At Mass on each Sunday of Advent, many parishes light a new candle on the Advent Crown. This year, Five Books for Catholics will do something similar. Each week it will recommend a book for the season and delve into it.
First on this year’s list of recommended books for Christmas and Advent is:
Sermons for Advent and the Christmas Season
by St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Advent and Christmas are liturgical seasons. If we are going to read anything at this time of year, it should be a book that helps us participate more deeply in the Advent and Christmas liturgy and encounter Christ in the various readings from Sacred Scripture. For this reason, the first book on this year’s list is a series of sermons for Advent and Christmas.
"St Bernard of Clairvaux was called "the last of the Fathers" of the Church because once again in the 12th century he renewed and brought to the fore the important theology of the Fathers."
Benedict XVI
There are many such sets of sermons. St. Bernard’s is one of the most celebrated. Not only are these the sermons of a saint and doctor of the Church. They stand out for their deep understanding of Scripture, spiritual insight, conviction, warmth, vivid prose, and brilliant oratory. The seventeenth-century Benedictine scholar, Dom Jean Mabillon, may have been thinking of this peculiar combination of qualities when he called St. Bernard “the last of the Church Fathers.”
Of course, the patristic era was long over by Bernard’s day. Still, as Benedict XVI pointed out in one of his catecheses, St. Bernard deserves Mabillon’s epithet “because once again in the 12th century he renewed and brought to the fore the important theology of the Fathers.”
Bernard’s prose is brilliant. If you know Latin, reading these sermons in the original is well worth the effort. An economic edition with the Latin text is available from Sources chrétiennes. The first volume (no. 480) contains the Advent sermons and the second (no. 481) the ones for Christmas.
St. Bernard was the greatest preacher of his day. He was frequently called from his monastery to acts as both a preacher and prestigious diplomat. Among other things, he helped ended the schism over the successor of Honorius II, securing the papacy for Innocent II, and preached the calamitous Second Crusade. However, while there is documentary evidence of the extent and power of all the preaching he did outside the monastery, hardly any of those homilies were transcribed. Almost all the sermons we have from Bernard were directed to his monks.
Scholars debate whether St. Bernard ever preached them from the pulpit or simply penned them as sermons.
The references to the readings, antiphons and rituals from the liturgical feasts appear to indicate that these sermons were delivered. For example, in the first sermon for Advent, he uses Wisdom 18:14-15 to describe Christ’s birth. “For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne.” This verse was the Introit of the Mass for Sunday within the Christmas Octave. He also cites Isaiah 1:23 and recalls how the monks have come across that verse in the matins of that day.
On the other hand, take Bernard’s most famous homilies: In Praise of the Virgin Mary (In laudibus Virginis Mariae). This work began at a treatise or tractate (tractatus). Among other things, the tractate was the literary genre for a commentary on a book from the Bible. Hence, St. Augustine’s commentary on the fourth Gospel is called Tractates on the Gospel of John (Tractatus in euangelium Ioannis). Though less systematic and more occasional in character, sermons are also commentaries on a passage from Scripture. Hence, a medieval biblical commentary could easily be recast series of sermons. That is exactly what Bernard did in his celebrated sermons on Mary. Similarly, his homilies for Advent and Christmas may have been only penned but never delivered as sermons. He may have framed as homilies his commentaries on the Gospel passages pertaining to Christ’s birth and infancy. A skilled writer, he could have even inserted references to the liturgy to make it appear that they had been delivered.
Even if that were the case, penning them as sermons was no mere literary artifice. Here, the medium is the message. By settling on this literary genre, St. Bernard is making a point: the liturgy is the proper place for listening to the Word of God. It is where we are most likely to encounter Christ in Sacred Scripture and receive the grace to respond to his call.
Moreover, Bernard covers the whole liturgical season, from Advent to Candlemas (2 February). All the homilies are on a feast that falls within the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Hence, in addition to the liturgical commemoration of the mysteries of Christ’s birth and infancy, there is a sermon on the Conversion of St. Paul (25 January) and one that covers together three feasts from the Octave of Christmas: those of St. Stephen, St. John Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents. Normally, there are various homilies for the major feasts. For example, there are six for the Christmas Vigil, five for Christmas Day, and three each for the Circumcision of the Lord (1 January) and Epiphany.
As it is Advent, a brief survey of Bernard’s six sermons for this liturgical season is appropriate. It can also highlight some keys for reading his sermons.
The first sermon addresses a problem that is far more pressing in our day than it was in Bernard’s. “The name of this solemnity is well renowned and known throughout the world. Perchance, the meaning of that name not so much.” Concerned that most people either do not know or have not grasped the meaning of Advent, he explains the season.
Fast-forward from twelfth-century Christendom to the secularised twenty-first century. Now many celebrate Christmas enthusiastically as a “season of goodwill” or a family holiday. They are concerned with getting all the festive trappings right and maybe performing some work of beneficence, but not with worshipping the Word made flesh. Even practicing Christians can get so caught up in preparing the external festivities that they neglect to prepare themselves interiorly for the liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth. This makes Bernard’s sermon on the meaning of Advent even more relevant in our day than it was in his.
