Bernard of Clairvaux's Aesthetics

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was one of the most influential figures in twelfth-century Western Christendom: Cistercian monk and reformer, abbot of Clairvaux, preacher of the Second Crusade, spiritual director to Pope Eugenius III, and the most important mystical theologian and spiritual writer of his age. Born into a Burgundian noble family, he entered the Cistercian order in 1113 accompanied by thirty kinsmen and friends, was sent in 1115 to establish the new monastery at Clairvaux, and from that abbacy — with his letters, sermons, and treatises — exerted an incalculable influence on the Western Church throughout the twelfth century.

Bernard's aesthetic theory enters this theological aesthetics series in a profoundly paradoxical way: he is the thinker in this tradition who most explicitly raises theological objections to art and beauty, while simultaneously being the person who created one of the highest literary-aesthetic achievements in this tradition — his eighty-six Latin sermons on the Song of Songs (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 1135–1153, unfinished) are among the most radiant prose in all of medieval Latin literature, their rhetorical refinement, imagistic power, and emotional depth compelling any reader who has encountered the original to acknowledge: this is a person of the highest literary gifts, applying the highest theological seriousness to questioning certain uses of that gift.

The foundational proposition of Bernard's aesthetics is:

genuine beauty is the beauty of holiness — the inner beauty the soul acquires through ascetic purification in union with God, not the outer formal beauty grasped by the senses; the monastery, as a community of prayer and contemplation, must guard the inner spiritual concentration by removing all sensory distractions, including excessive architectural ornament and visual art; yet the beauty of language — the poetic language that expresses divine love with the most refined rhetoric — is a legitimate medium of movement toward divine beauty, because the Song of Songs itself carries, in poetic form, the mystery of love between God and the soul.

I. The Apologia: A Theological Critique of Ornate Church Decoration

Bernard's aesthetic position is historically most widely known through his 1125 letter to William of Saint-Thierry, abbot of a Cluniac monastery, the Apologia ad Guillelmum — one of the most celebrated single documents in the history of medieval aesthetics, and the most important theological argument about monastic aesthetics.

In this letter, Bernard mounted a systematic critique of the increasingly elaborate decoration in churches of the Cluniac style, describing in his characteristically sharp rhetoric what he regarded as unsuitable for the monastic environment:

"The church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor; she clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked; the eyes of the rich are fed at the expense of the indigent. The curious find their delight there, yet the needy find no relief for their misery. … What profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity?"

He supports this critique with a series of specific pictorial descriptions: the carved apes, lions, monstrous hybrids, battling knights, and hunting scenes adorning church walls and capitals — those dizzying bizarre figures that cause monks, whether reading or praying, to let their gaze wander involuntarily, substituting an astonished fixation on carving for contemplation of God's word. He asks: does not the time people spend satisfying their curiosity before these images far exceed the time spent in contemplation of God — is this not a spiritually inverted disorder?

Bernard's critique addresses three interrelated theological problems:

The Problem of Wealth Distribution: Monasteries were investing enormous material wealth in elaborate decoration while the poor starved at the monastery gate. The contrast between the gold-gleaming church and the desperately impoverished poor is a theologically indefensible contradiction — that wealth ought to serve the most vulnerable members of Christ's body (the poor) rather than satisfy aesthetic vanity.

The Problem of Distraction from Spiritual Attention: The central purpose of monastic life is the opus Dei (Work of God) — continuous prayer, lectio divina (sacred reading), and contemplation. Anything that diverts that attention, however beautiful in itself, is contrary to the monastery's fundamental purpose. Fine ornament, through its sensory attraction, draws the monk's attention from inner spiritual concentration to external sensory pleasure, subverting the order of spiritual life.

The Problem of Competitive Vanity: Bernard implies that elaborate monastic decoration is driven not by love of God but by competitive rivalry between monasteries — displaying greater glory and donor generosity through a more magnificent church, conflating the worship of God with the pursuit of human prestige.

II. Cistercian Architectural Aesthetics: Simplicity as Theological Statement

Bernard's aesthetic critique did not remain at the level of written argument but became visible as theological statement in the Cistercian architectural tradition. The architectural style of twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries, shaped by Bernard's theological influence, formed a distinctive visual theological language that constitutes — virtually contemporaneously with Suger's Gothic cathedral — the most important theological aesthetic dialogue of the Middle Ages.

