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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• Sermons on wounds and languishing

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