SOURCE: Paulsell, William O. “Virtue in St Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs.” In Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: Studies Commemorating the Eighth Centenary of His Canonization, edited by M. Basil Pennington, pp. 101-17. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977.

In the following essay, Paulsell discusses the connection between virtue and spiritual progress in Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs.

The eighty-six sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs constitute one of the great classics of Christian spirituality. Here the Abbot of Clairvaux outlined for his monks a methodology of spiritual development. He saw a direct relationship between our virtue or lack of it and our spiritual progress. In the first Sermon of the series he insisted that there could be no spiritual progress apart from a life of virtue:

Before the flesh has been tamed and the spirit set free by zeal for truth, before...