Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  The feasting of the holy souls at heaven’s banquet table is among the few images in all five sermons that depict the saints as gathered together. Joined in a common meal, the hungry souls of saints feed with unending desire on the words and the works of Christ.21 This image of saints feasting evokes commensality and commonality more than it does “soul-to-soul” intercourse. Nonetheless, Bernard does not elaborate on the communal setting of the heavenly feast, on the social aspects of eating.22 Furthermore, when he is discussing the feast, he seems much more interested in the food than in the company.23 But to say this is once again to bring attention to community, but community in a very particular sense.

  The image of the saints collected around a table, triumphantly feasting on Christ, calls to mind the eucharistic meal; it suggests the incorporation of all souls into Christ.24 In order to understand what associations the image of feasting on Christ may have had for Bernard, it is helpful to turn to other instances in which he talks about eating Christ. In a passage from his Sermon Seventy-One on the Song of Songs, Bernard writes about the spiritual food that Christ offered to Martha and to Mary. Explaining that for Christ to nourish is to be nourished, Bernard describes the person who eats spiritual food as being simultaneously eaten by Christ:

  So it is that while he feeds others he is himself fed, and while he refreshes us with spiritual joy he himself joys in our spiritual progress. My penitence, my salvation are his food. I myself am his food. . . . I am chewed as I am reproved by him; I am swallowed as I am taught; I am digested as I am changed; I am assimilated as I am transformed; I am made one as I am conformed. Do not wonder at this [John 5: 28], for he feeds upon us and is fed by us that we may be the more closely bound to him. Otherwise we are not perfectly united to him. But if I eat and am not eaten, then he is in me but I am not yet in him [John 6: 57]. But if I am eaten but do not eat, then he has me in him, but it would appear he is not yet in me; and in neither case will there be perfect union between us. But he eats me that he may have me in himself, and he himself is eaten by me that he may be in me, and the bond between us will be strong and the union complete, for I shall be in him and he will likewise be in me.25

  If heaven involves complete and perfect union with Christ, then union with Christ in heaven means something like being digested and transformed into Christ and digesting and transforming Christ into oneself. Bernard follows this graphic description of incorporation with a passage in which he considers in more technical terms the soul’s union with God. Between God and man there exists “a communion of wills and an agreement in charity” (communio vuluntatum et consensus in caritate).26 In another sermon, he writes:

  Man and God, because they are not of one substance or of one nature, cannot, indeed, be said to be one; nevertheless, they are with sure and complete truth said [to be] one spirit [1 Cor. 6: 17], if they adhere to each other with the glue (glutino) of love. Certainly, it makes a unity not so much by a coherence (cohaerentia) of essence as by a sharing of wills (conviventia voluntatum).27

  The transformation that the saved soul undergoes is a transformation of will. It is the will of the saint that in heaven is incorporated into the will of Christ; fleshly love (amor carnis) will be absorbed (absorbendus) into the will of God.28 In On Loving God, Bernard talks about the soul being “poured into the will of God” and compares this pouring into with a little drop of water that seems to forsake itself (deficere a se tota videtur) as it takes on the flavor and color of the wine into which it is infused.29 He speaks also about the “fired-iron” being made like (simillimum) the fire, “the previous form having been cast off.”30 He wonders and he rejoices:

  When will it experience this kind of state, so that the spirit, drunk with divine love, forgetful of itself, and its very self made as if a broken vessel [Ps. 30: 13] in God, and wholly advanced in God and adhering to God [1 Cor. 6: 17], [is] made in one spirit with him and says, “Do my flesh and my heart fail, God of my heart and my part, God, in eternity [Ps. 72:26]?” . . . Indeed, to lose yourself in a certain manner, just as if you were not you . . . , and to empty your very self, and to be almost annihilated (paene annullari), is of heavenly life not of a human state. . . . O pure and stainless intention of the will, surely the more stainless and purer because now in this [will] there is left behind nothing of the self admixed, by which the will is the more pleasant and sweeter, because it is wholly God that is felt! To be moved in this way is to be deified.31

