Solemnity of Saint Bernard 20th August 2013
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Bernard "Like a towering cedar"
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Extract from Article in the Bernardine archive.
With acknowledgement to the author.
Sobornost vol. 14:2 1992
http://www.sobornost.org/other-pubs.html
4.
St Bemard of Clairvaux and
the tradition of the Christian East
G.L.C. FRANK
The suggestion
that there is a relationship between St Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090-1153) and the Eastern Christian tradition may at first seem somewhat contrived.
Bernard was indeed a church-man deeply embedded in the Latin religious world.
He was an ardent papalist and a staunch defender of the Western dogmatic
tradition, concerned to preserve both the Church's unity centred in Rome and
her received Latin understanding of the Christian mystery. Moreover, he seems
to have been oblivious to or uninterested in Byzantine Orthodox theology and
spirituality. Bernard was born thirty-six years after the mutual anathemas of
pope and patriarch and so lived in a Church already canonically separated from
Eastern Christianity.
Despite the
ecclesial separation of East and West and despite Bernard's clear commitment
to Roman theology, I would suggest that in a fundamental way his concerns and
his responses to the problems he faced reveal a theological mind which still
had much in common with the Orthodox East. One should not be unduly surprised at this
suggestion since the formal canonical act of breaking eucharistic communion between
Rome and Constantinople did not necessarily mean the breaking apart of the
catholic ecclesial mind shared by both East and West. St Bernard was,
as Dom Cuthbert Butler puts it, a 'child of the patristic age that was passing
away', and the 'last of the Fathers'. 1* These descriptions rightly place Bernard
within that delicate moment in the flow of church history when both Easterners
and Westerners could still recognise in each other their common catholic
tradition despite their separation, had they been willing to do so. It was precisely during the
immediate post-schism period, however, that the Orthodox East and the Roman Catholic
West were both experiencing a new phase in theological development which was
to further exacerbate the division between them and which was to break down
even further what remained of their common ecclesial mind. This situation
constitutes the context for understanding the relationship between Bernard and
the Eastern Christian tradition. I would suggest that St Bernard was one of the last
major Western medieval theologians who theologised in a manner similar to that
of the Christian East. He was, of course, a westerner, living in and thinking
out of the Latin Christian tradition, but it was precisely his adherence to the
received Latin tradition with its universal dimension which linked it and him
to the experience of Eastern Christianity in its Byzantine form.
. . . . . . . . .
...[natures and the Fathers and rote repetition of their words does not lead one to the knowledge of God and enable one to speak and discourse about God. These things are not
possible without observance of the commandments and the light of the Spirit which leads to the mystical knowledge of God.26 The heart of Symeon's theology is his attempt, like that of Bernard, to
hold together personal experience and orthodox dogma and to assert the necessary place of experience in Christian life and theological reflection:
Believers receive this teaching through signs of many kinds: by enigmas [ ... J, through ineffable mystical
energies, through divine revelations, through contemplation of the reasons of creation, and by many other means [ ... ]. In addition, through the sending and the presence of the Holy Spirit, God
gives them the same assurance as he gave to the apostles. They are more perfectly enlightened and learn by this light that we cannot
conceive of God nor name him [ ... ] that he is everlasting and
incomprehensible. Indeed, all knowledge and discernment [ ... J, the adoption as sons l ... ], the apprehension of the mysteries of Christ and of the mystery of his divine oikonomia
toward us, in short, all the things which unbelievers do not know but we are able t~
know and utter after receiving the grace of faith, are all taught by the Spirit. 27
In his Catecheses,
Symeon expressed it this way:
It is heresy when someone turns aside in any way from the dogmas that have been defined concerning the right faith. But to deny that at this present time there ae some who love God, and that they
have been granted the Holy Spirit and to be baptised by Him as sons of God, that they have become gods by knowledge and experience and contemplation, that wholly subverts the Incarnation of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.28
St Bernard and
the non-scholastic East
Bernard of Clairvaux, I would suggest, breathed
the same theological air as that of Symeon the New Theologian and the Orthodox
East. This is not to say, of course, that he was like the Eastern theologians in
all respects. His writings, for example, display little of the apophaticism which
dominated Eastern theology from early times. The writings of pseudo-Dionysius,
which popularised apophatic theology in the West, did not enter into the Latin
theological tradition until the twelfth century, although they had already been
translated into Latin in the ninth century by John Scotus Erigena. Nor does Bernard
seem to have had a place for the physical body's experience of and participation
in God - something clearly maintained by St Syrneon and later emphasised even
more strongly by the Eastern hesychasts and St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359).29*
In this sense, Bernard's mysticism seems to reflect and to be more heavily
indebted to platonic philosophy than was the Eastern Chritian spiritual-doctrinal
tradition, which - while influenced by platonic ideas - nonetheless also
continuously criticised platonic philosophy and developed an anthropology with
an emphasis on the whole human being and the participation in God of the body
as well as the soul. Nonetheless, St Bernard's fundamental approach and method
of theologising was the same as that of the Orthodox East. Both emphasised the
intimate connection between reason and experience. Both approaches gave logic
an allotted place in theology, but were fundamentally experiential in
character. Both theologies had the Church as their context and so were moulded
by ecclesial life rather than by an academic and speculative environment.
In his dispute with Abelard, St Bernard
won the immediate battle but lost the basic theological conflict underlying the
battle. In the West, theology was eventually to develop into the queen of the sciences
and as a positive and speculative discipline. Bernard's attempt to maintain the
fundamental nature of theology as the mystical experience of God with its subsequent
reflection on that experience and on the mysteries of the faith gave way to a
scholasticism in which reason and logical disputation came to play the primary
role. Mystical theology was not, of course, repudiated entirely in the West. But
it came to have a subordinate place in the theologising of the scholastics and
it tended more and more to be separated from rational reflection in theology - a
tendency which continues to dominate the Western theological scene.
In contrast to this, it was the representatives
of mystical theology who won the conflict in the East. Symeon came to be
venerated as a saint, not Stephen of Nicomedia. And the Orthodox East perpetuated
the experiential theology of earlier centuries. This difference in the way
Westerners and Easterners theologised during the so-called Middle Ages meant
the further shattering of the early theological mind common to both East and
West. By the fourteenth century, if not before, Easterners saw in Latin scholasticism
a theology which they regarded as too naturalistic, too philosophical and too
much dependent on purely human methods of argument. In this regard, I have no
doubt that St Bernard would have concurred with them.
D. Ambrose
We are very sorry to announce the death of Dom Ambrose, who died this morning. He was a very dear member of our community: one-time abbot, as well as Abbot General of the OCSO between 1974 and 1990. He was 90 years old. Please pray for him. You can read more about him on the Order's website:
