Faith & Spirit Quote by Bernard of Clairvaux

Belief here isn’t a consolation prize for ignorance; it’s a disciplined choice to stop treating the mind as the only court of appeal. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great 12th-century monastic powerhouse, draws a hard line between comprehension and commitment. The sentence turns on that quiet “though”: he refuses the flattering modern idea that sincerity must be backed by total intellectual mastery. For Bernard, the point is not that reason is bad, but that reason is finite, and God, by definition, isn’t.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. In an era when cathedral schools were sharpening their tools and early scholasticism was starting to argue faith into neat propositions, Bernard plays defense for a different model of knowing: experiential, devotional, obedient. His Latin Christianity is saturated with Augustine’s “I believe in order to understand,” but Bernard tightens it into a monastic ethic. “I hold” is tactile language: faith as grip, not hypothesis. The subtext is a warning against spiritual tourism - collecting concepts about God as if God were content.

Context matters: Bernard was a reformer of the Cistercian movement, suspicious of theological virtuosity that inflated ego and thinned prayer. His clash with Peter Abelard, the era’s celebrity logician, hangs in the background. The quote works because it sounds like humility while also asserting authority: the believer doesn’t lose the argument for lack of evidence; he wins by refusing the terms. It’s a rhetorical inversion that makes unknowing feel like strength, even fidelity.