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AMY HOLLYWOOD
From: M. Rubin, W. Simons (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, v. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100 - c. 1500, Cambridge 2009 (Pages 297-307).
Page 5
Claims not only to experience God's presence but also some kind of union with God occur throughout the texts of early Christianity; they are arguably found in Augustine and also in Clement (d. c. 215), Origen (c. 185–254), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–94), in the texts attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500), and in a host of martyrological, hagiographical, and monastic texts. In the medieval west, the influence of Augustine and Dionysius looms largest, and both suggest – without clearly asserting – that union involves a dissolution of the self before and in God. Yet the mainstream of the Augustinian tradition, represented by the work of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and his fellow Cistercians, as well as that of the twelfth-century Victorines and much thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan mystical writing, insists on a union of wills in which the soul maintains its identity as other than God even as it feels as if that distinction is lost.
Drawing on 1 Cor. 6. 17 ('Qui autem adhaeret Domino unus spiritus est'– 'One who adheres to the Lord is one spirit with him'), Bernard of Clairvaux asks 'when will [the soul] experience this kindof love, so that the mind, drunk with divine love and forgetting itself, making itself like a broken vessel (1Cor. 6. 17), marches right into God, and, adhering to him, becomes one spirit with him?' [5] Against any who might suggest that the union of the soul's will with that of God is like that between the Father and the Son, Bernard insists that the human person and God 'do not share the same nature or substance' and so 'they cannot be said to be a unity, yet they are with complete truth and accuracy, said to be one spirit, if they cohere with the bond of love. But that unity is caused not so much by the identity of essences as by the concurrence of wills.' [6] Bernard thus both asserts that union between the soul and God is possible in this life and that this union never occurs at the expense of the continued creaturely existence of the soul. We come to be one with God when, through God's grace, we have so overcome our sinfulness as to have a will that fully adheres to God's will.
[5] Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, inG. R. Evans, trans. , Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), X. 27, 195. Translation modified.
[6] Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs IV, trans. Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1980), Sermon 71, n. 7, 54.
