| Author Quoted | Jean Leclercq o.s.b. |
| Title Quoted | St. Bernard mystique |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1950/10/09 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : Desclee de Brouwer. 1948 |
| Quotation | Your remarks on St. Bernard's ideas of Scripture are extremely important to me. I have been meditating on your appendix to St. Bernard Mystique, and also I have been talking on this very subject to the students here. I agree with your conclusions about St. Bernard and yet I wonder if it would not be possible to say that he did consider himself in a very definite sense an exegete. My own subjective feeling is that the full seriousness of St. Bernard's attitude to Scripture is not brought out entirely unless we can in some sense treat him as an exegete and as theologian, in his exposition of the Canticle. Naturally he is not either of these things in a purely modern sense. But I think he is acting as a theologian according to the Greek Fathers' conception at least to some extent (see end of Lossky's first chapter: Theol. Myst. de l'Eglise orientale). I think that is essentially what you were saying when you brought out the fact that he was seeking less to nourish his interior life than to exercise it. |
| Quotation Source | The School of Charity: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Renewal and Spiritual Direction.; Selected and edited by Brother Patrick Hart. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1990, p. 23 |
| Letter to | Dom Jean Leclercq, o.s.b. |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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