Song of Songs — Chapter 1 46 sermons
The Title of the Book
Read this sermon →Sermon I · Download all sermons as PDF →
Before he opens the text at all, Bernard opens the question of who is ready to read it. This book is bread, he says, not milk — meant for those already trained by long meditation on the things of heaven. A short sermon, almost entirely about the kind of reader the Song demands, before a single verse has been touched.
The Incarnation of Christ, Expected
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Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth. Bernard hears this as the patriarchs’ own impatience — weary of a God who comes only through stammering prophets, and asking instead for the thing itself, unmediated. He admits the sermon costs him some shame: he doubts his own age feels that longing half as keenly.
What It Is to Kiss the Feet, the Hand, and the Lips of the Lord
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The sermon that gives Bernard’s whole commentary its shape: a threefold kiss — the feet, marking conversion; the hand, the grace that follows; the mouth, a rare encounter almost no one reaches. He calls it hidden manna: whoever tastes it still hungers for more.
The Threefold Progress of the Soul
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Bernard returns to yesterday’s threefold kiss and presses on one detail: why the Bride asked, precisely, for the kiss of the mouth — not the more modest requests of foot or hand. The whole sermon turns on that single word.
Of the Four Orders of Spirits
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A pause for taxonomy before the kiss is taken up again: animal, human, angelic, and the one Spirit who needs no body at all. Methodical and almost scholastic in tone, it lays groundwork Bernard will lean on for several sermons to come.
Of the Supreme and Infinite Spirit, Who Is God
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Continuing directly from the previous day, Bernard asks why God alone is truly incorporeal — needing no body, no organ, no instrument to act. A close, careful argument, more philosophical than most of what surrounds it.
Of the Ardent Love of the Soul for God
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Bernard says he has invited his own questions this time, moving from the kiss of the foot to the kiss of the hand — from penitence to the grace that meets it. The tone is warmer here, more clearly devotional than the two taxonomic sermons just before it.
That the Kiss of God Is the Holy Spirit
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The third and highest kiss, named directly: the kiss of the mouth is the Holy Spirit Himself. Bernard calls it a hallowed secret, of consummate sweetness, rarely experienced and understood only with difficulty — the climax of the whole three-sermon sequence on the kiss.
Of the Breasts of the Bridegroom
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Having spent eight sermons on a single opening image, Bernard finally turns to the verse itself and begins the commentary proper. A hinge sermon, marking the shift from prologue to exposition.
Of the Three Spiritual Perfumes
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Penitence, devotion, and piety — three fragrances Bernard reads out of the Bride’s perfumed name, structuring the soul’s progress as a movement through scent rather than argument.
Of Two Principal Facts in Human Redemption
Read this sermon →Sermon XI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Continuing the perfume of devotion from the previous day, Bernard wants his hearers to share in a holy unction — a devotion that acknowledges what God has done with joy rather than mere duty.
Of the Perfume of Piety
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Bernard distinguishes the sting of penitence from the comfort of piety: one wounds before it heals, the other simply heals. A short, gentle sermon, quieter than most of what surrounds it.
That Praise and Glory Is Always to Be Rendered unto God
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The sea is the source of every river, Bernard says, and Christ is the source of every virtue. Whatever good is found in a soul, none of it originates there — it is owed back to the one true source.
Of the Church of Faithful Christians, and of the Synagogue
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Reading Judah and Israel as figures of Synagogue and Church, Bernard traces how those who once were not a people became one people, joined at a single cornerstone. A more theological, less personal register than the sermons around it.
In What Manner the Name of Jesus Is a Salutary Medicine
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One of Bernard’s most quoted passages: the Name of Jesus as honey in the mouth, music in the ear, medicine for every wound of the soul. Sweetness, here, is not decoration but the actual mechanism of healing.
Of Contrition of Heart, and of the Three Kinds of True Confession
Read this sermon →Sermon XVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard reaches for an odd Old Testament image — Elisha stretching himself over a dead child, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes — as a figure for the work contrition does in a soul that has gone cold.
That It Is Needful to Observe the Approach and Departure of the Holy Spirit
Read this sermon →Sermon XVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Do we dare follow the Spirit into His deeper recesses, Bernard asks, or only watch from a distance? A sermon about spiritual attentiveness — learning to notice when grace arrives, and when it quietly withdraws.
