EASTERTIDE · 21 APRIL & TRINITY · 20 AUGUST Archbishop & Abbot · Doctors of the Church
Anselm of Canterbury & Bernard of Clairvaux
Archbishop & Abbot · Doctors of the Church · d. 1109 & 1153
Anselm — AN-selm · Bec — BEK · Proslogion — pros-LOH-gee-on · fides quaerens intellectum — FEE-days KWAIR-enz in-tel-EK-tum · Cur Deus Homo — koor DAY-us HOH-moh · Bernard — BER-nard · Clairvaux — KLAIR-voh · Cistercian — sis-TER-shun · Doctor Mellifluus — dok-tor mel-IF-loo-us
O God, who didst give to thy servants Anselm and Bernard the twin gifts of understanding and love, that they might seek thee with the whole mind and find thee with the whole heart; Grant that we, following their example, may hold reason and charity together as the two wings on which the soul rises to thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The medieval theological tradition begins, strictly speaking, with two Benedictine monks — one Italian by birth who became Archbishop of Canterbury, one Burgundian by birth who became the most influential churchman of the twelfth century — who represent its two essential impulses so completely that everything the medieval period would subsequently achieve in theology and mysticism can be located somewhere between them. Anselm of Canterbury (AN-selm) is the father of Scholasticism: the man who gave the Western Church its intellectual method, its confidence that faith not only does not fear reason but positively requires it. Bernard of Clairvaux (KLAIR-voh) is simultaneously the last of the Fathers and the first of the medieval mystics: the man who insisted that the ultimate movement of the soul toward God is not argument but love, not demonstration but transformation. Their feast days stand four months apart — Anselm on 21 April in the Easter light, Bernard on 20 August in the long green weeks of Trinity — and the liturgical distance between them is the distance between the method and the goal, between the intellect that seeks and the love that finds.
Anselm was born in Aosta in 1033, and entered the great Benedictine monastery of Bec (BEK) in Normandy in 1060, where he became prior under Lanfranc and then abbot. His years at Bec produced the works that would define Western theology for centuries: the Monologion, the Proslogion (pros-LOH-gee-on), the dialogues on truth and free will, and finally the great Cur Deus Homo (koor DAY-us HOH-moh) — Why did God become man? — which gave the Latin West its definitive account of the Atonement. The Proslogion’s ontological argument — that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and that a God who exists in reality is greater than one who exists only in the mind, therefore God exists — has been argued about by philosophers ever since, but what is often missed in the philosophical debate is the context in which Anselm wrote it: not as an academic exercise but as a meditation, a prayer, an act of contemplative attention by a monk who already believed and wanted to understand what he believed. Fides quaerens intellectum (FEE-days KWAIR-enz in-tel-EK-tum) — faith seeking understanding — is his programme, and it is the programme of the whole medieval theological tradition: not doubt seeking reassurance, but faith seeking the joy of comprehension. He was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, spent two periods in exile for defending the Church’s liberties against the Crown, and died in 1109 still in harness, still arguing, still praying. What is less known than his philosophical theology is the extraordinary tenderness of his Prayers and Meditations — intimate, almost anguished conversations with Christ and the Virgin and the saints that show a man of great intellectual power who was also a man of great emotional depth, the two never separated.
Bernard entered the reformed Benedictine monastery of Cîteaux (see-TOH) in 1113, bringing with him thirty companions including several of his own brothers — a recruitment drive of such effect that the community could barely accommodate them all. Two years later he was sent to found the new monastery of Clairvaux, which under his governance became the mother house of sixty-eight daughter monasteries and the spiritual centre of twelfth-century Europe. He was given the title Doctor Mellifluus (dok-tor mel-IF-loo-us) — the honey-tongued Doctor — and the name is exact: his eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs, left unfinished at his death, are among the most beautiful extended works of Christian mystical writing in any language, a sustained meditation on the love between the soul and God that reads across all the centuries as freshly as it did in the chapter house at Clairvaux. He understood love not as sentiment but as the form of the soul’s ascent: the soul passes from loving itself for its own sake, to loving God for the benefits God gives, to loving God for God’s own sake alone, and finally — in the highest and rarest moment, granted only in flashes even to the saints — to loving itself only for God’s sake. This fourfold ascent is Bernard’s greatest contribution to the mystical tradition, and it runs like a thread through every subsequent medieval account of contemplative prayer. Yet the man who articulated this vision of pure contemplation spent almost none of his life in contemplation: he preached the Second Crusade, intervened in papal elections, attacked Peter Abelard (AB-eh-lard) at the Council of Sens with a ferocity that posterity has found hard to justify, and wrote letter after letter of counsel and correction to kings, popes, and abbots across Europe. He bore this contradiction with grief, writing to a former monk who had become Pope Eugenius III the treatise De Consideratione (day kon-sid-er-AH-tee-OH-nay) — On Consideration — which is in part a meditation on the spiritual dangers of the active life that its author knew from the inside.
Anselm and Bernard stand at the threshold of the entire medieval tradition and face in opposite directions: Anselm faces forward toward the universities and the Scholastic synthesis that Aquinas will complete; Bernard faces inward toward the monastery and the mystical flowering that Julian and the Cloud-author will complete. Yet they are not opposites but complements, the two poles between which the medieval theological genius moves. Anselm’s insight — that the mind which loves God desires to understand what it loves — and Bernard’s insight — that the understanding which has comprehended God is finally dissolved in the love which surpasses comprehension — are together the full account of what Christian theology is for. The Easter season in which Anselm’s feast falls is the season of the Resurrection whose logic he spent his life articulating in the Cur Deus Homo: God became man so that man might not die, and the satisfaction of infinite offence required an infinite satisfaction, which only God could make and only man was obliged to make, therefore God must become man. The Trinity season in which Bernard’s feast falls is the long season of ordinary love — the green weeks in which the soul attends to God not in dramatic illumination but in the daily fidelity of the common life, which Bernard’s Rule of Clairvaux was designed precisely to sustain. Between them, reason and love. Between them, understanding and transformation. Between them, the whole of the medieval tradition that opens this morning.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Anselm didst give to thy Church the joy of understanding the faith it professes, and by thy servant Bernard didst kindle in many hearts the fire of divine love; Grant that we may seek thee with all our minds, and find thee with all our hearts, until the love that surpasses understanding draws us at last into the fullness of thy joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.