Soliloquium de arrha animae (The Soul's Betrothal Gift)
Soliloquium de arrha animae
Ama, et quod facis, fac; dilige, et quod vis, tibi licet.
Our renderingLove, and do what you do; cherish God, and what you will is permitted to you.
What it is
A dialogue between Hugh of Saint-Victor and his own soul, exploring how the beauty of creation points to the beauty of God and culminating in the soul's recognition that God has given it an arrha — an earnest-pledge of the heavenly betrothal yet to come. Hugh, of noble Saxon birth, was the leading theologian of the Paris school of Saint-Victor, whose students included many sons of the aristocracy and the lesser nobility. More than 300 manuscripts survive, attesting to its extraordinary reach across every social stratum. Hugh himself introduced the soliloquy as an acceptable form of spiritual literature, following Augustine's Confessions in making the soul's conversation with itself a legitimate mode of prayer.
Why it still matters
The Soliloquium can be read in a single sitting as a guided meditation on divine beauty and the soul's longing for God; a modern English translation is available from Penelope Lawson (Mowbray, 1956) and it is well-suited to daily mental prayer.
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.