Sermons on the Song of Songs

Summary

Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse. Instead, Bernard lingers over phrases from the biblical love poem and turns them into meditations on the soul's desire for God, the church's relation to Christ, humility, contemplation, temptation, and charity. The erotic language of the Song becomes a disciplined vocabulary for spiritual longing. Bernard speaks to monks who have renounced ordinary household life, yet he does not preach cold detachment. He intensifies desire and redirects it. Kisses, fragrance, chambers, wounds, beauty, absence, and embrace become signs of the soul's education in love. The sermons also reveal a communal pedagogy. Bernard addresses brothers whose inner lives must be trained by Scripture, liturgy, obedience, and mutual charity. He warns against pride, curiosity, vanity, and spiritual presumption, treating the monastery as a school for desire. The medical lens is important because Bernard often speaks of wounds of love, sickness, healing, and the physicianly work of grace. His psychology is not modern; it is ascetic, sacramental, and hierarchical. Still, the sermons display a subtle account of longing, attachment, shame, and transformation. Historically, they belong to the twelfth-century flowering of affective piety, when monastic writers gave new emotional intensity to biblical interpretation. The collection also has a darker public edge because Bernard, the tender preacher of divine love, was also a force in ecclesiastical conflict and crusading propaganda. That tension makes the sermons more interesting, not less. They show how a language of intimacy can produce genuine spiritual self-knowledge while existing within institutions capable of coercion. Read with Augustine, the Song sermons make Christian interpretation a medicine of desire: the wound is longing, and the cure is rightly ordered love. Their intimacy is therefore both literary achievement and spiritual discipline.

Plot or Argument

• The love poem enters the cloister

  Bernard reads the Song's sensual language as a text for monastic desire, contemplation, and union with God.

• The soul learns through longing

  Absence, fragrance, kisses, and wounds become figures for the gradual purification and intensification of love.

• Humility guards contemplation

  Bernard repeatedly warns that spiritual sweetness without humility becomes vanity or presumption.

• Communal discipline shapes inward life

  The sermons address a monastic audience whose desires are trained by obedience, liturgy, and shared practice.

Lessons

• Desire can be disciplined without being killed

  Bernard does not ask his monks to become loveless. He tries to redirect longing toward a divine object, making desire the engine of transformation.

  • How does Bernard distinguish purified desire from ordinary appetite?
  • What does ascetic language preserve that moralism might lose?

• A metaphor can train emotion

  The Song's erotic images become exercises in feeling. Bernard shows how repeated metaphors can shape what a community notices, fears, and hopes for.

  • When does allegory deepen a text?
  • How can repeated images alter emotional habits?

• Intimacy and authority can coexist uneasily

  The sermons are tender and searching, but Bernard also lived inside powerful ecclesiastical structures. His work reminds readers that intense inner language does not remove institutional questions.

  • How should readers hold Bernard's mystical tenderness beside his public power?
  • Can spiritual intimacy become a tool of authority?

Context

The sermons belong to twelfth-century Cistercian monasticism, a reform movement emphasizing austerity, biblical meditation, and affective devotion. Bernard was one of medieval Europe's most influential religious figures.

Composition

Bernard preached the sermons over many years at Clairvaux and did not finish the entire Song. They were preserved as Latin monastic sermons and circulated widely.

Reception

The collection became a classic of medieval spirituality and influenced later mystical and devotional writing. Modern readers value its psychology of desire while also reassessing Bernard's role in crusade preaching and controversy.

Comparisons

• confessions

  Augustine's restless heart and Bernard's wounded love both turn desire into the central problem of spiritual healing.

• the-bible

  The sermons are a sustained example of medieval Christian allegory applied to the Song of Songs.

• homilies-on-the-gospel-of-john

  Augustine trains attention through signs; Bernard trains desire through lyrical images of absence and embrace.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Sermon 1, where Bernard tells his monks that they need bread rather than milk and places the Song after Solomon's other books, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, as the crown of a spiritual education.
• The opening verse, Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth, which occupies Bernard for several sermons. In Sermon 2 the kiss becomes the Incarnation, and in Sermon 3 the soul progresses from kissing the feet, to the hand, to the mouth.
• Sermon 26, where Bernard breaks off his commentary to mourn his brother Gerard, a monk of Clairvaux. Notice how a sermon about divine love makes room for raw human grief.
• Sermon 74, in which Bernard speaks cautiously of his own experience of the Word coming to his soul and withdrawing, known only by its effects.
• The slow pace of the whole collection: Bernard preached eighty-six sermons over nearly two decades and reached only the opening of the Song's third chapter before his death.

Key terms and names

Bride and Bridegroom

The two lovers of the Song, read by Bernard as the Church and Christ, and also as the individual soul and the Word. He moves freely between the two readings.

The three kisses

In Sermon 3, the stages of the soul's progress: the kiss of the feet in repentance, the kiss of the hand in growth in virtue, and the kiss of the mouth in contemplative union.