Of the Two Operations of the Holy Spirit: Effusion and Infusion
Read this sermon →Sermon XVIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
The Spirit works in two directions at once, Bernard argues: inwardly, strengthening the virtues that lead to salvation, and outwardly, equipping a person with gifts that serve others. Editorial note: the opening sentences of this sermon were disrupted in the OCR source and have been reconstructed from context — worth checking against a print copy.
Of the Nature, Manner, and Properties of the Angelical Love Towards God
Read this sermon →Sermon XIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
“Therefore do the virgins love Thee” — Bernard reads the fragrance poured out on the Bride as something that doesn’t stop with her, drawing other souls, virgin and untested, into the same love by simple attraction.
Of the Three Ways in Which We Love God
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Bernard opens with Paul’s anathema against anyone who does not love Christ, then spends the rest of the sermon softening that severity into something closer to gratitude — structuring degrees of love rather than simply demanding it.
In What Manner the Bride Asks to Be Drawn to Follow Her Spouse
Read this sermon →Sermon XXI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Draw me after Thee. Bernard lingers on the oddity of a willing soul asking to be pulled along — the difference, he argues, between being dragged and being carried by someone stronger than yourself toward something you already want.
Of the Four Perfumes of the Bridegroom and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Read this sermon →Sermon XXII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Having spent several sermons on the Bride’s perfumes, Bernard turns to the Bridegroom’s own, mapping them onto justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude — the classical virtues read as a fragrance Christ Himself wears.
Of Three Ways of Contemplating God, under the Figure of Three Storerooms
Read this sermon →Sermon XXIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
The King hath brought me into His storerooms. Bernard structures contemplative life as a series of rooms entered in sequence, each deeper than the last — an architecture of access rather than a single threshold crossed once.
Principally Against the Detestable Vice of Detraction
Read this sermon →Sermon XXIV · Download all sermons as PDF →
A rare moment where Bernard’s own circumstances surface directly: he has just returned from Rome, a long schism finally over, peace restored to the Church. From that relief he pivots hard into a warning against the much smaller, much pettier sin of backbiting among his own monks.
The Bride Is Black, Yet Comely
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Answering those who mock her as “black,” the Bride does not return scorn for scorn — she calls her critics daughters of Jerusalem rather than the harsher names they have earned. Bernard turns this into a model for anyone set over others: the good pastor meets resistance with healing rather than punishment.
St. Bernard Laments the Death of His Brother Gerard
Read this sermon →Sermon XXVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard begins, as scheduled, continuing his exposition of “the tents of Kedar” — but partway through, the lecture breaks open. His brother Gerard has just died, and Bernard turns from the text altogether to speak his grief directly, in some of the most personal prose in the entire collection.
Of the Adornment of the Bride, and in What Sense the Holy Soul Is Called Heaven
Read this sermon →Sermon XXVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard resumes teaching the day after Gerard’s funeral, naming the difficulty plainly: it feels wrong to keep mourning someone who is now, by his own conviction, in joy. A quiet, deliberate return to ordinary exposition, written in the shadow of the sermon just before it.
Of the Blackness, Yet Beauty, of the Bride
Read this sermon →Sermon XXVIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Returning to the curtains of Solomon and the tents of Kedar, Bernard works through what it means for the same Bride to be called both black and beautiful — not a contradiction to resolve, but two things equally true of her at once.
Of the Complaint of the Church Against Her Persecutors
Read this sermon →Sermon XXIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
My mother’s children were angry with me. Bernard names Annas, Caiaphas, and Judas as the Synagogue’s own sons turning against the Church — family violence, in effect, since the Church is herself a daughter of the same household.
That the Faithful People Are Signified by the Vineyards
Read this sermon →Sermon XXX · Download all sermons as PDF →
They made me the keeper of the vineyards. Bernard notices the strange detail that the very people who attacked the Bride are also the ones who gave her this charge — correction and commission, he suggests, can come from the same hand.
The Excellency of the Vision of God
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Tell me where Thou feedest, where Thou makest Thy flock to rest at noon. Bernard surveys the different ways Christ makes Himself visible to seeking souls — never in exactly the same form twice, because no soul is yet able to see Him as He fully is.
