William of Saint Thierry wrote down his reflections on the nature and greatness of love during the second decade of the twelfth century, while he was abbot of the benedictine monastery of St Thierry, near Rheims. His insight, drawn from Scripture and the Church Fathers, shaped his own spiritual journey and his earthly pilgrimage from the schools to the abbey and finally to cistercian life at Signy in the Ardennes. Love, he writes, is a force which draws human beings towards the God who is love. In love we were created 'to the image and likeness of God'...

Written in reaction to the teaching of Peter Abelard and as a companion piece to The Enigma of Faith, the Mirror explores how faith knows, how reason knows, and how—in the last analysis—only love can know God.

Written during his benedictine years, these colloquies reveal William's inner struggle to reach out to God by stripping away encumbrances, to learn to love and to accept God's love by learning to accept himself.

"Perhaps no book was more central to medieval spirituality and mysticism," writes Bernard McGinn, "or more problematic to contemporary readers, than the Song of Songs. . . Lingering Victorian attitudes towards the opposition between sex and religion find the Song's frank erotic language embarrassing and even distasteful." But in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Song of Songs was a favorite book of Cistercian monks. Bernard of Clairvaux, Gilbert of Hoyland, and John of Ford, as well as William of Saint Thierry, read it as a dialogue between Christ the Bridegroom and the human soul, the Bride. William of Saint Thierry began composing his commentary soon after entering the Cistercian abbey of Signy in 1135. Having left behind a busy life as a Benedictine abbot and author of theological treatises, he turned to writing meditations on Scripture as the means of listening to the voice of the Beloved. It is therefore ironic that he broke off his commentary on the Song, never to return to it, to alert the Church in France to the teaching of Peter Abelard and then to compose two treatises correcting what he deeply believed were Abelard's theological errors.

The Epistle to the Romans was a favorite text of medieval commentators, especially in an age concerned with the theology of grace. William of Saint Thierry's Exposition is a thoroughly monastic text. In it the twelfth-century monk is concerned, not with dialectic or scholastic disputation, but with something far more personal: humility of heart and the recovery of the image of God in fallen humankind. Only when a person is open to God's grace can growth occur. William is convinced of this. He hopes to convince us of it. He sings the praises of God's grace. He combs Scripture for insights on the workings of grace. Several times in the course of the commentary, he shifts from narrative to address God directly. In doing so, he adds a personal, intimate touch to a literary genre which was soon to become settled in the impersonal methodology of the Schools.

William of Saint Thierry left all things in his search for God. He left his home in Liége (modern Belgium) to study in France. He left the schools to enter benedictine monastic life at Rheims. And late in his life he left the Benedictines to enter the more austere, recently founded cistercian abbey of Signy in the Ardennes forest. What he did not leave was his keen intellect and his vehement love of Truth.

This practical guide to the spiritual life, cherished by monks, beguines, and layfolk for eight centuries, can still lead men and women to God.