The foremost of the precursors of Eckhart was Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). He was the exponent of the love of God which he placed above knowledge; in one of his letters he calls love "the existence of God Himself," basing his definition on the passage in the Gospel of St. John, "God is Love." "Love is the eternal law which created and preserves the universe; the whole world is governed by love; but although love is the law to which all creation is subject, it is not itself without law, but it is a law unto itself. Serfs and mercenaries are ruled by laws which are not from God, but which they made themselves; some because they do not love God, others because they love the things of this world better than God.... They made their own laws and subordinated the universal and eternal laws to their own will. But those (who live righteously) are in the world as God is: neither serfs nor mercenaries, but the children of God and, like God Himself, they live only by the law of love." "His greatest happiness is complete absorption in the vision of the divine and forgetfulness of self." "All love is an emanation of that one love. It is the eternally creative and governing law of the universe." "To be penetrated by such emotion is to become deified. As a drop of water in a cup of wine is completely dissolved and takes the taste and colour of the wine, so also, in an indescribable manner, is the human will absorbed in the divine will, and transformed into the will of God. For how could God become all in all if anything human were left in man?" "They are completely immersed (the martyrs) in the infinite ocean of eternal light, in radiant eternity...." The entranced soul "shall lose all knowledge of itself and become completely absorbed in God; it shall become unlike itself in the measure as it has received the gift of becoming divine." Sensuous metaphors from the Song of Songs and the Psalms are again and again intermingled with these lofty thoughts. But in spite of his divine emotion, in spite of his anticipations of the German mystics, Bernard took the standpoint of ecclesiastical orthodoxy whenever he was not in the ecstatic state; his contemplative mind was unable to grasp the importance of independent thought, a fact amply proved by his inglorious quarrel with Abélard, the greatest thinker of his time. This quarrel was a typical illustration of the difference between the believer and the thinker. Bernard forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up unpleasantness whenever he could do so. So he wrote to Pope Innocent II.: "Peter Abélard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine mind.... Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...," etc. Thanks to his machinations, Abélard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens, and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence. Berengar of Poitier took Abélard's part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise St. Bernard's conduct: "Thus philosophise the old women at the looms. Of course, when Bernard tells us that we must love God, he speaks a true and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for it is a self-evident truth." As a matter of fact, these words branded and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the emotional mystic salvation lies in the "absorption in God," in shapeless, thoughtless contemplation. Richard of St. Victor, founding his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation. The Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the _Biblia Pauperum_, added a seventh, a complete rest in God--"like the Sabbath after the six days of labour." To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the world was a ladder leading up to God.