Devotion to the Sacred Humanity
of Christ
As Found in St. Bernard of Clairvaux
and St. Francis of Assisi

by Stephen N. Filippo

This article will focus on the rich, deep, and profound devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ in the spirituality of two of His greatest Saints: St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Bernard

In the 10th century St. Bernard, inspired and on fire with the love of Our Lord (and His Blessed Mother), re-introduced devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus on such a grand scale as to re-invigorate all of Christendom. His reform of Cluny at Citeaux and Clairvaux, (together with St. Robert of Molesmes and St. Stephen Harding) revived Religious life to such an extent that monastic life flourished once again. Mothers hid their sons when St. Bernard came to town to preach, lest they lose them to the “Mellifluous Doctor.” St. Bernard entered Citeaux, the fledgling order’s only house, in 1112. At the time of his death in 1153, the order counted 339 Cistercian houses. He is also known as “The last of the Fathers of the Church” and the “Doctor of Charity.”

St. Bernard’s spirituality is eminently Christocentric, Scriptural, Cataphatic and Affective; so much so that it is virtually impossible to isolate the four aspects since they are so interconnected and interwoven. For St. Bernard, to know Christ Crucified (Christocentric) is to love Jesus and Mary (Affectivity), and to love Christ (Affectivity) is to live Christ (Christocentric) and to live Christ is to have Him constantly before you (Cataphatic). St. Bernard’s spirituality is deeply rooted in Scripture: “. . . and thou shall love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind and with thy whole strength.” (Mk. 12:30)

St. Bernard’s deep devotion was the result of a dream he had at Midnight Mass at the tender age of 10. He dreamt he saw Mary giving birth to Jesus. From then on he was convinced that God had shown him this dream at the exact moment of Jesus’ birth.

As a result, all of St. Bernard’s teaching is deeply Christocentric. He loved God, Jesus and Mary very much. He said: “The reason for loving God is God Himself; the measure of loving God is to love Him without measure.”1 For St. Bernard, God is Love and He revealed His Love for us by sending His only Son to save us. All are made in the image and likeness of God, which image is a reflection of Jesus. Jesus alone is the perfect image of Wisdom, Truth and Justice. Yet man lost his likeness to Jesus by sinning. Man is able, through God’s grace, to attain, through the correct use of his own free will, union in prayer with Jesus, the perfect image, however, by practicing the virtues and imitating Jesus. God, in His Great Mercy, allows us to be restored to His likeness through the merits of His Son, though imperfectly and only fleetingly on earth, and fully in Everlasting Life. It is precisely in this Christocentric focus of St. Bernard’s that he startled the world and brought many souls back to Our Lord.

St. Bernard stresses the importance of Sacred Scripture in order to be Christ-centered and follow Jesus. He saw all of Sacred Scripture as pointing to Jesus Christ. He himself took Scripture literally and to heart: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me”(Jn. 14:6). Every thought, word and deed should be directed to and imbued with deep, affective love of Jesus. And Jesus should be loved for Jesus’ sake alone. “Write what you will, I shall not relish it unless it tells of Jesus. Talk or argue what you will, I shall not relish it if you exclude the name of Jesus. Jesus is to me honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the ear.”2 In order to imitate Christ, you have to constantly remember Him, keep Him right in front of you all the day long, have an image of Him painted on your mind’s eye, love Him constantly and be forever devoted to Him, thinking only of Him before every thought, word and deed, and offering Him these too.

For St. Bernard the key to imitating Christ is to constantly focus on His Sacred Humanity, His suffering, His humility, His obedience to the Father, but especially His physical sufferings and wounds. He advised that prayer be done with some image of Jesus always in front of you. His own strong and deep devotion to the Sacred Wounds in Our Lord’s side was a precursor of modern devotion to the Sacred Heart. St. Bernard is also credited with establishing devotion to His Holy Name, because only through this Name is one saved and only this Name gives light, nourishment, and healing.

