De diligendo Deo (On Loving God)
De diligendo Deo
Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est; modus, sine modo diligere.
Our renderingThe reason for loving God is God himself; the measure of love due to him is to love without measure.
What it is
Bernard of Clairvaux's treatise setting out four ascending degrees of love for God, dedicated to Haimeric, Cardinal Chancellor of the Roman Church and among the most powerful ecclesiastical figures of the 12th century. Composed between approximately 1132 and 1135, it was the first work in the Latin West to make the love of God its single explicit subject. Bernard's connections to the French royal court were direct — Louis VII, Queen Eleanor, and the princes of France prostrated themselves before him during Crusade preaching — and the text's elegant theological structure made it a model for lay noble reading. An anonymous French vernacular translation existed already by the late 12th century.
Why it still matters
A modern reader can take Bernard's four-degree schema as a framework for self-examination in prayer: where on the ladder from self-love to loving God for God's own sake does my devotion currently stand? Multiple modern translations exist.
Kept alongside
Penitential Psalms and Litany of Saints (as compiled in Ottonian royal use)
Psalmi poenitentiales cum litania sanctorum
The seven Penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) combined with the Litany of Saints form the core private prayer structure documented directly in the Prayerbook of Otto III (BSB Clm 30111), where Archbishop Bernward of Hildesheim employed them in the young emperor's spiritual formation. This pairing — penitential self-examination before God followed by intercession from the whole company of heaven — was used by Christian teachers as early as Origen and Augustine, ordered for Lenten use by Pope Innocent III, and embedded in the Use of Sarum and successive Books of Common Prayer. Its place in the weekly devotional rhythm of the Salian and Hohenstaufen courts via their breviary traditions makes it the single most broadly transmitted prayer form in this dataset, extending across all dynasties and centuries. The sequence remains structurally unchanged in the Roman Rite today.
Orationes sive Meditationes (Prayers and Meditations)
Orationes sive Meditationes
A collection of nineteen prayers and three meditations composed by Anselm of Bec between c. 1070 and 1085, representing the founding documents of western affective devotion. Anselm sent a personalised copy to Princess Adelaide of Normandy (daughter of William the Conqueror) in 1081 in response to her request for psalms, adding long intimate prayers addressed to individual saints. He later sent a 'Matildan recension' of twenty-two prayers and meditations to Countess Matilda of Tuscany during his second exile (1103–6), composing at least one prayer (Oratio 1) expressly for her use. The prayers are cast in a new mode of intense psychological self-examination, designed to arouse compunction, love, and fear of God in private reading.
Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (Sermons on the Song of Songs)
Sermones super Cantica Canticorum
Bernard's eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, begun c. 1135 and left unfinished at his death in 1153, represent the summit of 12th-century mystical exegesis and became one of the most widely copied Latin texts of the medieval period. While addressed formally to his monks at Clairvaux, the sermons were circulated and read far beyond the cloister: Bernard was the central spiritual authority for royal and aristocratic Europe alike, and the courts of France, England, and the Empire received and debated his writings. The sermons teach the soul's ascent to union with the divine Bridegroom through humility, self-knowledge, and love, using the language of bridal mysticism in a way that resonated as much with court culture as with monastic life.