Christ Communicates Himself to the Holy Soul as Bridegroom and as Physician
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Picking up the same verse as the previous day, Bernard pauses to recap the modes of vision already covered before pressing further — framing Christ’s two distinct roles toward the soul: the one who heals, and the one who is loved.
Of Those Things Which a Devout Soul Ought to Seek Without Ceasing
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard pairs the Bride’s question with Job’s — tell me why Thou judgest me thus — reading both not as accusations but as a soul asking to understand its own affliction rather than simply endure it blindly.
Of Humility and of Patience
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXIV · Download all sermons as PDF →
If thou know not… go thy way forth. Bernard reaches back to Moses, who presumed to ask for a vision of God’s glory, as a parallel to the Bride’s own reproof — humility, here, as the precondition for any vision at all.
Of the Sharp Reproof Which the Bridegroom Gives to the Bride
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard lingers on just how harsh this rebuke actually is — the language a master uses to dismiss a servant who has deeply offended. A sermon willing to sit in the discomfort of the text rather than soften it.
That the Knowledge of Literature Is Good, but Self-Knowledge More Useful
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard admits he is preaching today more from duty than desire — a promise made, a charity owed. What follows is one of his clearest statements that no learning matters if it isn’t accompanied by honest self-knowledge.
Of the Two Kinds of Knowledge and the Two Kinds of Ignorance
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Continuing yesterday’s theme, Bernard structures two kinds of not-knowing — ignorance of oneself, and ignorance of others — as two distinct failures with two distinct remedies.
How from Ignorance of God Comes Despair
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A soul can reform its conduct and still fall into despair, Bernard argues, if it doesn’t also come to know God rightly. Conduct corrected without that knowledge leaves the deeper problem untouched.
Of the Chariots of Pharaoh, That Is, the Devil
Read this sermon →Sermon XXXIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
I have compared thee to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh’s chariots. Bernard reads the Exodus — the Church prefigured fleeing Egypt through the Red Sea — as the deep background to this otherwise strange image of comparison.
What Is Meant by the Face of the Soul
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Thy cheeks are beautiful as the turtle-dove’s. Bernard reads this as the Bride’s blush after correction — modesty, not vanity, as the beauty being praised, and a sign that the reproof of the previous sermons has actually landed.
Of the Great Consolation Which the Bride Feels from Contemplation of the Divine Glory
Read this sermon →Sermon XLI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Thy neck is as chains of gold. Necklaces are usually worn to supply a beauty someone lacks; Bernard notices that here the comparison runs the other way — the Bride’s own beauty is what would give the gold its worth.
Of Two Kinds of Humility: Born of Truth, and Warmed by Charity
Read this sermon →Sermon XLII · Download all sermons as PDF →
When the King sitteth at His table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof. Bernard notices the Bride answers her reproof indirectly — not to the King Himself, but to His companions — and reads real humility into that very reluctance to address Him directly.
How Meditation on the Passion of Jesus Christ Enables the Soul to Pass Through Adversity
Read this sermon →Sermon XLIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me. The title shifts from King to well-beloved, the setting from banquet-room to closeness — and Bernard reads the change as the whole point: majesty drawing nearer rather than staying at a distance.
That Correction Ought to Be Adapted to the Character of Offenders
Read this sermon →Sermon XLIV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Myrrh for the bitterness of Christ’s death, the grape-cluster for the sweetness of His resurrection — from this pairing Bernard draws a pastoral principle: correction itself should carry both notes, suited to who is actually receiving it.
Of the Twofold Beauty of the Soul
Read this sermon →Sermon XLV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Behold, thou art fair… thou hast doves’ eyes. Bernard traces a sequence — presumption, reproof, amendment, recompense — and reads the praise of her eyes as part of what’s restored only after the relationship has been mended, not before.
Of the State and Composition of the Whole Church
Read this sermon →Sermon XLVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Our bed is flourishing; the beams of our houses are of cedar. Bernard reads the whole verse as nuptial-chamber imagery — the furnishing of a shared dwelling — closing out the long traverse of Canticles 1 that began, forty-five sermons earlier, with a single kiss.
