The last few Decembers I’ve been grateful for the company of two wonderful Advent books—first a weighty volume by Fleming Rutledge and then more recently a helpfully pocket-sized one from Tish Harrison Warren. This year I’m finally getting around to a somewhat older reflection on the season, that of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).
Published in English translation by Liturgical Press (Cistercian Publications) as Sermons for Advent and the Christmas Season, these homilies begin with the dawn of the church’s year, walk us through a surprisingly full Christmas Eve, track the greater and lesser feasts across Christmastide and Epiphany, and conclude with a sermon on the conversion of St. Paul.
With the seven sermons On the Lord’s Advent, Bernard intends readers—given he seems to have meant these texts to be circulated—to “Weigh well the reasoning behind this Advent—this coming.” Our meditations, he suggests, can be fruitfully animated by a set of six questions: “who it is who comes, whence, whither, why, when, and by what means.” Curiosity about these things, Bernard says, is “praiseworthy and healthy,” because it sets us on the way to perceiving something of the “great mystery concealed” within the coming of Christ.
Now Bernard, the stern reformer, is not necessarily a figure most warm to immediately. His asceticism often seems especially austere, and in these seasonal sermons he can rival any present-day curmudgeon when he complains about how “the remembrance of this condescension”—the festival of Christmas—“is turned into a pretext for the flesh”: preoccupation with fancy clothes and fine dining.
I think Bernard is at his most companionable and insightful when he is, instead, focused on narrating the story of the advent of Christ, who “comes from the heart of God the Father into the womb of the virgin Mother” and by such a path to a world in desperate need. This startling movement must find its origin in a divine motivation that is “Something great, certainly—great mercy, abundant compassion, and overflowing love.”
While he has his misanthropic moments, then, Bernard cannot help but tell us that in Christ’s “incalculable and all but unimaginable condescension” is contained a profound truth about the glorious destiny of those for whom he came. When once a year “the universal Church celebrates a solemn remembrance of the coming of such majesty, such humility, such godly love” it also recalls “indeed such a glorification of ourselves.”
To quote Bernard at his most exuberant: “Wondrous is the condescension of the God who seeks, and wonderful the dignity of the humanity thus sought!” (To be clear, when Bernard or another theologian say “condescension” in this sense, they mean the gracious divine “stooping down” in the Incarnation, not a patronizing attitude.)
It is for us to reflect on the moral and even political implications of this dignity, which is not Bernard’s first concern here. But let us learn from him that to contemplate the subject matter of Advent is to discover once more the gratuity of the astonishing good news of God’s taking on flesh as one of us:
If I consider why he comes, I embrace—insofar as I can—the inestimable breadth of his love. If I think about how he comes, I am struck by the exaltation of the human condition. The Lord and Creator of humanity comes indeed: he comes to human beings, he comes for human beings, he comes as a human being.
I’ve mentioned Bernard’s six Advent questions, but as this quotation shows, he is, like many preachers, generally given to organizing his themes into sets of three. Perhaps the most recognizable of these triplets is the notion of the three Advents: the “threefold coming” of Christ. Our place in sacred history is found in the interval between humble Incarnation and glorious return. Just so, “you must ponder not only that coming at which he came to seek and to save what was lost, but also and no less the one at which he will come and take us to himself … ruminating in your hearts how much he performed in the first and how much he promised in the second!” Between these markers, we are visited in Christ’s “intermediate” arrival—his presence to us in the meanwhile—“a kind of path by which we travel from the first to the final.” (Rutledge and Warren are excellent on all this, too, and on what this means for the witness of the church.)
Bernard can gloss this threefold arrival in a range of different ways. He points, for instance, to the contrasting modes of Christ’s presence: “In the first he came in flesh and weakness; in this middle one he comes in spirit and in power; in the final he will come in glory and in majesty.”
Or, a little differently: “In the first Christ was our redemption. In the final he shall appear as our life. In this one … he is our rest and consolation.” (Again, we might want to pause to explore what it means to be truly consoled yet undulled to the sufferings and struggles of our time.)
