;Love is at once God and the gift of God;-St. Bernard of ClairvauxIn this concise and transcendent commentary on the human souls capacity to love God, St. Bernard of Clairvaux charts the souls ascent from the simplest beginnings of self-love toward the highest form of love: loving God purely for His own sake.On Loving God is both a practical guide and a theological reflection, offering readers the insights to deepen their relationship with God through a total commitment to ;the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.;With incisive clarity and depth, On Loving God directs readers with contemplations that are as intellectually enriching as they are spiritually transformative. No matter your station in life, dear reader, this timeless text will deepen your understanding of the eternal bond between Creator and creation and inspire you to an even greater awe, reverence, and devotion of Our Lord.

The subject of the treatise was suggested, as is plain from the text itself, as the result of a public, or at any rate semi-public, discussion with some person unknown in which St. Bernard, strongly commending the work of grace, had seemed to lay himself open to the charge of unduly minimizing the function of free will. There is about the treatise the fragrance of mystical theology; not the mystical theology of the esoteric, but that of the simple Christian living in the world. It is wonderful how this ascetic, this cloistered recluse, touches his subject with the hand of one who knows the pulsations of average humanity.

You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much.I answer, the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love. . . . Saint Bernard's On Loving God is one of his most delightful, and most widely read, works. It stands in the tradition of the Fathers of the Church, but it carries patristic teaching into the Middle Ages and into the cloister. Its famous affirmation that God is to be loved without limit, sine modo, is taken directly from the letters of Saint Augustine. While the tract is not an example of scholastic theology, it shows a typically twelfth-century love of logic and an unexpectedly precise use of terminology. In reading or listening to this work, it is very important, as with all medieval authors, to take them on their own terms, without superimposing on them categories favored by later generations, even our own. Or especially not our own.