  As Etienne Gilson has pointed out, such images of fire, water, and wine highlight the likeness of the soul to God (but not the sameness), the seeming to be the same as God (but not being the same).32 When Bernard speaks about the soul without using images, he talks sometimes about the soul’s transformation in God, sometimes about the soul being almost annihilated, and sometimes about the preservation of the substance of the human being in God. While it is true that Bernard explicitly and repeatedly insists that the substance of God and the substance of the saved do not become one, it is important not to minimize the extent to which he insists on the identification of God and the soul, the extent to which the saved in heaven are transformed in becoming more God-like. The passage quoted from above continues: “Otherwise, how will God be all in all [1 Cor. 15: 28], if anything of humanity survives in humanity?”33

  Bernard’s images of the soul pouring into God and disappearing like water poured into wine, even his more formal explication of the will of the soul conforming completely to the will of God, might strike some of his modern readers as threatening something one might call “self.” For Bernard, however, the soul is not really its self until its will is lost in God’s will. The soul becomes “like God” and fully itself by becoming—at least in some respects—other than it was in life.34 From a certain perspective, annihilation (of the will) is restoration: “the soul that is unlike God is unlike itself.”35 In some sense, it is by moving away from that which we were in life that we become who we are and were meant to be.

  Read in the light of these several quotations from Sermon Seventy-One on the Song of Songs and this passage from On Loving God, the image of the saints feasting on Christ is one of transformation, a transformation that is really a self-realization, in which the soul is shorn of the skin of self-will.36 And, shorn of self-will, the soul’s will becomes one with the will of God. Furthermore, these passages may suggest that the saints are assimilated to, dissolved in, and lose themselves not only in Christ but also in one another. For if each saint is united “by the concurrence of wills to God,” the implication may be that the soul of each saint is united to the soul of every other saint. But Bernard does not quite make this assertion. Bernard hints at this kind of unity among all of heaven’s inhabitants—saved souls and holy angels—in his First Sermon for the Dedication of a Church, when he says (using 1 John 4: 16) that souls are joined with one another in love and knowledge through love of God.37 When we put this in context, we see even more clearly the intimate union of each “living stone” of the heavenly church with every other:

  The stones cohere to one another by that double glue (glutino) of full knowledge and of perfect love. [They cohere to one another] so greatly, since they are joined reciprocally by greater love the closer they stand to that love that is God. But there is no mistrust that can separate them from the reciprocity, where there is nothing in the one that the other does not suffer happily; the beam of truth penetrates everything. For because “the one who adheres to God, is one spirit” with him, indeed, there is no doubt that the blessed who adhere perfectly to Spirit with him and in him penetrate the whole.38

  By considering the image of feasting on Christ in the context of some of Bernard’s other writings, we have seen that the image suggests that the saved in heaven are united through the common experience of feasting. But if we think of experience insofar as it is located in the will, the other images we have considered, in combination with Bernard’s more formal discussions, suggest that Bernard may have also considered this experience a shared one, in which
boundaries between the wills of saints are dissolved into one another through and in Christ. The souls of the blessed “penetrate the whole.” And yet, Bernard does not talk about the souls of saints pouring into one another as he does about each soul pouring into God. Bernard does insist, however, that the personal memories of each soul are retained in heaven. And this certainly suggests that very real boundaries between individual souls abide eternally.39 Such perduring of boundaries is very important to Bernard. In his sermon on the death of his brother, Gerard,40 we learn that Bernard was laden down with sorrow and anger at the “bitter separation” wrought by death. The loss of Gerard is one that daily recalls itself to him. He catalogues lovingly the numerous pleasures (and the utility) of his brother’s companionship and declares his continuing need for him. Vivid hurt and fierce love rage: “Gerard was mine, so utterly mine.”41 Although in heaven Gerard rejoices in “a sea of endless happiness,” the language of brutal physical rending characterizes Bernard’s experience of his brother’s death: Gerard was “snatched from” Bernard’s embraces, “torn from” Bernard,42 life without Gerard is a galling wound.43 Death accomplished what was unthinkable while Gerard lived: “While you lived when did you ever abandon me?”44 His brother’s was not the only death that left Bernard heavy with dejection and neediness: the author of Bernard’s first Life speaks of Bernard’s desire to buried next to his “special friend”45 Malachy (archbishop of Armagh and papal legate, who wished to be a disciple of Bernard), and in his own Life of Malachy, Bernard articulates his hope for reunion with the friend whom death has taken from him.46 In his Sermon on Blessed Humbert (a monk who left the Benedictines to become a follower of Bernard), Bernard laments that death has deprived him of “a dear friend, prudent counsellor, a strong supporter.”47 In the same sermon Bernard bemoans the death of his brother and his companions (probably referring to Gerard, who died in 1138, and perhaps to Malachy, who died in 1148, the year in which Humbert also died).48 Addressing himself to God, he enumerates the cruel gifts that these several deaths have delivered:

