William of St. Thierry was a Benedictine contemplative whose writings are charged with a particular beauty and intellectual power. He is known to have exercised a great formative influence on St. Bernard.
William of St. Thierry was a Benedictine contemplative whose writings are charged with a particular beauty and intellectual power. He is known to have exercised a great formative influence on St. Bernard.
The actual nature of the image of God in man is one of the more interesting points of difference between William and St. Bernard. For Bernard, the "Godlikeness" of man is his freewill. For William, it is the ability to love. Love, according to William, begins as a mere capacity for loving; this capacity, the will, being deformed by sin, must be reformed.
This process of reformation starts with the recollection of God's presence in the soul. And this presence is recollected by means of the memory, which reminds William that God is only to be found "in love, for that is where He lives." Thus the image of God in the soul begins to emerge. In William's vocabulary of "form" alone, we can discover the whole of the process of our return to God. He writes: "when the substance of the inner man has been softened up by the long practice of penance," it is "impressed and informed anew." The passage from 2 Corinthians iii, "Beholding the glory of the Lord with face uncovered, we are transformed into the same image", is the Leitmotiv of William's development of the process.
This is the fifth title in the Columba Series.
On Contemplating God, by William of St. Thierry (trans. G. Webb and A. Walker).
41 pages, paperback. ISBN 1 901157 55 5.
£3.95 ; $4.50 in the U.S.A.
Published by The Saint Austin Press.
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