Song of Songs — Chapter 2 28 sermons
Of the Threefold Flower of Holiness
Read this sermon →Sermon XLVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the valleys. Bernard notices the Bride has just praised their shared couch as decked with flowers — and reads the Bridegroom’s reply as a gentle correction: He is Himself the flower. The beauty she enjoyed was never the room’s to give; it was His all along.
Of the Praises Which the Bride and the Bridegroom Address to Each Other
Read this sermon →Sermon XLVIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. Bernard reads the thorns as the ordinary friction of life in the flesh — not dramatic persecution, just the daily irritation of living alongside people who pierce and trouble. The lily’s beauty isn’t that it avoids thorns, but that it keeps blooming among them.
How Charity Is Regulated by Discretion
Read this sermon →Sermon XLIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
He brought me into the banqueting house, and His banner over me was love. The Bride returns from this encounter so visibly changed that her maidens think her drunk. Bernard reads that misreading charitably: real love, seen from outside, can look indistinguishable from intoxication.
Of Two Kinds of Charity: That of Feeling and That of Action
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Bernard admits he’s departing from the expected next verse to gather up “fragments” left over from yesterday’s feast — and uses the detour to distinguish charity felt from charity done, since the two don’t always arrive together.
How the Bride Makes Petition That the Fruits of Good Works May Abound
Read this sermon →Sermon LI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Stay me up with flowers… for I languish with love. Bernard reads this not as weakness but as the particular exhaustion that follows real nearness to God — a languishing that only deeper love, not less of it, can answer.
Of That Ecstasy Which Is Called Contemplation
Read this sermon →Sermon LII · Download all sermons as PDF →
I charge you… that ye stir not up, nor wake my love till she please. The Bride asks her companions to guard her stillness rather than interrupt it — Bernard reads this as instruction for anyone tending a soul in contemplation: protect the rest, don’t rush it toward usefulness.
By 'Mountains' and 'Hills' Are Signified the Heavenly Spirits
Read this sermon →Sermon LIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
The voice of my beloved. The Bride’s maidens have grown quieter, more careful not to intrude on her contemplation — and Bernard reads their new restraint as evidence the Bridegroom Himself has been shaping them, even though they were never His direct concern in the text.
Another Interpretation: By Mountains Are Signified Angels and Men; by Hills, Demons
Read this sermon →Sermon LIV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard offers a second reading of yesterday’s verse rather than defending the first — openly inviting his hearers to weigh both and keep whichever serves them better, a rare moment of interpretive humility in the collection.
How It Is Possible, Through a True Penitence, to Escape the Judgment of God
Read this sermon →Sermon LV · Download all sermons as PDF →
My Beloved is like a roe or a young hart. Bernard reads the swiftness of these animals as a figure for how fast grace can move once true penitence opens the way — agility, not distance, becomes the measure of the soul’s nearness to God.
That Sins and Vices Are as Walls, Interposing Between God and the Sinner
Read this sermon →Sermon LVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Behold, He standeth behind our wall… shewing Himself through the lattice. Even in approach, the Bridegroom doesn’t force entry — Bernard reads the wall itself as sin, and the lattice as the cracks of grace still visible through it, glimpsed but not yet fully given.
That the Visitations of the Lord Are to Be Carefully and Reverently Observed
Read this sermon →Sermon LVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
My beloved spake, and said to me. Bernard slows the verse down almost frame by frame — He comes, He hastens, He draws near, He looks, He speaks — reading the sequence itself as a lesson in noticing grace's approach rather than only its arrival.
How the Bridegroom Bids the Bride to Undertake the Rule and Training of Souls
Read this sermon →Sermon LVIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. Bernard catches the apparent contradiction — hadn’t He just forbidden anyone to wake her? — and reads the shift as the difference between rest for its own sake and rest that has done its work and is now sent outward, toward other souls needing care.
Of the Groans of the Soul Which Sighs for Its Heavenly Fatherland
Read this sermon →Sermon LIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
The voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Bernard notices the Bridegroom speaks of earth with the intimacy of someone who actually lives there — not visiting from heaven, but at home enough in human experience to name its smallest seasons.
