Authority and Innovation in Bernard of Clairvaux ’s De gratia et libero arbitrio

Abstract

Twelfth-century scholastics are renowned for their willingness to reassess and to criticize patristic authorities, with monastic authors typically understood as far more conservative in this regard. Bernard’s treatise revises that view. It reflects Bernard’s willingness to depart sharply from the late Augustine on grace and free will and to invoke a patristic-age monastic authority, John Cassian, in so doing. Bernard’s own position, accenting the liberty of our postlapsarian free will and its full collaboration with divine grace, displays both his uses of, and departures from, these two authorities.