This book tells the life of a saint by a saint. Malachy O'Morgair spent his life and considerable energies exhorting, wheedling, badgering, and praying his countrymen back to christian faith and practice. Bernard holds him up in this Life, eulogy, and hymn as a model to bishops.

A scholar turned monk, Isaac combined the increasingly technical vocabulary of the cathedral schools with the spiritual tradition of the monastery. Dialectic is here combined with meditative reflection.

The son of Burgundian nobility, Bernard admitted after years of struggle that humility remained for him the most elusive of the virtues. Yet the uncompromising vehemence of his love for God made him strive for what monastic tradition taught is indispensable to anyone hoping to share God's perfect love.

Perhaps Bernard's most delightful tract, On Loving God posits that everything good in human persons is an expression of God's love and by love the person may participate in the being of the triune God. In a new analytic commentary, Stiegman examines Bernard's language, logic, and theology, demonstrating the vital importance of reading medieval authors on their own terms, without superimposing categories developed by later generations.

Taking up Saint Bernard's unfinished sermon-commentary, Gilbert ruminates on verse 3:1-5:10 in forty-eight sermons, leaving the task to be finished by John of Ford.

Aelred of Rievaulx possessed a personal charm which drew friends and disciples naturally to him. His own experience of human weakness in a worldly life at the court of King David of Scotland made him sensitive to the doctrine of charity which he found among Cistercian monks. The Mirror of Charity gives us a solid theology of the Cistercian life. Because the divine nature is love, as the Bible tells us, directing our love to God-love conforms us to the image of God that has been lost through sin. All love, to Aelred, is a participation in God-love that leads us to union.