Of the Incredulity of the Jews, and of Their Slaying Christ
Read this sermon →Sermon LX · Download all sermons as PDF →
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs. Bernard reads the unripe fruit as a season of promise rather than failure — an image he turns, more darkly, toward those who saw the same signs of spring and still refused to recognise what was arriving.
How the Church Finds the Riches of Divine Mercy in the Hollows of Christ's Wounds
Read this sermon →Sermon LXI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. The Bridegroom repeats Himself nearly word for word from a few verses earlier — and Bernard reads the repetition itself as tenderness, the kind of thing said twice only because the speaker means it that much.
What Is Meant by the Abiding of the Faithful Soul in the Clefts of the Rock
Read this sermon →Sermon LXII · Download all sermons as PDF →
My dove that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs. Bernard reads the dove’s hiding place not as a single refuge but as the hollow spaces within the gathered company of the saints — safety found specifically in what others have left open for you.
That a Man Ought to Cultivate Carefully His Vineyard
Read this sermon →Sermon LXIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. Bernard refuses outright the obvious reading — that this is simply good husbandry advice. The vines are souls, the tender grapes the fragile beginnings of virtue, and the foxes two particular dangers he goes on to name: flatterers and detractors.
Of the Temptations of More Mature Monks; Also of Taking Heretics
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Bernard makes good on yesterday’s promise and names the foxes outright: temptation itself, unavoidable and even necessary, since there is no crown for a fight no one had to fight. The sermon closes, as so many do, with Bernard’s own “AMEN” — after which the source text inserts an entire historical letter as background, omitted here as outside the sermon proper.
Of Secret Heretics, Whose Perverse Doctrines St. Bernard Severely Censures
Read this sermon →Sermon LXV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard admits he’s now given three sermons to a single verse and asks his hearers’ patience for one more — turning from his own monks, already warned, to the heretics themselves, whose errors he takes up directly and without much patience at all.
Concerning the Errors of Heretics with Respect to Marriage, Baptism, and Purgatory
Read this sermon →Sermon LXVI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Still occupied with the same foxes, Bernard moves from naming the danger to cataloguing it — specific heretical claims about marriage, infant baptism, and the intercession of saints, answered one by one rather than dismissed in general terms.
Of the Wonderful Expression of the Love of the Bride
Read this sermon →Sermon LXVII · Download all sermons as PDF →
My Beloved is mine, and I am His. Until now the Bridegroom has done all the speaking; Bernard pauses to ask for help simply receiving the Bride’s own words rightly, as though her voice demands a different kind of attention than His did.
How Christ the Bridegroom Inclines unto and Gives Attention to His Bride
Read this sermon →Sermon LXVIII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard says he’s been saving something back from yesterday — a joy held overnight so it could be shared properly today. The sermon itself is almost entirely about that holding: how grace sometimes arrives and is kept, rather than immediately spent.
All That Lifts Itself Up Against the Knowledge and Service of God Is to Be Abased
Read this sermon →Sermon LXIX · Download all sermons as PDF →
My Beloved is Mine, and I am His. Bernard returns to a question raised the day before: can words spoken for the whole Church be claimed, just as truly, by one soul alone? He answers yes — without making the claim any less corporate for being personal.
Why the Bridegroom Is Called Beloved
Read this sermon →Sermon LXX · Download all sermons as PDF →
My Beloved is mine, and I am His: He feedeth among the lilies. Bernard catches the audacity of the claim before excusing it — for an ordinary soul to say it has table-fellowship with the One who feeds among lilies is either presumption or the simple truth of love. He argues, at length, for the second.
Of Spiritual Lilies, That Is, Good Works
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXI · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard picks up exactly where yesterday left off — the Bridegroom as lily, untouched by the thorns that mark the Bride’s own life — and asks what it would mean for good works themselves to carry fragrance and colour, not just moral correctness.
The Meaning of the Words "The Day Breaks and the Shadows Flee Away"
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXII · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard admits real uncertainty about how to read this closing phrase — whether it belongs with what comes before or after — and lets that ambiguity stand rather than resolving it artificially, tracing both possible readings through to their different ends.
