Concerning Grace and Free Will

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote this treatise in response to critics who accused him of erasing human free will in his passionate defense of divine grace. He was, by all accounts, a cloistered mystic, a man who had withdrawn from the world to contemplate God, yet this text pulses with understanding of ordinary human struggle. The question at its heart remains urgent: how can we be truly free if God steers everything toward salvation? Bernard walks a tightrope between predestination and choice, arguing that grace does not destroy will but perfects it. His prose has the warmth of pastoral counseling despite its theological precision. This is mystical theology for people who live in the world, not just contemplatives in their cells. Eight centuries later, the tension he grappled with, what we owe to God and what remains genuinely ours, hasn't been resolved.