Avatar💓Estrella🔯 :
1. A “Summa” of Contemplative Theology
The Sermons on the Song of Songs are presented as Bernard’s magnum opus, according to a well-known literary tradition. A historian of Erasmus has written, regarding the twelve books of Hilary of Poitiers’s De Trinitate:
“It is easy to see that it was a common ambition of famous writers, as well as of exceptional painters and sculptors, to leave in one of their works a complete and mature example of their art: by this way posterity could assess what they could have achieved had they exercised all their capacities. Virgil seems to have attempted this in the Georgians, Ovid in his Medea, Cicero in De Oratore, Augustine in The City of God, Jerome in his Commentary on the Prophets, Thomas Aquinas in his reflections on the Eucharist, and Bernard in his commentary on the Song of Songs.”
Magnum opus or Masterpiece? Both expressions are found in Bernard's letter to Bernard de Portes, number 153, which serves, so to speak, as a preface to the Sermons on the Song of Songs, and which Bernard wanted included in his correspondence when preparing its publication. In that letter and in the following one, addressed to the same recipient, all the elements that, according to literary tradition—to which Bernard remained extremely faithful—should be placed in a prologue similar to those with which he himself began his treatises are present. It has been said and repeated that this work was only undertaken because it was requested insistently and many times "in frequent letters."
There the title is already announced: it will be "sermons on the beginnings of the Song of Songs," Sermones super principia Canticorum. With this,
Bernardo takes the liberty of not commenting on the entire sacred book. The literary genre will be that of "sermons," not delivered before a real audience but intended to be "published"—the verb edere is used twice in its most literal sense. What will be the character of the work (opus) that has been requested of him? It must not be "light," nor "of little value," nor "vile," nor "despicable," nor "mediocre," but "great," so as not to disappoint the hope of the one who awaits it: great expectation, hopeful hope.
2026-09-04 12:37:06