ABSTRACT
When Pope Pius XII conceded St. Bernard of Clairvaux as “the last of the Fathers” in his encyclical letter, Doctor Mellifluus, Thomas Merton, a keen reader of both Kierkegaard and Bernard,1 commended the encyclical, numbering Bernard among those whose “doctrine penetrates the ‘deep things of God’ and scrutinizes the mysteries of faith not merely with the light of human dialectics, but with the far more searching light of charity which knows God less by ‘seeing’ than by ‘tasting’ the very substance of His goodness.”2 There is at least one way in which Kierkegaard belongs in the same category. Kierkegaard, like Bernard, is concerned to recover the existential core of Christianity and to demand of its adherents a high degree of commitment and longing for God, as opposed to the distanced, academic understanding of Christianity. Bernard, too, was frustrated with the “academic theology” of his day, represented by the likes of Gilbert of Poitiers, and Peter Abelard.3