Clairvaux

The Cistercian abbey in Burgundy that Bernard founded in 1115 and led as abbot. The sermons were preached, at least in literary form, to its monks.

Cistercians

The reformed Benedictine order, begun at Citeaux, that sought a stricter, simpler monastic life of manual labour, liturgy, and biblical meditation. Bernard was its most famous member.

The book of experience

Bernard's way of describing what the monk must read alongside Scripture: his own inner life. He insists that the Song can only be understood by those who have tasted the love it describes.

Gerard

Bernard's brother and fellow monk, whose death in 1138 prompted the lament of Sermon 26, one of the most personal passages in medieval literature.

Allegory

Reading a text as having a spiritual meaning beyond its literal sense. Bernard inherited the allegorical reading of the Song from Origen and the Fathers and made it a school of desire for monks.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In Sermon 1, why does Bernard say his monks need different teaching from people living in the world, and how does he place the Song among Solomon's books?
2. Comprehension What are the three kisses of Sermon 3, and what stage of the spiritual life does each represent?
3. Comprehension What interrupts the commentary in Sermon 26, and how does Bernard return to his text afterward?
4. Interpretation Why does Bernard choose a love poem full of bodily language as the highest text for celibate monks, and what does he do with that language rather than suppress it?
5. Interpretation Bernard says the Song can be understood only by experience. What kind of experience does he mean, and how does that change what it means to read Scripture?
6. Interpretation In Sermon 26 Bernard defends his tears for Gerard against those who think a monk should not grieve. What does his grief show about the relation between love of God and love of a brother?
7. Big Question Is human desire something to be overcome in the spiritual life, or something to be educated and redirected toward God?
8. Big Question Can the language of human love truly describe the love between God and the soul, or does it always fall away before the reality?

Faith Connections

• Song of Songs 1:2 (Scripture)

  The verse Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth opens the Song and occupies Bernard's first sermons. Reading it as the longing of the patriarchs and prophets for the Incarnation, and then of the soul for the Word, sets the method for the whole collection.

• 1 John 4:7-19 (Scripture)

  John teaches that God is love and that we love because he first loved us. Bernard's sermons, especially the closing sermons on the soul as bride, rest on this order: the soul's longing is itself a response to a love that came first.

• Origen, Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs (Church Fathers)

  Origen, in the third century, first read the Song systematically as the love of Christ for the Church and for the individual soul. Bernard stands in this tradition but gives it a new warmth by drawing constantly on the monk's own experience.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book X (Great Conversation)

  Augustine describes God as calling, shining, breathing fragrance, and being tasted, turning the five senses into a language for divine love. Bernard's sermons inherit this way of speaking and extend it across the whole sensual vocabulary of the Song.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The Song of Songs, as Scripture, must speak of the love between God and the soul. Human beings are made to love, and their desires are not to be destroyed but purified and directed to their true end. The Song's language of kisses, fragrance, and embrace gives the soul words for this longing, and the soul learns its meaning only by experiencing it through repentance, virtue, and contemplation. Therefore the monk who reads the Song in humility will be trained by it to love God with the whole of his desire.

Rhetorical device: allegory. In Sermon 2 Bernard reads the kiss of the mouth as the Incarnation: the one who kisses is the Word, the one kissed is the human flesh he assumes, and the kiss itself is the union of God and man in Christ.

Debate: Resolved: Bernard's spiritual reading of the Song of Songs is truer to its place in Scripture than a reading of it as human love poetry alone.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Bernard teaches celibate monks with the most sensual book of the Bible. Using the kiss of Sermons 2 and 3, the lament for Gerard in Sermon 26, and the account of the Word's visits in Sermon 74, argue how Bernard understands the relation between human desire and the love of God.

Comparison with Confessions: Augustine's Confessions trace a restless heart that finds rest only in God, and Bernard's sermons train monks to direct their longing toward the Word. Compare how each writer understands desire, its disorder, and its healing, and argue which gives the fuller account of how the soul learns to love God.

Medical Lens

Bernard's sermons are useful for the history of religious psychology. They medicalize longing through wounds, sickness, and cure, while transforming erotic language into ascetic therapy. Any modern psychological reading should be carefully hedged.

• Early sermons on the kiss

  The language of bodily intimacy becomes an account of spiritual desire and affective transformation.

  Sexuality MedicalizedMind Body
• Sermons on wounds and languishing

  Bernard's love-sickness imagery shows medieval overlaps between emotion, body, and religious cure.

  Melancholia DepressionPhilosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Write about love-sickness in Bernard as a medieval alternative to modern categories of desire and mood.

• Poetry

  Compose a short sequence where each physical sense becomes a step in spiritual longing.

Further Reading

• The Growth of Mysticism, Bernard McGinn

  Places Bernard within the broader history of Christian mysticism.

• Bernard of Clairvaux, G. R. Evans

  A concise study of Bernard's life and theology.