The characteristics of Cistercian architecture are a systematic inversion of the Cluniac-Sugerian model: pure white walls (rather than painted color or colored glass), simple stone arches (rather than intricately carved capitals), smooth and undecorated interior walls (rather than complex decorative programs of relief and image), uncolored clear glass windows (rather than Suger's painted glass), and those white spaces that emit, through their very simplicity, a certain special radiance.

This architectural style, in Bernard's theological understanding, is not a rejection of beauty but the pursuit and embodiment of a different kind of beauty: a beauty of subtraction — beauty disclosed through removal rather than addition. When all sensory stimulants have been removed, what the remaining space presents is not emptiness but a pure space of spiritual presence undisturbed by any formal interference — a beauty that speaks through its very simplicity, speaking not to the senses but to the soul.

Modern art historians have traced the Cistercian quality as a medieval theological predecessor of the "less is more" principle of modern minimalist aesthetics; contemporary architect Peter Zumthor's concept of "architectural atmosphere" has also been traced by many scholars to this Cistercian tradition. But within Bernard's own theological framework, this simplicity is not modern aesthetic minimalism but a subtractive service to the spiritual: removing every sensory form that might obstruct the divine presence, so that the presence that surpasses all forms can work with less obstruction in the soul.

Bernard's Cistercian architectural aesthetics is the architectural practice of apophatic theology (theologia negativa): just as apophatic theology protects God's transcendence by negating every finite definition of God, Cistercian architecture protects the formless divine presence in the soul by removing every finite sensory form. That pure white space is the architectural apophatic theology of the divine presence that no finite form can adequately express.

III. Bernard and Suger: Two Conclusions from the Same Source

Bernard's aesthetic position can only be fully understood in relation to his contemporary interlocutor, Abbot Suger (c. 1081–1151) — this debate is the most important theological aesthetic debate in the Middle Ages, and both positions proceed from the same theological source (Incarnation theology and the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition) while arriving at nearly opposite conclusions.

Bernard and Suger were not theological opponents but mutually respectful friends — both deeply critical of ecclesiastical corruption, both committed to the theological seriousness of monastic life. Their disagreement is a disagreement about the different pastoral application of the same theological truth:

Suger's argument is: God approaches humanity through material beauty — an extension of Incarnation theology; for spiritually dull believers (animales), material beauty is a necessary medium of spiritual elevation; the richest material beauty is the finest instrument for guiding those incapable of rising through pure intellectual contemplation toward the divine.

Bernard's response is: that may be appropriate for the laity (laici), but the monastery is not designed for the laity's level of spiritual development — the monastery is a community of those who have already renounced the world's abundance, dedicating themselves to the pursuit of pure spiritual contemplation. Providing carefully crafted sensory stimulants to monks who are already spiritually mature, who have already moved beyond dependence on sensory media, is not spiritual assistance but spiritual regression. Monastic architecture should serve that community's spiritual purpose, not cater to those not yet spiritually mature.

The deeper significance of this debate reaches far beyond the difference between two monastic styles, touching a permanent tension in Christian aesthetics: the tension between the helpfulness and the obstruction of finite sensory media (material beauty, visual art, music) as channels toward the divine. Suger emphasizes their helpfulness (for most people, sensory media are necessary spiritual channels); Bernard emphasizes their potential for obstruction (for those spiritually advanced enough, sensory media are something to be transcended). This is not an either-or choice but a pastoral judgment about how the same medium produces different effects depending on the degree of spiritual maturity of the one who uses it.

IV. The Song of Songs Sermons: The Beauty of Language as Medium of Divine Love

Bernard's aesthetic position contains a profound internal tension that his modern readers often miss: he critiques excessive visual-architectural ornament with the strongest theological seriousness, while simultaneously writing one of the richest works of literary beauty in the Middle Ages — his eighty-six Latin sermons on the Song of Songs (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum), exploring the mystery of divine love between the soul and God in the most refined Latin rhetoric, the richest imagery, and the deepest emotional depth.

