Sermons on the Song of Songs

Sermons on the Song of Songs is Bernard of Clairvaux’s major work of devotional interpretation: an extended reading of the biblical love poem as a guide to the soul’s desire for God. Addressed to monks and shaped by the poem’s language of longing and intimacy, the sermons move from repentance and spiritual growth toward union with Christ. Their unfinished form preserves both the reach of Bernard’s project and the limits of a work cut short by his death.

Composition and Scriptural Design

Bernard began the sequence around 1135–36, after returning to his monastery from the demands of church and public affairs. He presented the sermons to monks he believed were ready for more demanding spiritual instruction. The series would become one of the great works of Christian spirituality, and its sustained engagement with the Song of Songs represents Bernard’s mature thought. He continued composing it for the rest of his life, but did not complete the exposition.

The interpretive method belongs to a medieval tradition also represented by Origen: the poem’s bridegroom is understood as Christ, while the bride may signify the individual soul or, at times, the Church. Bernard does not treat the poem merely as a text to decode. Its language gives form to the soul’s desire for God and supplies images through which he can describe spiritual change. The sermons therefore connect biblical interpretation with instruction: the poem’s intimate encounter becomes a way of thinking about faith, purification, and the soul’s growth toward God.

The series begins with the Song’s opening plea for a kiss. Bernard stays with that image for the first four sermons, turns to other topics, and later returns to it for four more. This repeated attention gives the kiss a structural role rather than treating it as a passing metaphor. It becomes a point to which the argument can return as its account of desire and spiritual development deepens.

The Kiss and the Soul’s Progress

For Bernard, the kiss is the fulfillment of a soul’s longing, not a formal greeting. It names an encounter with Christ that brings the human and divine into intimacy. He presents it as necessary to strengthen faith and as a means of approach to God through Christ. At the same time, he insists that this experience cannot be adequately conveyed to someone who has not received it: its character is known inwardly, not grasped through description alone. The image thus joins two emphases in the sermons: the soul’s desire to know God and the limits of language in reporting that knowledge.

Bernard develops the kiss into a three-stage account of spiritual life. First comes the kiss at Christ’s feet, associated with confession and the forgiveness of sin. The kiss of Christ’s hand follows: a sign of being raised up and guided in spiritual growth. The kiss at the mouth represents holy intimacy and union with God. These stages correspond to purgation, illumination, and union. The sequence gives spiritual change a discernible direction: from acknowledging sin, through learning to live in faith, toward contemplative intimacy.

The kiss also clarifies why the sermons’ imagery is not simply decorative. It lets Bernard speak of a relationship that is deeply desired but not controlled by human effort. The soul longs and seeks, but the encounter is not something it can produce at will. In his account of love, spiritual maturity depends on grace as well as desire; the image of the kiss makes that relationship personal and inward without making it fully explainable.

Inward Experience and the Work of Seeking

In Sermon 74, written toward the end of his life, Bernard describes experiences in which the Word came to him. He says he was not conscious of the moment of arrival or departure and reports no sensory perception of the encounter. His account locates the experience inwardly, beyond what sight or other senses could establish. Rather than offering an external sign, he identifies its reality by its effects: his hardened and troubled heart is stirred, faults lose their hold, and his desires are brought into subjection. The experience changes him, though its spiritual force later weakens, like a fire that has been removed from beneath a boiling pot. The sermons consequently present the sense of God’s presence as both transformative and passing, leaving the soul again to seek.

That seeking becomes explicit in Sermon 84, which turns to the Song’s account of searching for the one the soul loves. Bernard treats seeking God as a blessing in itself. Finding God does not end the search; it kindles desire further. Nor is the pursuit initiated by the soul alone: Bernard argues that the soul seeks because God has already sought and loved it. The passage thus makes love both the cause and the fruit of spiritual seeking. His address to the monks also distinguishes those who respond to grace by loving God from those who remain enclosed in self-love.

Sermon 85 develops the image of spiritual marriage. A soul that leaves other claims behind, clings to the Word, and orders its life by it can be understood as the Word’s bride and spouse. Bernard presents this union as the result of an inward reorientation: love is not merely declared but expressed in the shape of a life. The wedding image extends the earlier language of desire and the kiss, describing a sustained bond rather than a single moment of encounter.

The Unfinished Sermon and the Work’s Significance

Sermon 86 returns to the search for the beloved and turns that theme toward prayer. Bernard commends privacy, leisure, and silence, particularly when others are asleep and distractions have receded. He instructs the monks to seek the Word itself rather than treating prayer as a means to some other end. In his account, the Word contains what the soul needs: healing, help, restoration, and resources for growth. The sermon’s emphasis gathers the sequence’s central movement into a practical counsel: desire should be directed toward God, and prayer should seek God rather than merely the benefits God may give.

The sequence stops before this final sermon is complete. Bernard died in 1153 without finishing it; others continued the series, but the book notes that they could not write as he did. Its ending is therefore not a planned resolution but an interruption at a point where the teaching on prayer remains underway. The incomplete form is consistent with a work centered on ongoing desire: its search for God reaches no neat literary closure, though that resemblance should not obscure the historical fact that Bernard died before completing the exposition.

The sermons also belong to a life that joined contemplation with public responsibility. Bernard administered a large monastic community, advised rulers, and intervened in church affairs; he was frequently away from the monastery, whose monks missed him. The work’s inward emphasis should therefore not be taken as evidence that he withdrew from the world or ignored action and virtue. Its wider significance lies partly in the way it sets contemplative intimacy within the demanding life of a monk and church leader. Through the recurring images of the kiss, the search, and marriage, the sermons make longing and love the means by which the soul is directed toward God, while leaving the deepest encounter beyond complete verbal description.