Last Things by Bynum Caroline Walker; Freedman Paul;

Author:Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul; [Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Community Among the Saintly Dead

Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints

Anna Harrison

Bernard is Famed for the friendships he enjoyed. He pours out, in his sermons on saints as in his sermons on the Song of Songs, ardent expressions of longing and love for his brother and for other friends, living and dead, and one can find such expressions in his letters as well. A hunger to be remembered by his now dead brother infuses his lamentation on Gerard: “How I long to know what you think about me, once so uniquely yours,” Bernard writes. “Perhaps you still give thought to our miseries, now that you have plunged into the abyss of light, become engulfed in that sea of endless happiness.”1 For these reasons alone—that is, because of the tight hold that friendship exerts on him and because of his longing to be remembered by his brother—one might expect to discover in Bernard’s writings signs of this-life-like relationships among the saintly dead. Moreover, Bernard’s various works are shot through with references to the common life and to relationship with others more generally. In this essay, I consider Bernard’s sense of the relationship among heaven’s inhabitants. I focus on his five Sermons for the Feast of All Saints,2 and I look closely at the two images that are central to his discussion of the experience of saintly souls in heaven: the image of the bed and the image of the feast. My analysis of these images within the larger context of Bernard’s work indicates that despite his charged preoccupation with his brother’s love for him, despite his broader interest in friends and friendship, despite his attention to the common life and to the relationship between self and other, Bernard thinks little about interaction when he thinks about the dead.

Although the love that was alive on earth continues to move in heaven, it does change. Addressing his dead brother, Bernard exclaims:

God is love [1 John 4: 8], and the deeper one’s union with God, the more full one is of love. . . . Therefore. . . . Your love has not been diminished but only changed. . . . All that smacks of weakness you have cast away.3

The image of the heavenly feast is evocative of such change. More specifically, Bernard uses that image to talk about the dissolution of the will of each soul into the will of God; and through this image he conveys, too, a sense—however tentative and ambiguous—of the union of all souls in heaven. Bernard uses the image of souls resting on separate beds to talk about the maintenance, in heaven, of the self each soul was on earth, as well as the soul’s passionate, gratifying encounter with God.4 Neither of these images nor any other, however, communicates a sense of relationship among the saintly dead that resembles relationships forged in this life.

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