This internal tension is not Bernard's inconsistency but the most crucial distinction in his theological aesthetics: what he criticizes is beauty aimed at sensory stimulation as an end — beauty that fixes attention on form itself rather than guiding the soul through form toward the divine; what he practices is the beauty of language that carries and transmits the soul's journey toward God — the beauty of language that bears the mystery of the Song of Songs. These two kinds of beauty carry a fundamental theological distinction for Bernard:

The former (the beauty of visual decoration), through its material nature and direct sensory impact, risks fixing the soul on form itself — form so beautiful that the soul stops before it, substituting the enjoyment of form for passage through form. The latter (the beauty of language and image), through its directedness (the meaning of language points toward reality beyond language itself) and its emotional momentum, is essentially a medium of movement toward the divine: the beauty of language is not the terminus but the channel that carries the soul forward.

Bernard's Song of Songs sermons begin with theological meditation on the opening verse: "Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth" (Osculetur me osculo oris sui), and develop from this a mystical theology of the divine marriage between the soul and God (mystical marriage, sponsa Christi, the soul as Bride of Christ). In this theology, beauty is present in a very specific form: the soul's beauty is the beauty the soul acquires as it is progressively purified and transformed in the relationship with the divine Bridegroom — not a static formal attribute but a relational, dynamic beauty that is continuously generated in the encounter of love.

He expresses this in exquisitely refined Latin: the soul's transformation (conversio) is the journey from self-centered love (amor carnalis — carnal love, love whose purpose is self-satisfaction) to God-centered love (amor spiritualis — spiritual love, love that realizes itself in God's love). That journey is itself an aesthetic journey: from the ugliness that self-love uses to conceal divine beauty, to the inner beauty acquired in the illumination of divine beauty.

V. The Beauty of Humility: Theological Anthropology and the Ethics of Inner Beauty

The most original theological-anthropological dimension of Bernard's aesthetics is his understanding of humility(humilitas) as an aesthetic category. In his theology, humility is not merely a moral virtue but an ontological beauty — the inner form the soul acquires when it truly knows itself (knowing its actual condition before God — created, sinful, and forgiven).

His treatise De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae (On the Steps of Humility and Pride, c. 1124) systematically expounds twelve steps of humility and twelve steps of pride as the process of the soul's ascent or descent in true self-knowledge. The first step of humility is self-knowledge (cognitio sui) — truly knowing one's condition before God, not concealing that true condition behind illusions. This self-knowledge is not despairing self-abasement but the openness that enables the soul to be filled by God's love in the right way — the soul closed by pride cannot receive that love; the soul opened by humility becomes the vessel for it.

Here Bernard's aesthetic proposition enters into deep structural resonance with O'Connor's "violent grace": both argue that the closed, self-satisfied self-system must be opened before it can receive divine love — Bernard achieves that opening through the ascetic practice of humility, O'Connor through the violent shock of narrative. Both point to the same theological truth: pride (the self-satisfaction of form) conceals beauty; humility (receiving beauty through the emptiness of form) opens beauty.

VI. The Degrees of Love: From Created Beauty to Divine Beauty

Bernard's most systematic theological work, De diligendo Deo (On Loving God, c. 1132), systematically expounds his theology of love — above all the four degrees of love and the soul's journey from lower to higher forms of love. This doctrine of the degrees of love is the deepest systematic theological foundation of his entire aesthetics.

The First Degree: Loving oneself for one's own sake (homo diligit se propter se). This is the self-satisfaction-oriented, untransformed human self-love — love that takes its own benefit and pleasure as its ultimate point of reference. In aesthetic terms, this is the aesthetic attitude that takes the sensory pleasure of beauty as its purpose — stopping at the immediate satisfaction that created beauty provides.

The Second Degree: Loving God for one's own sake (homo diligit Deum propter se). The person begins to recognize God as the source of all good and therefore loves God — but that love remains instrumental, loving God as a means to the goods God provides. In aesthetic terms, this is the religiously utilitarian use of art — treating beauty as a tool for achieving spiritual ends.

The Third Degree: Loving God for God's sake (homo diligit Deum propter Deum). At this degree, love begins to transcend instrumentality; God himself becomes the object of love — that love takes God's own beauty and goodness as its content. This is the love of spiritual maturity, and the truly aesthetic transformation: the aesthetic orientation that begins to take the source of beauty rather than beauty's sensory effects as its ultimate reference.

