On Loving God

It is Bernard of Clairvaux's great little treatise on why and how we should love God. Writing in the twelfth century, Bernard answers the question of why God is to be loved by saying: because of who he is and all he has given — and the question of how much, with his famous reply, that the measure of loving God is to love him without measure. He then traces the soul's ascent through degrees of love.

A twelfth-century French abbot, the founder of the monastery of Clairvaux and one of the most influential figures of the medieval church — a reformer, preacher, and mystic whose warmth of devotion earned him the title 'the honey-sweet doctor.' On Loving God is among his best-known works and a classic of Christian spirituality.

That God deserves our love for his own sake, because of who he is, and that we owe it to him for all he has given — first the gifts of creation and life, and above all the gift of himself in redemption. God loved us first and gave himself for us; the only fitting response is to love him in return, and to love him because he is worthy of it, not merely for his benefits.

Asked what the measure of loving God should be, Bernard replies that the measure is to love without measure — that is, there is no limit at which love for God becomes excessive. Because God's own love and worth are boundless, the love we owe him knows no proper ceiling; we are always to love him more, never to decide we have loved him enough.

Bernard traces the soul's ascent through stages: first a man loves himself for his own sake; then he loves God for his own benefit; then he comes to love God for God's own sake; and at last, rarely and only in part in this life, he loves even himself for God's sake, wholly caught up in the love of God. It is a map of how self-love may be transformed into pure love of God.

It is short and, for its depth, remarkably warm and readable. Bernard writes as a lover of God rather than a mere theologian, and much of the treatise has the tone of devotion rather than argument. Its images and its ardour have kept it alive for eight centuries, and it remains one of the most accessible doorways into medieval Christian spirituality.

Because the question he answers — why and how to love God — is permanent, and few have answered it with such clarity and fire. Bernard cuts beneath sentiment to the reasons love is owed to God and charts a path by which cold hearts may be warmed, making the book as searching for the modern reader as for the medieval one.

At the beginning; the treatise is brief and moves as a single argument, from why God is to be loved to how far, and then up through the degrees of love. Read slowly, as Bernard's own devotion invites, it is less a lesson to be finished than a fire to be warmed at.