Epistola aurea / Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei (The Golden Epistle)
Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei
Amor ipse intellectus est. Ubi amor, ibi oculus.
Our renderingLove itself is understanding. Where love is, there is the eye that sees.
What it is
William of Saint-Thierry's final work, addressed to the newly founded Charterhouse of Mont-Dieu near Reims, is a complete map of the spiritual life from the animal man, through the rational man, to the spiritual man, structured as a pastoral letter of extraordinary warmth. Called 'Golden' by Mabillon in 1690, it circulated for centuries under the name of Bernard of Clairvaux, which secured it an even wider audience in royal and noble households. It was 'cherished by monks, beguines, and lay folk for eight centuries' and survives in Latin, Middle High German, Old French, Alemannic, and Middle Dutch translations, testifying to an aristocratic and lay reading audience that reached well beyond the cloister.
Why it still matters
The Golden Epistle's three-part structure (animal / rational / spiritual) remains a diagnostically useful guide to where one stands in the interior life; it is available in a Cistercian Publications translation and is eminently practical for daily spiritual reading.
Kept alongside
De diligendo Deo (On Loving God)
De diligendo Deo
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.
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.
Meditativae Orationes (Meditative Prayers)
Meditativae Orationes
William of Saint-Thierry, a Flemish nobleman who became Benedictine abbot of Saint-Thierry and then a Cistercian, composed his Meditativae Orationes with an honesty about doubt, struggle, and consolation that Augustine's Confessions had made canonical. As friend and confidant of Bernard of Clairvaux, William moved in court as well as monastic circles; he himself described these prayers as 'not altogether useless in training beginners in prayer.' Written with the psychological intensity of someone who had known both courtly and cloistered life, they express the full range of affective spiritual experience — longing, compunction, consolation, and petition — in a form suitable for private recitation.