make it through life and, of course, to eternal life.
We often thus learn to love God as we reach out to Him for help and thank Him for answering our prayers. As the Lord says in Psalm 50:15, “Then call on me in the day of distress. I will deliver you and you shall honor me.” At this stage, though, we are beginning to love God, but are still somewhat self-centered, focusing on the material and spiritual benefits of loving God, rather than on God himself.
Although we initially love God because of the good things that he gives to us, each of us must eventually discover that God himself is far greater than his gifts. Once we have begun to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), then the goodness of his creation begins to pale in comparison.
At this third stage, then, we love God not merely because it is beneficial to love God, but because God is so worthy of our love. Our hearts begin to easily cry out with the Psalmist, “Give praise to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever” (Psalm 118:1).
St. Bernard then speaks of a degree of love that we may glimpse in this life, but which is fully possible only in eternity, after our glorious resurrection from the dead at the end of time. We are called to love ourselves solely for the sake of God, free from all self-interest, seeing ourselves as God sees us, with all of our passions perfectly conformed to and transformed by the will of God. St. Bernard describes this exalted state with poetic language:
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 to 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.
Our fallen humanity holds us back from the fullness of this love. By the infusion of God’s grace, we can indeed hope for our human passions to be greatly purified, but some struggle will remain throughout this life. As St. Paul laments, “Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” (Romans 7:24). Even if we enter the glory of heaven and see God face to face, St. Bernard argues, we will still have some desire to be reunited with our bodies, because humans were never meant to be disembodied spirits.
When Jesus comes again in glory, however, the souls of all the saints will be reunited with their glorified bodies. These bodies will be conformed to the resurrected body of Jesus, and we will love God with both body and soul, with absolutely no shadow of self-interest, because the longing of our hearts will be perfectly fulfilled by our communion with God.
As the Second Vatican Council proclaimed and the Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats, “All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity” (CCC 2013). Following the teaching and example of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, let us all strive for the highest degrees of charity!