On Loving God

On Loving God is Bernard of Clairvaux’s account of love as a spiritual progression: it begins with the self’s ordinary concerns and can, through grace, become a love centered on God. Written in response to a question from Carthusians at the Grande Chartreuse, the work moves beyond asking why God deserves love to examining how love changes as a person recognizes grace, prays, and becomes less governed by personal need. Its four degrees make that change the treatise’s central structure, while its emphasis on desire and intimacy connects the work to Bernard’s wider reading of the Song of Songs.

Commission and purpose

Bernard wrote On Loving God for Carthusians who had asked, “Why and how should God be loved?” The question gives the work its twofold direction: it considers both the grounds for loving God and the formation of a deeper love. Bernard’s answer holds together obligation and benefit, but refuses to make either the final end. He observes that “no one can be loved more righteously, and no one can be loved with greater benefit,” then gives the more fundamental reason: “I can see no other reason for loving him than himself.” Love may begin with what a person receives from God, but its fullest purpose is not reward. It is directed toward God for God’s own sake.

The treatise belongs to a period of sustained writing. Bernard began writing in 1125; among his works were The Steps of Humility and Pride and On Loving God, followed later by On Grace and Free Will. Around 1135–36 he began the eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs for which he is best known. Those sermons reached only chapter 3:1 before his death, and Sermon 86 remained unfinished. The devotional interpretation in that larger work offers a related context for On Loving God, but the brief treatise has its own clear task: to describe the stages through which love may be reordered and deepened.

The four degrees of love

The first degree is love of oneself for one’s own sake. Bernard treats this self-concern as natural rather than as a condition that can simply be denied. The ethical question is how it might be enlarged. Jesus Christ’s command to love one’s neighbors as oneself supplies a measure for that enlargement, but Bernard adds that love of neighbor must have its foundation in God. Without that foundation, people cannot love others with purity. The first degree therefore contains both a beginning and a limitation: care for the self is real, yet it cannot by itself establish the fullest basis for care of others.

In the second degree, a person loves God for personal benefit. This stage recognizes that help and other benefits come from God, but Bernard insists that they are gifts of grace, not payment earned through personal merit. The distinction changes how a person understands what has been received. Benefit can prompt love, but it cannot justify a claim of deserving; it points instead to grace. Bernard’s sequence does not dismiss the human need that brings someone to God. It uses recognition of that need and its answer to open a way beyond self-interest.

The third degree is love of God for God’s own sake. As prayer becomes more frequent, Bernard says, the relationship grows more intimate, enabling a person to “taste and discover how sweet the Lord is.” Love at this stage is purer than “the urgency of our own needs”: it no longer rests chiefly on what the person wants to obtain. Bernard links that change back to human relationships. Pure love of God makes it more natural to love others, so the movement toward God does not end in indifference to the neighbor. Rather, love becomes less restricted by private need and more capable of extending outward.

The fourth degree turns the sequence back upon the self: a person loves oneself for God’s sake. Bernard describes its extremity in the words, “Happy the man who has attained the fourth degree of love, he no longer even loves himself except for God.” This is not presented as a routine achievement or the result of willpower alone. To cease experiencing oneself as the center, he writes, is “not a human sentiment but a divine experience”; human feelings must, in a mysterious way, give way to God’s will. The capacity to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and strength is a gift of grace. Bernard says that it rests in God’s hands to give, rather than being secured by human effort. The surviving passage begins to add that people may more easily reach this degree under certain conditions, but it does not complete that explanation.

Desire, prayer, and intimacy

The four degrees give On Loving God a progression, but Bernard’s account is not only a classification of motives. Desire and love are its key elements in finding God. In Bernard’s interpretation of the Song of Songs, the intense desire between lovers becomes an image of human longing for God, and a kiss on the mouth represents the deepest intimacy with God. The image gives spiritual development an affective language: love is not merely assent to a principle, but a relationship that can become more intimate.

Prayer is the practice associated with that deepening. Bernard’s account links more frequent prayer with a closer relationship, and that intimacy with a change in what love seeks. The sequence is therefore at once ethical and devotional: it begins with self-concern, recognizes God as the giver of benefits, learns to love God beyond those benefits, and reaches toward a self no longer loved apart from God. The image of the kiss and the movement through the four degrees describe complementary aspects of the same aspiration—longing for God and the gradual purification of love.

Place in Bernard’s writing

Bernard’s wider body of work places On Loving God among writings concerned with spiritual formation and theological questions. His Apology had addressed controversies between Benedictines and Cistercians about monastic life; On Grace and Free Will treated a theological subject; and the sermons on the Song of Songs became a major work of devotional literature. Against that range, On Loving God is distinctive in its compact organization around a question and four degrees. It offers a readable account of how love can change direction without pretending that the final transformation is simply self-produced.

The work’s argument also turns on a productive tension. It begins with love for the self and acknowledges that people may approach God for benefit, yet it does not treat either as the final form of love. At the same time, its highest degree does not arise from self-discipline alone: the decisive capacity is given by grace. The treatise thus holds human practice and divine gift together. Prayer and growing intimacy mark the movement, while grace sets its limit and makes its completion possible.