This article uses analytical concepts from cognitive science to explore and deepen our understanding of how medieval monastics imagined themselves as characters within biblical narratives. It argues that Cistercian monks - and in particular Bernard of Clairvaux - used techniques of imaginative immersion to enter and blend themselves into biblical viewpoints and events, thereby engaging the monks in epistemically and personally transformative experiences. The article concludes that this served to build community and to enculture monks and converts. Specifically, the article offers a close reading of two of Bernard's liturgical sermons, Sermon Two for Palm Sunday and Sermon Two on the Resurrection, to show how his sermons 1) traverse time and space and 2) blend viewpoints. Examples are also taken from texts by John Cassian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and William of St. Thierry.
Keywords: Bernard of Clairvaux, blended viewpoint, deictic displacement, lectio divina, liturgical time and space.
On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Bernard of Clairvaux was the first writer to stake out a precise role for
the pope at the spiritual nuptials between Christ and the Church: the
pope was the ‘friend of the bridegroom’ and Christ’s best man. But it
was Pope Innocent III who turned bridal imagery into an argument for
papal primacy in the Church, imagining the pope as bridegroom of the
Church. This chapter addresses conceptualization and representation
of papal authority and church hierarchy by means of bridal imagery, as
testified in sermons and in decorations and inscriptions that Innocent
commissioned in Rome. Who, exactly, was Innocent III’s bride? And what
kind of marriage was this, anyway? What relation was there between
Innocent’s marriage to the Church of Rome and marriage between a
man and a woman?
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