St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the Riddle of Human DesireThe Necessity of a Reversal of Priorities in the Human Life of Desire

Introduction

Is desire a riddle of human existence? It is evident that it is a puzzle. We seem to be more than anything else creatures of desire. Being a bundle of desires, we live in and by desire. Often it is not that clear whether we live our desires or the other way around. Often we do not know and cannot articulate what we really want. Moreover, we all know the perplexing situation in which we find more and more hidden desires emerging from the depths of our being. When shall we be able to truthfully claim that we live with complete clarity about our desires? Perhaps the whole of human life is an apprenticeship of desire, in which we may come to learn what our desire is all about. We people of the twenty-first century live in a peculiar predicament in connection with desire. Namely, we live in a consumerist culture where a social mechanism of inducing desires is operative in the form of the constant creation of desirable objects. But why is it that the people of our age remain unsatisfied despite the superabundant objects of desire? In this predicament, we are more than ever in need of learning about Christian wisdom concerning human desire.

If we are perplexed about our desires, we can well turn to the twelfth-century abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, St. Bernard (1090–1153). His teaching on love-desire has special significance for us. It is a treasure trove of theological hermeneutics, psychological insights, and ascetic-contemplative wisdom. It combines and correlates profound theology with a rich phenomenology of the life of desire. So from him we can profitably learn a hermeneutics to discern our life of desire. Already before the time of Bernard, there had been profound Christian reflections on love and desire in the works of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Augustine.¹ They posited a necessary transformation of human love-desire on our way to union with and enjoyment of God as the ultimate object of desire. But the theme of “ordering of love” (ordinatio caritatis) took on new significance and urgency in twelfth-century Europe when monastic authors all earnestly took up “the problem of love” in their writings² and sought to offer a solution.³ Inheriting the legacy of this tradition of Christian wisdom concerning desire, Bernard offered the people of his age a powerful teaching on the ordering of love. His writings contain a wealth of valuable insights and sagacious counsels regarding desire that were born out of his own life experiences and penetrating reflections. In Sermon 51.3 of the Sermons on the Song of Songs, he declares to the monks of Clairvaux:⁴ “I am telling you of what comes within my own experience”; and in Sermon 3.1, he invites the monks to check whether or not his teaching makes any sense by probing “the book of our experience” in the light of his sermons. By measuring and testing Bernard’s teaching against their own experience, each one was invited to decide for himself whether it makes sense or not. By this mystagogical strategy, Bernard still invites us today to do the same and think along with him about the mystery of human desire.⁵

The present article intends to visit some salient aspects of Bernard’s teaching on the ordering of human love-desire as found in On Loving God (De diligendo Deo [Dil]) and the Sermons on the Song of Songs (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum [SCC]).⁶ It focuses on the predicament of human desire, the abbot’s theological anthropology, the ultimate destiny of human desire, the need for a reversal of priorities in our life of desire, two contrasting ways of living desire, his mysticism of the Word, and the dialectic between divine desire and human desire. In general, studies on Bernard’s thought include a treatment of his teaching on love, which tends to focus on doctrine.⁷ Certainly...