With a slightly different inflection, Bernard repeatedly draws our attention to the hiddenness of the second, perpetual advent, the presence of Christ that we are invited to perceive afresh moment by moment. If the first and third arrivals are “obvious”—in the first “he was seen on earth and lived among human beings” and in the last “all flesh will see the salvation of our God”—the second is one in which “he comes every day invisibly in the Spirit.”
Where do we look for this “intermediate” arrival? Characteristically, Bernard’s answer is essentially interior: “you need not sail across the seas or pierce the clouds or cross the Alps! No grand way is being shown to you. Run to your own self to meet your God! The Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.”
Nevertheless, it is also strongly affective and as it shapes dispositions seems to flow naturally into the active life. “He is the living bread and food for the mind. … Let it enter into the bowels of your soul. Let it pass into your feelings and into your routines.” (Grateful for Bernard’s moral psychology, we might yet wish for a little more elaboration on the presence of Christ to us in the neighbor, though this is perhaps more evident elsewhere in Bernard’s writing, for instance on love.)
Another instructive set of three: Christ comes “to humankind, into humankind, and against humankind.” Bernard correlates these three comings, it seems, with the first, second, and third advents—the Incarnation of Christ behind us, the union with Christ possible in the present through grace, and the last judgment by Christ that lies ahead. But it might be equally clarifying to receive it as a testimony to the character of our own encounters with the living Christ in this time between.
The purpose of Bernard’s threefold ascriptions, I think, is to tell and retell the story of Christ in a way that evokes its textured beauty, and to help us find our place within it. He’s continually shifting his imagery, drawing on an extraordinarily rich hinterland of scriptural allusion to add metaphysical depth and rhetorical persuasion. (To risk a niche and an almost certainly unfitting analogy: the patterns of three in his thought function just a bit like the tiki taka triangles that used to characterise F.C. Barcelona’s ever-moving style of football.) It is also aimed at existential resonance. This is seen most clearly in the final sermon of the series, which is the briefest (two pages), the most compressed, and for that reason perhaps the most saturated with biblical references.
Bernard begins “Sermon Seven: On the Threefold Benefit” with a now familiar encouragement to “celebrate the Lord’s coming with devotion” and to contemplate the character of this divine advent. What should we notice this time? That “the One who has no need of our goods not only comes to us, but comes for our sake.” Moreover, “the very magnitude of his condescension shows the extent of our neediness. Not only does the cost of the medicine indicate the danger in the illness, but the multitude of remedies shows the number of diseases.”
What kinds of infirmity does Bernard have in mind? Though many preachers then and now would no doubt give it a shot, to “run through in one sermon all the needs we experience is difficult,” and the abbot once again settles for a set of three. He takes these to be more or less universal: “No one is found among us who does not seem in this meantime to need counsel, help, and protection.” This “threefold misery” or “threefold disadvantage” can be summarized in the observation that we struggle to know the good, struggle to do the good we intend, and struggle to resist evil. In a nutshell: we need help.
If this is the truth of our situation, “Indispensable then is the Saviour’s coming; indispensable is Christ’s presence for people thus overwhelmed.” The overwhelmed, Bernard continues—which on some level means all of us—need Christ’s presence in at least three ways. “If only he will so come that by his supremely abounding condescension as he dwells in us by faith he may illumine our blindness, help our weakness as he stays with us, and as he stands alongside us to protect and defend our frailty.”
If Bernard is right, then our imaginations will be enriched this Advent season if we learn to think in a few threes about the mystery of Christ. His last homily culminates in what seems a timeless exhortation: “let us hasten to this great teacher in every decision. Let us call on this vigorous helper in every task. Let us entrust our lives to this faithful defender in every struggle.” And then the closing line, with its three slightly shifted prepositions pointing us to the compassing presence of Christ: “This is why he came into the world”—“that by dwelling in us, with us, and alongside us, he might illumine our darkness, lighten our labors, and ward off all dangers.” May we keep an Advent that is alive to his arrival, in all its steadiness and surprise.
Samuel Tranter, PhD is McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life, Christ Church, Oxford University. Previous appointments include Academic Dean at Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, in Durham, England, and an Honorary Research Fellow of Durham’s Department of Theology and Religion.
