The Measure of Love

Love as Knowledge

Bernard’s central theological claim is that love is a form of knowledge — that the soul comes to know God not primarily through argument or speculation but through a transformation of desire that Augustine had described as the reordering of love. The soul was made to love God above all things; sin has disordered that love, directing it toward lesser objects; grace restores the right order; and the restored love is itself a form of knowledge that no merely intellectual operation can produce.

This has profound implications for literary criticism, because it suggests that the deepest form of understanding is not detached observation but engaged love — that to know something truly is to be rightly related to it, not merely to have correct information about it.

What the Sermons on the Song of Songs Reveal

Bernard’s eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs are one of the monuments of medieval Latin literature — a sustained reading of the biblical love poem as an allegory of the soul’s relationship with God that is also, simultaneously, a theology of desire, a psychology of prayer, and a guide to the spiritual life.

The soul that the sermons describe is not a disembodied intellect but a creature of desire, longing, and sometimes painful waiting — a creature whose relationship with God is not serene possession but dynamic pursuit. The beloved withdraws; the soul searches; the finding is always partial and always preparatory to a deeper seeking.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose deepest dimension is the disorder of love introduced by the Fall. The seed of the serpent works, in Bernard’s analysis, primarily through the misdirection of desire — through the soul’s tendency to love lesser things as if they were ultimate, to find its rest in what cannot finally satisfy it.

Bernard’s entire literary and theological project is a form of resistance to this disorder: a sustained attempt to reorient desire toward its proper object, to show the soul what it was made to love and how that love transforms everything else. In this sense his work is among the most directly apologetic in the Christian tradition.

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