St. Bernard uses very affective imagery from The Song of Songs to describe the ascent to God in prayer: embrace, kiss, ecstasy and marriage. In particular, he uses the kiss to describe the way to God. The first kiss is like the penitent woman’s to the feet of Jesus, weeping, full of contrition, begging forgiveness for one’s many, many sins; purgation. The second kiss is to the hands of Jesus; He lifts us out of the mire of sin and into the state of Grace; illumination. Finally, the kiss of the mouth is the infusion of the Holy Spirit, where He enlightens and enflames us. Very few ever experience this level. But for those who do it culminates in Bridal Mysticism:

Love is a great reality, but there are degrees to it. The bride stands at the highest . . . Pure love does not gain strength through expectation, nor is it weakened by distrust. Pure love has no self interest. This is the love of the bride, for this is the bride—with all that means. Love is the being and hope of a bride. She is full of it, and the bridegroom is contented with it. He asks nothing else, she has nothing else to give....but the love of a bridegroom—or rather the Bridegroom who is love—asks only the exchange of love and trust. Let the Beloved love in return. How can the bride —and the bride of love—do other than love? How can love not be loved? . . . Rightly then does she renounce all other affection and devote herself to love alone, for it is in returning love that she has the power to respond to love. Although she may pour out her whole self in love, what is that compared to the inexhaustible fountain of His love? . . . Although the creature loves less, being a lesser being, yet if it loves with its whole heart nothing is lacking, for it has given all. Such love, as I have said, is marriage, for a soul cannot love like this and not be beloved; complete and perfect marriage consists in the exchange of love. No one can doubt that the soul is first loved, and loved more intensely, by the Word; for it is anticipated and surpassed in its love. Happy the soul who is permitted to be anticipated in blessedness so sweet. Happy the soul who has been allowed to experience the embrace of such bliss! For it is nothing other than love, holy and chaste, full of sweetness and delight, love utterly serene and true, mutual and deep, which joins two beings, not one in flesh, but one in spirit, making them no longer two but one.”3

Such dizzying heights of mysticism can only be the result of total, complete, unselfish and unconditional love, surrender, abandonment and obedience on the part of St. Bernard’s soul, to the Word. It was Jesus Himself who gave St. Bernard’s soul the grace to achieve such marriage and union in prayer.

Since St. Bernard’s love for the Sacred Humanity of Jesus was so deeply affective and tender, he saw and taught four stages in the love of Jesus:

1) Man loves himself for his own sake. Ensnared in sin, he is encumbered by the woes and cares of the human body; sense, carnal or fleshly love. Only human prudence operates on this level.

2) Man loves Jesus for his own (man’s) sake: we love Jesus for selfish reasons; because we need Him, for His Mercy, His deliverance, His healing power: still very selfish, but a growth nonetheless.

3) Man begins to love Jesus for His (Jesus’) sake. We begin to love by giving without asking anything in return; a true love of neighbor.

4) Man loves Jesus only for Jesus’ sake. Man is free to love and obey Jesus unconditionally. Man is no longer concerned with his own welfare at all.

This is the true imitation of Christ:

If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For he who would save his life will lose it; but he who loses his life for My sake and for the Gospel’s sake will save it. (Mk. 8:34-36)

Our Lord is not saying these words out of toughness or a sense of discipline, but out of a profound love and affection for us. It is when we can return such love and affection, like St. Bernard, that he begins to dwell in us for longer periods of time and take us to the heights of love with Him. In sum, few have been on fire with the love of Jesus and Mary like St. Bernard:

If we ask what was the secret of Bernard’s extraordinary sanctity and his equally extraordinary power over his fellow men, the answer is, that his soul was at all times firmly anchored in God. The Crucified Savior was the center of his every thought and act; his light, his food, his medicine. And out of all of this all-pervading love for Christ was born a tender love for the Mother of Christ. The sermons of St. Bernard on the prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin have never been surpassed . . . ”4

