Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography

This volume is a study of spatial structures in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Parables. It lays out a spiritual topography which is linked to the rumination of the Bible. The topography ranges across such locations as Paradise, Babylon, the bridegroom’s chamber, and the Celestial Jerusalem, and man navigates it in the character of peregrinus and viator. The first part of the study addresses the spiritual topography and the hermeneutics of its mapping. The second and larger part examines each of Bernard’s eight parables and the ways in which he reformulates issues central to monastic tradition - militia Christi, for example, God’s image and likeness in man, contemptus mundi, the quest for beatitude - as voyages within spiritual landscapes.