How Christ Shall Come to Judge in Human Form
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Return, my Beloved. Bernard voices the obvious objection first — He only just left, why call Him back so soon? — before answering it: the Bride has, in effect, forgotten everything except Him, which makes any absence feel sudden no matter how brief it actually was.
Of the Visitations of the Bridegroom, the Word, to the Holy Soul
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXIV · Download all sermons as PDF →
Return, my Beloved. Bernard reads the single word — Return — as proof enough that the Bridegroom had truly been present before; you don’t call back someone who was never really there. Chapter two closes on that same rhythm it opened with: nearness, withdrawal, and the ache that calls it back.
Song of Songs — Chapter 3 12 sermons
God Is to Be Sought in Due Time, Place, and Manner
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXV · Canticles 3:1 · Download all sermons as PDF →
By night on my bed I sought Him whom my soul loveth. The Bridegroom hasn’t come back, even after she called Him — Bernard reads the delay itself as instructive, not punitive: there is a right time to seek, and this isn’t always it.
Of the Glory of the Bridegroom Sitting at the Right Hand of His Father
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXVI · Canticles 3:2 · Download all sermons as PDF →
In the streets and in the broad ways I will seek Him. Bernard catches something almost endearing in the Bride’s logic: she still thinks like a child, assuming He must be found exactly where she last expected Him, rather than wherever He actually is now.
Concerning the Bad Pastors of the Church
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXVII · Canticles 3:2 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard turns from the Bride’s search to a harder subject — the leaders who are supposed to help others find God and instead get in the way. A sharper, more institutional sermon than most of what surrounds it.
That the Bride, the Church of the Elect, Was Predestinated by God Before All Ages
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXVIII · Canticles 3:2 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard returns to a word that had stopped him short before — found — and works through the scruple it raised: if the Church was chosen before the world began, what does it mean for her to be sought, let alone found, at all?
Of the Strong and Indissoluble Love Wherewith the Soul Holds to Its Lord
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXIX · Canticles 3:3 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Saw ye Him whom my soul loveth? Bernard opens not with exposition but with an outburst — love itself, addressed directly, violent and burning, the kind that won’t allow anything else to be thought of.
An Acute and Profound Argument Respecting the Image or Word of God, and the Soul
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXX · Canticles 3:3 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard admits some of his monks have grumbled that his recent sermons have been too abstract, not practical enough — and instead of simplifying, presses further into theology, taking up Gilbert of Poictiers’ controversial teaching on the Trinity directly.
Of the Similarity and Likeness of the Soul to the Word
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXI · Canticles 3:3 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Continuing the inquiry from yesterday, Bernard asks what kind of resemblance actually exists between the soul and the Word — not metaphorical decoration, but a real, structural likeness worth examining carefully.
How the Soul, While Remaining Like Unto God, Loses by Sin a Portion of Its Likeness
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXII · Canticles 3:3 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard checks in with his hearers before continuing a difficult line of argument — can the soul remain like God in essence while losing something of that likeness through sin? He works the apparent contradiction rather than smoothing it away.
Of the Manner in Which the Soul May Recover Its Resemblance to the Bridegroom
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXIII · Canticles 3:3 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Three days into the same demanding argument, Bernard turns from diagnosis to remedy: if sin can erode the soul’s likeness to God, what restores it? A more practical close to a deeply theological run of sermons.
That the Soul, Seeking God, Is Anticipated by Him
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXIV · Canticles 3:1 · Download all sermons as PDF →
On the night-seeking that opens chapter three, Bernard makes a turn that quietly undoes the whole premise of seeking: no soul, he says, ever began looking for God first. It was already found, already sought, before it knew enough to ask.
Of the Seven Needs of the Soul, on Account of Which It Seeks the Word
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXV · Canticles 3:1 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard catalogues, with real specificity, the reasons a soul goes looking for God in the first place — seven distinct needs, named one by one, rather than a single generic ache.
Of the Caution and Modesty Becoming to the Soul in Seeking the Word
Read this sermon →Sermon LXXXVI · Canticles 3:1 · Download all sermons as PDF →
Bernard’s final word on how a soul ought to seek — carefully, without presumption — and then, mid-argument, his own words simply stop. He died while writing this sermon. What survives ends exactly where his life did.