This is a continuation of an interview with Fr. Michael Casey, OSCO January, 2010.
Br Chris: Do you think that Saint Bernard is over emphasized amongst the other Cistercian Fathers? It seems that he has the pride of place in Cistercian monasteries, over and above our other Cistercian Fathers.
Fr Michael Casey: Well, as I quoted Julia Childs in the retreat conferences saying, “You can never have enough butter”, you can never have too much Bernard in my book! You asked the wrong man that question [laughs].
I’ve just written a fifteen thousand word article on how to read Bernard. It’s being published in a companion book to Bernard by Brill, edited by Brian Patrick McGuire. In that I say, Bernard is brilliant. He’s a head and shoulders above all the others. With the sheer brilliance, it’s really the only word for it. But he’s also a very warm personality but we need to begin with some of the more basic works of his to understand where he’s coming from. I like to suggest people to begin with the Parables. They contain a lot of his solid teaching but in a fairly easy form. The Letters of Bernard are also very interesting although they are more demanding. The translation by Bruno Scott James is not good and that’s the only one available in English. Some of his other works are better to start with, the Sermon on the Song of Songs really needs to be postponed until we’ve got a good feeling for where he’s coming from. It’s a brilliant piece of work but it belongs to this genre of Sermo, they’re talks and he models them as talks or reflection which go round in circles, they’re not logical, you’d go berserk if you tried to list the contents of it. There’s a kind of coherence about them, so read as a whole they really do constitute a very good treatment of all aspects of monastic and contemplative life. But they’re not the place to begin.
The Steps of Humility and Pride, which is a bit of a joke in some cases, he’s got some very profound things in there. Things which are often forgotten, his three stages of spiritual growth. The first one is self knowledge, the third one is contemplation, and the question is, what’s the intermediary step? It’s compassion. That’s the step which people often forget, they think they can get to contemplation simply by self discipline and self knowledge, by working hard at gaining humility and they’ve completely locked other people out of the equation. Bernard is saying, if self knowledge is genuine then it’s expressed in compassion. It’s expressed in this ability to go easy on other people, to be merciful and so forth. It’s only in that context of giving and receiving mercy that we actually proceed to third stage of contemplation. That’s a pretty unexpected, counter-intuitive sort of step. That instead of going through the works of discipline and self knowledge and proceeding to contemplation, you actually do a sort of loop and come back to the world, come back to the neighbor before you go on.
So there’s a lot in Bernard. But sometimes people are put off by too much enthusiasm, but there’s plenty there. Really to understand Bernard, the other thing is to know the world in which he moved. So reading any of the Fathers and knowing about the monasticism of that period is good preparation.