  “Friend and neighbor Thou hast put far from me, and my acquaintance because of my misery” [Ps. 87: 7]. Thou hast drawn them from their misery leaving me alone in mine. Thou hast taken from my side those who were related to me according to the flesh and related to me more closely according to the spirit. . . . Would to God thou wert willing to slay once and for all him whom Thou scourgest, instead of keeping me thus alone, miserable man that I am, in order to make me endure repeated deaths, many and cruel!49

  In spite of Bernard’s intense grieving for the intimacies of lost friendship, he does not describe heaven in his Sermons for the Feast of All Saints as being peopled by intimates or as a place in which wished-for reunions and renewed companionship with particular friends take place. Heaven is not compensation for this loss.50 The presence of a particular loved one that Bernard longs for in his writings on Gerard and Malachy, especially, seems very different from that kind of “togetherness” evoked by the language of incorporation into Christ, in which, as we have seen, all souls’ wills conform to Christ (and, seemingly, to one another) in union with him.

  The differing emphases that I have found, on the one hand, in the Sermons for All Saints and, on the other, in some of Bernard’s other writings may in part reflect the different purposes for which the several texts were written. But Bernard himself was sufficiently preoccupied by the difficulty of reconciling the soul’s assimilation into God with the maintenance, in heaven, of the affections built up in this life to address this concern in his sermon on Gerard. There he writes:

  How I long to know what you think about me, once so uniquely yours. . . . Perhaps you still give thought to our miseries, now that you have plunged into the abyss of light, become engulfed in that sea of endless happiness. It is possible that though you once knew us according to the flesh, you now no longer know us and because you have entered into the power of the Lord you will be mindful of his righteousness alone, forgetful of ours. Furthermore, “he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” [1 Cor. 6: 17], his whole being somehow changed into a movement of divine love. He no longer has the power to experience or relish anything but God, and what God himself experiences and relishes, because he is filled with God.51

  Gerard continues to be enormously important to his brother; alone and lonely, Bernard wonders with terrible uneasiness whether he may no longer be of significance to Gerard. Bernard’s apprehension is more poignant when we take into account his cry: “Who ever loved me as he [did]?”52 Yearning to be loved and to be remembered by him who loved him so vehemently, Bernard asserts that in heaven Gerard’s being joins with God in such a way as to satisfy Bernard’s own desire. The passage from Bernard’s Sermon Twenty-Six that I quoted from above continues:

  But God is love [1 John 4: 8], and the deeper one’s union with God, the more full one is of love. . . . Therefore . . . Your love has not been diminished but only changed; when you were clothed with God you did not divest yourself of concern for us, for God is certainly concerned with us. All that smacks of weakness you have cast away. And since love never comes to an end [1 Cor. 13: 8], you will not forget me forever.53

  This passage seems to affirm that the particular affections we establish on earth do continue in eternity. Such an insistence is echoed in a sermon Bernard wrote for the Feast of St. Victor:

  It is not a land of oblivion [Ps. 87: 13] that the soul of Victor inhabits; . . . Does the heavenly habitation harden the souls that it admits, or deprive [them] of memory, or strip away kindness? Brothers, the breadth of heaven dilates, not contracts, the heart; it delights, not estranges (alienat) the mind; it enlarges, not tightens (contrahit) the affections (affectiones). In the light of God, memory is made clear not obscured; in the light of God, that which is unknown is learned, that which is known is not unlearned.54

