“So man’s heart which had been kept secure by divine love, and one by loving one, afterwards began to flow here and there through earthly desires. For the mind which knows not to love its true good, is never stable and never rests. Hence restlessness, and ceaseless labour, and disquiet, until the man turns and adheres to Him. The sick heart wavers and quivers; the cause of its disease is love of the world; the remedy, the love of God.”

Hugo’s object is to give rest to the restless heart, by directing its love to God. One still bears in mind his three plains of knowledge, forming perhaps the three stages of ascent, at the top of which is found the knowledge that turns to divine contemplation and love. There may be a direct and simple love of God for simple souls; but for the man of mind, knowledge precedes love.

“In two ways God dwells in the human heart, to wit, through knowledge and through love; yet the dwelling is one, since every one who knows Him, loves, and no one can love without knowing. Knowledge through cognition of the Faith erects the structure; love through virtue, paints the edifice with colour.”[498]

Then make a habitation for God in thy heart. This is the great matter, and indeed all: for this, Scripture exists, and the world was made, and God became flesh, through His humility making man sublime. The Ark of Noah is the type of this spiritual edifice, as it is also the type of the Church.

The piety and allegory of this work rise as from a basis of knowledge. The allegory indeed is drawn out and out, until it seems to become sheer circumlocution. This was the mediaeval way, and Hugo’s too, alas! We will not follow further in this treatise, nor take up his De arca Noe mystica,[499] which carries out into still further detail the symbolism of the Ark, and applies it to the Church and the people of God. Hugo has also left a colloquy between man and his soul on the true love, which lies in spiritual meditation.[500] But it is clear that the reaches of Hugo’s yearning are still grounded in intellectual considerations, though these may be no longer present in the mind of him whose consciousness is transformed to love.

One may discern the same progression, from painful thought to surer contemplation, and thence to the heart’s devoted communion, in him whom we have called the Thor and Loki of the Church. No twelfth-century soul loved God more zealously than St. Bernard. He was not strong in abstract reasoning. His mind needed the compulsion of the passions to move it to sublime conclusions. Commonly he is dubbed a mystic. But his piety and love of God poise themselves on a basis of consideration before springing to soar on other wings. In his De consideratione,[501] Bernard explains that word in the sense given by Hugo to meditatio, while he uses contemplatio very much as Hugo does. It applies to things that have become certain to the mind, while “consideratio is busy investigating. In this sense contemplatio may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind (intuitus animi) regarding anything, or the sure apprehension of the true: while consideratio is thought intently searching, or the mind’s endeavour to track out the true.”[502]

Contemplatio, even though it forget itself in ecstasy, must be based on prior consideration; then it may take wings of its own, or rather (with orthodox Hugo and Bernard) wings of grace, and fly to the bosom of its God. This flight is the immediacy of conviction and the ecstasy which follows. One may even perceive the thinking going on during the soul’s outpour of love. For the mind still supports the soul’s ardour with reasonings, original or borrowed, as appears in the second sermon of that long series preached by Bernard on Canticles to his own spiritual élite of Clairvaux.[503] The saintly orator is yearning, yearning for Christ Himself; he will have naught of Moses or Isaiah; nor does he desire dreams, or care for angels’ visits: ipse, ipse me osculetur, cries his soul in the words of Canticles—let Him kiss me. The phrasing seems symbolical; but the yearning is direct, and at least rhetorically overmastering. The emotion is justified by its reasons. They lie in the personality of Christ and Bernard’s love of Him, rising from all his knowledge of Him, even from his experience of Jesus’ whisperings to the soul. He knows how vastly Jesus surpasses the human prophets who prefigured or foretold Him: ipsos longe superat Jesus meus—the word meus is love’s very articulation. The orator cries: “Listen! Let the kissing mouth be the Word assuming flesh; and the mouth kissed be the flesh which is assumed; then the kiss which is consummated between them is the persona compacted of the two, to wit, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

This identical allegory goes back to Origen’s Commentary on Canticles. Bernard has kindled it with an intimate love of Jesus, which is not Origen’s. But the thought explains and justifies Bernard’s desire to be kissed by the kiss of His mouth, and so to be infolded in the divine love which “gave His only-begotten Son,” and also became flesh. Os osculans signifies the Incarnation: one realizes the emotional power which that saving thought would take through such a metaphor. At the end of his sermon, Bernard sums up the conclusion, so that his hearers may carry it away:

“It is plain that this holy kiss was a grace needed by the world, to give faith to the weak, and satisfy the desire of the perfect. The kiss itself is none other than the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns God, per omnia saecula saeculorum, Amen.”

III