St. Francis of Assisi

In the 11th century St. Francis of Assisi personified, perhaps more than anyone else ever, devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus. Simply by the purity, poverty and humbleness of his life, he captured the heart and imagination of all Europe. He was a very humble, yet therefore a powerful example of how to live one’s life in close imitation of the poor, crucified Christ. If St. Bernard had the gift to speak most eloquently of Christ, St. Francis had the gift to live out that eloquence in power of example better than almost anyone else before or since. If St. Bernard refilled the silos (monasteries) with grain (spiritual food), then St. Francis with his poor Mendicant Order of Brothers Minor brought the grain out of the silos and into the streets and homes to nourish all.

If St. Bernard re-invigorated all of Christendom through his eloquent preaching and teaching of Christ Crucified, St. Francis did so living the life of Christ Crucified par excellence.

While St. Francis’ spirituality is also Christocentric, Scriptural, Affective and Cataphatic, it can be better seen by looking at the graces God favored him with, than by looking at his teachings per se. What God gave St. Bernard the grace to do through eloquence of speech, writing and prayer, he gave to St. Francis to accomplish by sheer power of example. The Poverello, never at a loss for the right thing to say, won the hearts and minds of many for his Lord, just by the sheer sight of his appearance. He looked poor, helpless and despised, just like how Our Lord must have looked.

Embracing destitute poverty and continual suffering, in imitation of the Sacred Humanity of his Master, is exactly what poor little St. Francis did. He embraced sever austerities, much sorrow and humility, all for love of the Crucified Christ. Francis was despised by his own villagers and made fun of, all for the love of Our Lord and Our Lady.

St. Francis’ conversion, like St. Bernard’s, also began in a dream. God showed him a fabulous palace adorned with military accoutrements, with the sign of the Cross of Christ most prominently displayed. When St. Francis asked in the dream whose were these things, Our Lord told him they were his and his soldiers. Mistaking the message, he originally set off to do battle in the noble service of a great Count of Apulia, whereupon the Lord called out to him: “Why do you leave the Lord for the servant, the rich God for a poor mortal? . . . Return unto thy country, for the vision you have seen portends that which shall be spiritually wrought, and is to be fulfilled in you not by mortal counsel, but by divine.”5 From this moment forward, everything St. Francis did was totally and completely for Christ Crucified.

As Our Lord prepared him for his life of poverty, suffering, and sever austerities, He presented St. Francis with opportunities to move closer to Him. These “opportunities” would be called set-backs or adversity by most of us, however. In short, Our Lord imbued St. Francis with a distinct contempt of the world and granted him victory over self. Once, by embracing a leper, St. Francis was put in touch with the things he hated most: sights and smells most ugly and foul. As a result, St. Francis found out that what can appear to be bitter, is in reality, most sweet. Thus, he began to realize that all is pure gift from God.

        Like St. Bernard, St. Francis also took Sacred Scripture literally to heart. After hearing Mass with his first companion, Bernard of Quintavalle, he was moved to ask the priest to open the Missal three times, in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ:

The first place which he lit upon was at the answer of Christ to the young man who asked of him the way to perfection: If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and come, follow me. The second time he opened at the words which the Savior addressed to the Apostles when he sent them forth the preach the Word of Truth: Take nothing with you for your journey: neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money; wishing to teach them thereby to commit the care of their lives to him, and give all their thoughts to the preaching of the holy Gospel. When the Missal was opened a third time they came upon these words: If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”6

Not only did St. Francis immediately follow the counsel of the Scripture, but his life became an embodiment and personification of living up to the poverty, simplicity, and suffering that Christ calls all men to in the Gospel. His own religious Order, the Franciscans, would become deeply divided over exactly how close to live out the exact precepts of the Gospel in daily life that St. Francis meant for them to practice.

