Love is sufficient of itself; it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. it is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in the practice. Of all the movements, sensations and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal though it be. For when God loves, all He desires is to be loved in return. The sole purpose of His love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love Him are made happy by their love of Him.



From a sermon of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose memorial and feast is observed today.



This gifted man and Doctor of the Church -- reformer, ascetic, priest and teacher -- formidable in his learning, vast in his influence, stern in his discipline, could be difficult, no doubt, and he is seen as an unsympathetic figure by many, perhaps especially by those with a romantic attachment to the story of the lovers Abelard and Heloise.



But as Reverend George William Rutler has written: If his pure ardor made him overly strict in judging the faults of more wayward lovers like Abelard, it had happy issue in his radiant treatise on grace and free will, De Diligendo Deo, and bore social fruit in his protection of Jews persecuted by the extravagant monk Rudolf and in his desire for the sanctification of the laity as well as clerics.



Saint Bernard's motto was To Know Jesus, and Jesus Crucified and we are indebted to him for several great Christian hymns, perhaps especially for Salve caput cruentatum, O sacred Head sore wounded.