Series:

Monastic Studies

8 primary works

Book 12

Cover of Song of Songs I
A profound mystic, Bernard sought, above all and in all, to be with God and to bring all persons to the experience of God. His Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius which an entire generation found irresistible.

Book 13

Cover of On the Song of Songs II
A profound mystic, Bernard sought, above all and in all, to be with God and to bring all persons to the experience of God. His Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius which an entire generation found irresistible.

Book 17

Cover of The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman
This book tells the life of a saint by a saint. Malachy O'Morgair spent his life and considerable energies exhorting, wheedling, badgering, and praying his countrymen back to christian faith and practice. Bernard holds him up in this Life, eulogy, and hymn as a model to bishops.

Book 19

Cover of The Steps of Humility and Pride
The son of Burgundian nobility, Bernard admitted after years of struggle that humility remained for him the most elusive of the virtues. Yet the uncompromising vehemence of his love for God made him strive for what monastic tradition taught is indispensable to anyone hoping to share God's perfect love.

Book 20

Cover of On Loving God

On Loving God

by Bernard of Clairvaux

Published 13 April 2010
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who wrote this short book, was a Cistercian abbot and a prime mover in the reforming of this Order. In this, perhaps the most famous of his works, he explains that the way in which we should love God is to love him without measure. He then goes on to explain what the different degrees of this love are and which we encounter successively as we make progression in the spiritual way.

Book 23

Cover of Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The young abbot meditates on the singular role of the Virgin Mother of Christ 'to satisfy [his] own devotion', and in doing so bequeathes his own love of Mary and of Scripture to his Order and to the Church.

Book 25

Cover of In Praise of the New Knighthood
The monk and the knight-the two quintessentially medieval European heroes-were combined in the Knights Templar, men who took the monastic vows and defended the holy places and pilgrims. With characteristic eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux voices the cleric's view of the knights, warfare, and the conquest of the Holy Land in five chapters on the knight's vocation. Then, in another eight chapters the abbot who never visited the Holy Land provides a spiritual tour of the pilgrimage sites guarded by this 'new kind of knighthood.'

Book 29

Cover of Sermons on Conversion
The burgundian reformer abbot draws a picture of the perfect frontier bishop, and holds him up as a model for bishops everywhere. Conversion is used here not in the modern sense of transferring from one ecclesiastical body to another, but in the patristic and monastic sense of metanoia, turning one's entire being wholly to God.