St. Francis lived such a Christocentric life that toward the end of his life Our Lord blessed him with the Holy Stigmata. Our Lord appeared to him on Mt. Alvernia in the form of a winged Seraph and left the image of the Passion of Christ imprinted on St. Francis, including the actual nails growing out from his skin:

For upon his hands and feet began immediately to appear the figures of the nails, as he had seen them on the Body of Christ Crucified, who had appeared to him in the likeness of a Seraph. And thus the hands and feet appeared pierced through the midst by the nails, the heads whereof were seen outside the flesh in the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, and the points of the nails stood out that the back of the hands and the feet in such wise that they appeared to be twisted and bent back upon themselves, and the portion thereof that was bent back or twisted stood out free from the flesh, so that one could put a finger through the same as through a ring; and the heads of the nails were round and black. In like manner, on the right side appeared the image of an unhealed wound, as if made by a lance, and still red and bleeding, from which drops of blood often flowed from the holy breast of St. Francis, staining his tunic and drawers.”7

With regard to Affectivity, St. Francis loved and adored the Sacred Humanity of Jesus so much that he would do anything for Him:

So great was the fervor of love and compassion of blessed Francis for the pains and sufferings of Christ, and so much was he afflicted on account of that passion, within and without, that he took no care of his own infirmities. Whence, though for a long time, up to the day of his death, he had suffered ailments of the stomach and liver and spleen, and from the time he returned from over-sea he had had very great pains of his eyes continually, yet he would not on that account take any pains to make himself be made whole.8

Nothing stood in the way of St. Francis’ love of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Crucified. He reached the fourth level of love of Jesus purely for Jesus’ sake, as St. Bernard puts it. Yet, so kind, humble, gentle, tender, and loving was St. Francis to all God’s creation that even the animals were affected by him, and came to play with and listen to him. Lastly, he showed his deep affection for Our Lord by his constant weeping and crying over the Passion of Out Lord. Many, many times for long, long periods on end, St. Francis would weep for the Crucified; tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

To say that St. Francis’ spirituality is Cataphatic is an understatement. He went beyond Cataphaticity; from images to the real thing: Our Lord Himself. I do not know if St. Francis ever used images of Our Lord, in order to increase his devotion to Him; he may never have had to, for the earliest records indicate that Our Lord Himself appeared to St. Francis first in a dream, then on the road to Apulia, then many, many times far too numerous to count.

In sum: “Of all men who have borne the Christian name, none resembled Christ Himself so much as the Poverello, the “dear poor man” of Assisi, and of all the saints whom the Church has canonized, none has been so unanimously canonized by all succeeding generations.”9 At the end of one’s life, no one more closely resembled or emulated Our Lord either: “. . . ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. But we, we thought of him as someone punished, struck by God, and brought low. Yet he was pierced for our faults, crushed for our sins. On him lies a punishment that brings us peace, and through his wounds we are healed. . . . harshly dealt with, he bore it humbly, . . . and through him what Yahweh wishes will be done. . . . By his sufferings shall my servant justify many, taking their faults on himself” (Is. 53:4-5, 7,10,11).

Steven N. Filippo is a teacher of Theology for the Archdiocese of New York at Cathedral Prep Seminary in Rye, New York.

End Notes

1    Jordan Aumann, O.P. Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985, p.97
2    Kilian Walsh, O.S.C.O. tr. Bernard of Clairvaux-On The Song Of Songs I. Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1971, p.110.
3    Harvey Egan, S.J. ed. An Anthology of Christian Mysticism. Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1991, pp.177-178.
4    Rev. John Laux, M.A. Church History. Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1989, p. 326.
5    Thomas Okey, tr. and ed. The Life of St. Francis By St. Bonaventura. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934, p. 309.
6    Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B. The Little Flowers of St. Francis. London: Burns Oates, 1953, p.6.
7    Ibid., p.144.
8    Thomas Okey, Tr. & ed. The Mirror of Perfection By Leo of Assisi. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934, p. 266.
9    Op. cit. Church History., p.363.

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