St. Bernard of Clairvaux on Advent

Traveling the Road Together

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the famous twelfth-century abbot, preacher, and theologian, once explained that in Advent, we commemorate three distinct ways that Christ comes to us: His coming into the world in the Incarnation, His coming into our hearts, and His final coming in glory at the end of the world. Bernard makes this distinction in an Advent homily that is excerpted in the Office of Readings (part of the Liturgy of the Hours) for the first Wednesday in Advent. Although he doesn’t advert to the fact, Bernard is here interpreting the Gospel account of the events leading up to the Nativity using three of the four traditional senses of Scripture: the literal sense referring to Christ’s birth; the tropological sense applying the story to our present lives; and the anagogical sense relating the events to eschatological realities.

In the excerpted portion of the homily, Bernard’s focus is on the second of these comings of Christ, what he calls the “middle coming.” He explains that when we turn our love toward God and keep God’s Word, then that Word will live within us. Interestingly, he proposes that this middle coming is a “road on which we travel from the first coming to the last.” We might say that Christ’s Incarnation puts God’s salvific plan in motion, and through grace we are then empowered to participate in Christ’s saving action. If we remain open to grace, we will ultimately be glorified in God’s presence in the Last Days.

Bernard’s reference to Christ’s presence in our hearts as the road on which we travel evokes the common medieval image of the Christian faithful as pilgrims (or viatores) on a journey toward our true home. In more recent times, such imagery has sometimes been dismissed as too otherworldly, focusing too much on the afterlife while downplaying God’s presence in the here and now and our responsibilities for transforming the present world. Bernard’s explanation pushes against this dismissal, suggesting as it does that the road on which we journey is Christ’s transforming presence in our hearts through which He “take[s] possession of your desires and your whole way of life.”