Divine Sensations: Sensory Language and Rhetoric in Bernard of Clairvaux's ‘On Conversion’

Abstract

What does it mean to speak of God in a sensory language? Christian exegetes in the middle ages were steeped in a Biblical language of visions and voices, not to mention the anthropomorphic and sensual imagery of the Song of Songs. Although they had inherited early Christian theologians' distrust towards human sense perception, medieval preachers and theologians from the twelfth century onwards talked about divinity in metaphorical language that systematically evoked not just seeing and hearing, but also the senses of touch, taste, and smell. This article discusses the wildly imagistic, sensory, and sensual language of the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Focusing on Bernard's sermon ‘On Conversion’ ( De conversione), given in Paris in 1140, I will interrogate the underlying theoretical assumptions in Bernard's rich rhetoric, and his emphasis on the senses. The central claim I make is that in these representations of the divine, embodied experience is both affirmed and negated at the same time. To bring out this point, I will consider why medieval Christian writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable regarded Jewish and Muslim exegetes' ‘carnal’ hermeneutics—and the latter's use of sensual and sensuous imagery to convey conceptions of divine bliss—as radically different from their own approaches.