The Fourth Degree: Loving oneself for God's sake (homo diligit se propter Deum). This is the highest degree of love — where even the self is loved in God's way, that is, for what it truly is in God (a created, beloved, redeemed being) rather than for purposes of self-satisfaction. Bernard holds that this degree of love can only be briefly touched in rare mystical experiences in this life; only in eschatological fullness will it be sustained.

This doctrine of the degrees of love provides the deepest theological framework for understanding Bernard's entire aesthetics: his critique of visual decoration targets the aesthetic attitude that stops at the first degree (beauty as sensory pleasure); his Song of Songs sermons guide the soul from the second degree toward the third and fourth; and the simplicity of Cistercian architecture is the environment required by a monastic community that has already entered the third degree — a community no longer dependent on sensory media, already capable of direct contact with divine beauty in a formless space.

VII. Bernard and the Whole Tradition: Simplicity as the Limiting Case of Theological Beauty

Bernard of Clairvaux occupies in this theological aesthetics series a unique and indispensable position: he is the thinker in this tradition who most explicitly thinks about art and beauty from the conditionality of spiritual maturity. His position is not a simple negation of all the other aesthetic affirmations in this tradition but a conditional annotation on them: the theological affirmations of material beauty (Suger's cathedral of light, Luther's theology of music, Aquinas's formal radiance) are all genuine — but they apply differently to persons at different degrees of spiritual maturity; for those who no longer need sensory media, the purest simplicity is the most genuine channel of beauty.

His debate with Suger, in the context of this whole series, discloses a permanent tension internal to this tradition: the position and function of finite things (sensory media, material form, architectural ornament) in the journey toward the infinite. Suger represents this tradition's "cataphatic way" — using finite beauty as a channel; Bernard represents the "apophatic way" — using the removal of finite beauty as a channel. Both point to the same destination (the direct presence of divine beauty), but proceed in completely opposite directions.

That pure white Cistercian space and Suger's colored-glass cathedral — together they constitute the two most magnificent theological answers the twelfth century wrote in stone and glass to the question "how does beauty lead the soul toward God"; and the dialogue between those two answers is the deepest, still unresolved tension at the heart of this tradition: is beauty a stairway of ascent (when we use it) or an obstacle to ascent (when it makes us stop on the stairway)? Bernard, with his whole life and writings, tells us: the same thing can, depending on the spiritual condition of the one who uses it, simultaneously be both.

The Unity of Theology and Aesthetics

Bernard's theory of art ultimately unifies into a Cistercian narrative of humility, purification, and divine love:

genuine beauty is the beauty of holiness — the inner beauty the soul acquires through ascetic purification in relationship with God; the simplicity of monastic architecture is a beauty of subtraction, creating pure space for spiritual presence by removing sensory stimulants — the architectural practice of apophatic theology; the theological critique of visual decoration is not rejection of beauty but critique of the aesthetic attitude that stops at sensory form — critique of the use of beauty that cannot guide the soul through form toward its divine source; the beauty of language — the poetic language that expresses the mystery of love between soul and God with refined rhetoric — is a legitimate theological medium, because its essential nature is movement toward the divine rather than fixation on form itself; the doctrine of the degrees of love provides the systematic framework for the entire aesthetics: different degrees of love determine the different theological effects of the same medium; and the debate with Suger discloses the most permanent tension internal to this tradition: the helpfulness and potential obstruction of finite form as a stairway toward the infinite depends on the spiritual maturity of the one who ascends.

Within this series of theological aesthetics, Bernard is the indispensable voice from the side of simplicity — the voice that keeps the whole tradition honest: beauty is good and powerful, but it can also become an idol; the beauty of finite form is a genuine divine gift, but the attachment to that finite form can become the most refined obstacle preventing the soul's passage to infinite beauty. He is the person in this entire series who states that warning with the greatest theological seriousness — and his own Song of Songs sermons, with the linguistic beauty they create, are themselves the finest answer to that warning: the warning is not against beauty but is the guidance of beauty — guiding the love of beauty from form toward the One behind the form, from created light toward that uncreated light, from the beloved toward Love itself.

Primary Sources: Apologia ad Guillelmum (1125), Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (1135–1153, 86 sermons, unfinished), De diligendo Deo (c. 1132), De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae (c. 1124), De gratia et libero arbitrio (c. 1128), De consideratione (c. 1149–1153); Secondary Studies: Étienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard; Michael Casey, A Thirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs; Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God