Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) was one of the most illustrious figures in the Christian culture of the twelfth century. He was a Cistercian monk who founded the Abbey of Clairvaux, promoted profound monastic reform, and wrote many treatises and sermons which were widely circulated and translated into the vernacular. If one excludes a cursory reference in Letter XIII to De Consideratione, his works are never mentioned in Dante’s corpus, although he exerted a powerful and often underestimated influence on the thought and poetry of Paradiso. According to Bernard, who was a strong believer in mystical theology centred on the crucial notion of deificatio, God created man giving him free will and thereby making him metaphysically similar to Him. If man gives in to cupiditas, however, he moves away from his Creator, falling into what Bernard describes as the regio dissimilitudinis, thus recalling Saint Augustine. It is only through humility, the total submission of human will to that of the Creator, that a person can restore this lost resemblance to God and achieve beatitude, which, for Dante as well as Bernard, consists of a perfect harmony between the human will and that of divinity: thus the deificatio is achieved, or as Dante puts it in Par., I 70, the trasumanar. Even in this final phase however, where the mystical dimension is strong, is there no loss of the rational, Thomistic tension, which Dante takes as the basis for the beatitude of Paradise. Dante’s reliance on Bernard’s mystical approach to model his experience, albeit with decisive intellectual input from Thomas Aquinas, explains why he chose Bernard as his supreme guide in the Empyrean and as orator for the prayer in Par., XXXIII to the Virgin, to whom Bernard was particularly devoted.