  Memory is vitally important to Bernard. As he elsewhere insists, “it is agreed that the soul is immortal, and it will not live hereafter except with its memory, or else it would come to pass [that it would] not be the soul hereafter.”55

  Greedy for the pleasures and for the efficacy of friendship, Bernard believes that “social intercourse, especially between friends,” cannot be purposeless and that feelings of friendship are part of what it means to be a human being.56 Bernard asserts that the memory of those whom we value in life and our affections for them do not dissipate in heaven but are preserved. But as the passage from the Sermon for Gerard quoted from above also makes clear, souls in heaven love in a manner distinct from the manner in which they loved on earth. This is because in heaven “all that smacks of weakness” is cast away. His Steps of Humility helps us to make sense of just what this weakness may mean to Bernard.

  In Chapter Four, which concerns self-knowledge, Bernard explains that “neither love nor hatred can give a judgment of truth.” After alerting his reader to the unjust judgment that hatred gives rise to, Bernard warns that unjust judgment can also be born of love. He remarks: “I know that it is decreed in human law, and in both secular and ecclesiastical causes, that special friends of the litigants may not try their cases, in case they are misled or mislead others by their love. . . . love can make you diminish, or even hide, your friend’s fault.”57 Read in the light of his sermon on Gerard, Sermon Seventy-One on the Song of Songs, and Bernard’s five Sermons for the Feast of All Saints, this passage would suggest that incorporation into Christ reforms earthly love into a love that is stripped of the prejudice and partiality that colored that love in life. All of this raises important questions about how much of who we are, as well as who and how we love, is the dross (“weakness”) that adheres to us in consequence of sin.58 It therefore raises questions about what aspects of relationships we may have cherished in this life will be transposed into heaven and what aspects jettisoned—that is, it/provokes questions about the foundation for and preservation of a personal, this-life-like relationship among the saints. In his Fifth Sermon for All Saints, Bernard write
s:

  See, for there is nothing of security in this our fellowship (communione), nothing of perfection, nothing of rest (quietis); and nevertheless, this also: how good and how jocund it is to live together with brothers [Ps. 132: 1]! For everything offensive that occurs, whether interiorly or whether exteriorly—when in these things our heart and soul is one in God—is certainly found so much more tolerable by that very sharing of brothers (consortio fratrum). How much sweeter will that be when there is no occasion of dissension, where perfect charity connects all in indissoluble agreement so that as the Father and Son are one, so we shall be one in them [John 17: 21] !59

  This is the fullest statement in these sermons on the nature of the earthly community. The passage indicates that barriers to love are struck down in heaven—where all souls love one another in the love of Christ—precisely because the constraints of sin are no more. But the passage just quoted raises an important question. For if each soul’s love washes over all members of the heavenly community—the soul’s affections having been liquefied and poured into the will of God60—what becomes of the privileged status of some relationships in life over others?61

  In Bernard’s writings, we can trace a tension between “special friendships” in the eternity of heaven and the dissolution of the will into the comprehensive love of Christ. At least when he is considering his brother’s death, the absorption of the will into Christ seems to be a source both of joy and of anxiety for Bernard. Bernard seems to want to retain certain aspects of the self that will render individuals familiar to one another in heaven (memory) but to exclude that dross of the self that adheres to us in consequence of sin (including partial, prejudicial love and those aspects of the soul that keep us from loving others well). Bernard also seems to yearn for love that is not empty even in heaven of the special tenderness and partiality with which it was stamped on earth. In his sermon on Gerard, Bernard writes: “It seems to me that I can almost hear my brother saying, ‘can a woman forget the son of her womb. And if she should forget, yet, I shall not forget you.’ ”62 This tension is part of a larger, more complicated tension between, on the one hand, remaining who we were in this life and, on the other hand, peeling away those aspects of the self that are the accretions of sin63 and being incorporated into God in heaven. This tension makes it difficult to understand what the relationship among the saints might look like.