To explain its meaning, he goes through six questions, each of which regards one of the circumstances of Christ’s coming (adventus). Hence, the title of the sermon (De sex circumstantiis adventus). The questions he asks are: 1) Who is coming? 2) From where does he come? 3) To where does he come? 4) Why has he come? 5) When does he come? 6) By what path does he come?
Of course, any decently catechised person knows the answers to most if not all these questions. However, we may not know the full answers. Even if we do, we probably take them for granted and are indifferent to them.
For this reason, Bernard reminds us that what we should really be worried about are not the ups-and-downs of every day, but our eternal salvation. We are children of Adam. He has left us spiritually sick and destitute. Thankfully, the Son has humbled himself and become one of us. He has thereby come to heal us. In his mercy, he comes to raise us out of misery.
Bernard also leads us to deeper answers to the six questions about Christ’s coming. Take the last one. Clearly the Incarnation is the way in which the Son has come to us. However, Bernard points out that this he comes to us in two ways, not just one.
“To accomplish our salvation, he came amidst the world once and for all, visible and in the flesh. In like manner, he comes daily to save individual souls, invisible and in spirit.”
St. Bernard, First Sermon for Advent
In distinguishing these two ways by which the Son comes to us, Bernard is recalling that there is a twofold sending of the Son: the visible and the invisible; the Incarnation and his dwelling in the souls of the just. In the fifth sermon, Bernard draws out a further implication of this doctrine. He appeals to the invisible mission of the Son to explain how there are not just two advents of Jesus, but three. This sermon is one of the lessons in the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the First Week of Advent.
During Advent, we relive the chosen people’s wait for Christ’s first coming and, with renewed vigilance, ready ourselves for his second coming at the end of time. Bernard sees these two comings symbolised in the “the wings of a dove covered in silver” (Psalm 68:13). However, the same verse also speaks of those who “lie among the sheepfolds.” Bernard takes this an allusion to our condition as members of the pilgrim Church and to a third coming of Christ, which falls between his first and final advent.
“In his first advent, he came in the flesh and weakness; in this middle one, in spirit and power; in the final one, in glory and majesty…This middle coming is the way by which one comes from his first to his final one. In his first coming, Christ was our redemption. In his final coming, he will appear as our life. In this middle one he is our rest and consolation, so that we might lie sleeping among the sheepfolds.”
St Bernard, Fifth Sermon for Advent
Throughout these sermons, Bernard finds these three advents of Christ representative of other ternaries that characterise our spiritual life. Not only do we suffer from a threefold wretchedness but Christ’s coming has a threefold benefit, as he renews and heals us in three ways.
Medieval spiritual authors, such as Bernard, love tracing such patterns and discovering perfectly correlated numerical series. Modern readers might deem them a tiresome conceit. In these sermons at least, Bernard’s ternaries are never forced but grounded convincingly in both Scripture and our common experience.
It is hard to contest, for example, his description of our threefold wretchedness (miseria triplex).
“We are easily seduced, weak in works, frail in resisting. If we wish to discern good from evil, we are deceived. If we attempt to do good, we fail. If we try to resist evil, we give up and are overcome.”
St Bernard, Seventh Sermon for Advent
Similarly, in describing how Christ’s coming brings with it the remedy to each of these three ills, Bernard states truths to which Scripture attests amply. He describes how Christ enlightens our mind, strengthens us, and protects us from Satan.
St. Bernard stresses how the Son has come to us through his Incarnation and now comes to our soul spiritually through the life of grace. Rooted in the letters of St. Paul, the abbot of Clairvaux reminds us that in this way Christ is undoing the damage wrought by Adam and creating us anew. Hence we should cast of the old man, and put on the new.
“Just as the old Adam was diffused throughout and taken up the entire human person, so now must Christ take hold of the whole human person. He who created the whole human person, has redeemed and will glorify the whole human person.”
Bernard of Clairvaux, Fifth Sermon for Advent
In Bernard’s mind, these are the central truths that Advent should bring home to us each year.
The Christ-centredness of Bernard’s preaching and spirituality means that he is also deeply Marian. He expresses his appreciation of Mary’s place in the economy of salvation in the second sermon for Advent, on Isaiah’s prophecy to Achaz of the virgin who shall bear a son.
In that sermon, he stresses how Mary is “the royal road by which the Saviour has come to us” and that, through her, “we have access to the Son.” Indeed, Bernard closes the sermon by bursting out into a heartfelt prayer to Mary. This is not a mere rhetorical figure: an apostrophe. Rather, Bernard is following and illustrating the practice of lectio divina, the monastic mode of reading Scripture. In lectio divina, the reading and meditation of a passage of Scripture should lead to prayer.
What surer way is there to reap the benefits of Advent than, like St. Bernard, entrusting ourselves to Mary? We can even use the prayer he has left us.
“Our Lady, our mediatrix, our advocate, reconcile us to your Son, entrust us to your Son, represent us before your Son.”
