Honors Thesis pt 2

The following is the introduction to my senior honors thesis. Not quite completed as there are few more things I'd like to add; specifically about the role of love as the model for community life. I won't really be able to talk about that anywhere else in the paper but it's pretty important, I think.

Thus:

“To the mystics of the 12^th Century, love was not only to be experienced; it was also to be set in order.”[1]

For St. Bernard and his contemporaries, the problem of love was the greatest preoccupation of their writings and really, of their entire lives. The Cistercian way of life was to be a schola dilectionis; a school of love. [Room to speak about love as the model for community life?] Therefore it would be only proper that their entire philosophical and theological focus be on the question of love.

It is impossible to begin to speak of this Cistercian ordination caritatis without immediately calling to mind the great Christian philosopher of the 4^th century, St. Augustine of Hippo. The influence of this great thinker on Bernard cannot be overstated. In fact, this paper will argue that Bernard took Augustine’s thought as foundational to his philosophy and theology of love, developing Augustine’s ideas into a fuller and more comprehensive system.

There is however, a major obstacle that stands in the way of such an assertion. In De Diligendo Deo, Bernard’s system of love begins with love of self (carnal/egotistical love) and progresses to a disinterested and pure love of God. Although heavily influenced by Augustine’s thought, it appears that the starting point of Bernard’s contemplative theology of love is directly contradictory to that of Augustine who says that “the total initiative in the life of grace rests with God and not with man.”

Further, critics have argued that Bernard’s system as a whole constitutes a contradiction. How does one reconcile the starting point of love and its goal? That is, how does one come to a pure and disinterested love out of a love that which is, by its very nature, interested?

To answer these questions, one must consider Bernard’s thought in its whole. Carnal or egotistical love is incontestably the starting point of his system of love, as found in De Diligendo Deo. However, De gratia et libero arbitrio, another work by Bernard, contemporary of De Diligendo Deo, constitutes an essential element to his over-all thought. In fact, one might even go so far as to state that this work is the dogmatic foundation from which his contemplative philosophy and theology of love is based.[2]

What is this dogmatic base found in De gratia et libero arbitrio? It is a philosophical and theological anthropology of man centered upon the nature of the will, more specifically, that of free choice. This treatment, guided by Augustine, constitutes the first question that Bernard seeks to answer in his system of love, his real starting point: the question of what love out to be. By beginning with this question, he establishes that love of God is indeed first by right.

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[1] McGinn 155

[2]This point is noted by Bernard McGinn in his Commentary on St. Bernard’s “On Grace and Free Choice.” Pg 3