SOURCE: Stiegman, Emero. “Humanism in St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Beyond Literary Culture.” In The Chimaera of His Age: Studies of Bernard of Clairvaux; Studies in Medieval Cistercian History V, edited by E. Rozanne Elder and John R. Sommerfeldt, pp. 23-38. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1980.

In the following essay, Stiegman argues that theological humanism underlies Bernard's writings, noting that he held a deep sense of human worth and profoundly humanistic ideas about the genesis of human love.

Humanism, like all terms which historians invent to label a complex but broadly identifiable set of attitudes, is subject to ambiguity; the attitudes are affected by changing historical conditions. Since the common ground among humanisms develops in inverse proportion to the number which history records, one may come to question the usefulness of the label. Yet in religious thought humanism is a serviceable and perhaps necessary category. To Christian theologians, for example...