Who Was St. Bernardine of Siena, and Why Does His Voice Matter?

Born in 1380 near Siena, Bernardino degli Albizzeschi entered the Franciscan Order at twenty-two and became the most celebrated popular preacher of fifteenth-century Italy. He drew crowds of tens of thousands in town squares from Venice to Naples, yet his sermons were saturated with precise scholastic theology — a rare fusion of mystical fire and intellectual rigor. He was canonized in 1450, just six years after his death, a pace almost without precedent. His particular devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus and his deep sacramental theology position his words on the Eucharist not as pious exaggeration, but as carefully calibrated theological statement.

When Bernardine speaks of “degrees of love,” he is drawing on a rich tradition stretching from Origen and Augustine through Bernard of Clairvaux and the Franciscan school of Bonaventure. Love, in this tradition, is not a single undifferentiated emotion but a dynamic and graduated movement — a divine motus — that seeks ever-deeper union with its object.

What Are the Degrees of Divine Love in the Patristic and Scholastic Tradition?

The architecture of St. Bernardine’s insight rests on an ancient ladder. Love, the Fathers taught, is revealed not in a single gesture but in a progressive series of self-emptying acts — each one deepening the intimacy between Creator and creature. To grasp why the Eucharist stands at the summit, one must understand the rungs beneath it.

The progression is not merely poetic. Each degree involves a more radical surrender of divine transcendence. Creation makes God the source of our being. The Covenant makes Him our partner. The Incarnation makes Him our brother. The Passion makes Him our redeemer. But the Eucharist makes Him our food — and food is unique among all categories of love’s expression, because it is consumed entirely for the sake of the one who receives it.

Why Is Becoming Food the Most Radical Expression of Love?

In ordinary experience, food ceases to be itself in order that another might live. The grain dies, is ground, is baked, and loses all its former autonomy — so that the body of the one who eats might be nourished and sustained. St. Bernardine sees in this biological reality a precise theological image: in the Eucharist, Christ does not merely approach us, visit us, or walk beside us. He enters us. He is assimilated, not by being changed into us, but by changing us into Himself — the inverse and miraculous logic of the Sacrament, articulated by St. Augustine: “I am the food of the strong; grow, and you shall feed upon me; nor shall you convert me, like the food of your flesh, into you, but you shall be converted into me.”

This is what Bernardine means by “united with us in every way.” Other modes of love preserve a certain exteriorness — God remains, in some respect, across from us, facing us, speaking to us. In the Eucharist, that spatial and relational distance is annihilated. He enters the interior of the body, moves through the blood, is present in the marrow of the spiritual life. There is no more intimate human act than eating. There is no more intimate divine act than becoming what is eaten.

The Kenotic Logic of the Bread

The Greek theological term kenosis — from Philippians 2:7, “He emptied Himself” — describes the divine self-emptying that begins in the Incarnation. Bernardine’s insight is that the Eucharist is kenosis taken to its absolute terminus. In the Incarnation, God assumes flesh while remaining unmistakably God — His glory is veiled, but His person is not negated. In the Eucharist, the appearance is of bread and wine, humble, breakable, consumable. The condescension goes further. He hides Himself not in a glorious human body but in the ordinary material of daily nourishment.

The medieval mystics spoke of this as the abjectio — the abasement — that is simultaneously the highest exaltation of love. To become food is to place oneself wholly at the disposal of another. It is the logic of the servant (John 13) extended to its sacramental consummation: not merely washing feet, but giving the very self as daily bread.

How Does St. Bernardine Connect This to Union — “In Every Way”?

The phrase “united with us in every way” is not rhetorical flourish. Bernardine is making a precise claim about the comprehensiveness of Eucharistic union. Consider what “every way” encompasses in Scholastic anthropology: the human person is body, soul, and spirit — and the Eucharist reaches all three registers.

At the bodily level, Christ is physically received — the substance of His Body and Blood truly present under the accidents of bread and wine, as the Council of Trent would formally define a century after Bernardine’s death. At the soul level, sanctifying grace is infused and deepened — the theological life of the soul is nourished as the body is nourished by ordinary food. At the spiritual level — what the mystical tradition calls the apex mentis or the summit of the spirit — the soul is drawn into contemplative union with the divine life of the Trinity itself.

This three-dimensional union is what distinguishes the Eucharist from every other form of divine proximity. Prayer unites the soul. The sacrament of Baptism unites by incorporation into the Body of Christ. Penance restores the broken bond. But the Eucharist alone effects a union that is simultaneously corporeal, psychological, moral, and mystical — in every way, as Bernardine insists.

What Is the Relationship Between This Insight and the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6?

St. Bernardine’s theological vision is rooted in one of the most demanding passages in the New Testament. In John chapter six, after the multiplication of loaves, Christ makes a claim that divides His followers: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). When many disciples murmured and departed, Jesus did not soften or allegorize the statement — He intensified it: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

For Bernardine and the patristic tradition before him, this is not metaphor. It is the precise theological grammar of what love, at its final degree, does. It does not speak of love from a distance. It does not describe love. It enacts love by becoming food — by making itself the condition of the beloved’s survival and flourishing. The Eucharist is thus not a symbol of divine love but its most concentrated material instantiation.

How Should This Theology Reshape How We Approach the Eucharist?

If Bernardine is correct — and the depth of the tradition sustaining him suggests he is — then the Eucharist cannot be received as a religious formality or a liturgical obligation. To receive the Body of Christ is to participate in the final and highest movement of divine love. It is to allow the God who made you, redeemed you, and dwells beside you to now dwell within you.

This realization carries practical weight. The mystics in the Franciscan and Dominican traditions consistently observed that careless or distracted communion was a failure not of religious protocol but of attention to love. Just as one does not eat a great feast without awareness — without savoring, without gratitude — so one does not receive the God who gave Himself as Food without an interior disposition of wonder and receptivity. St. Bernardine preached this with urgency across Italy: the Eucharist is not the beginning of the spiritual life, nor merely its sustenance. It is its consummation — the point at which the soul’s journey toward God is, for a sacred moment, already arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bernardine’s idea of “degrees of love” unique to him?

No. The concept has roots in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, was systematized by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his De Diligendo Deo, and was developed within the Franciscan school through Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Bernardine synthesizes this heritage and applies it with particular force to the Eucharist as the apex of the series.

How does “becoming food” differ theologically from the Incarnation?

The Incarnation is a permanent but singular event — God takes on human nature once and dwells among us from outside. The Eucharist is a daily, renewable, and interior event — God enters each soul personally, bodily, and without remainder. The Incarnation gives us a brother; the Eucharist gives us a food, which is a category of union unavailable by any other means.

What does “united with us in every way” mean practically?

It means that no dimension of the human person is left untouched by Eucharistic union. The body is physically united through the Real Presence; the soul is spiritually nourished through sanctifying grace; and the deepest centre of the spirit is drawn into the life of the Trinity through the grace of contemplative union. No other sacrament operates across all three registers simultaneously.

Why does Bernardine call this the “last” degree and not merely a “high” one?

Because “last” in the scholastic sense means “ultimate” — the telos, the end toward which all prior degrees are ordered. The Eucharist is not simply greater than the Passion; it is the reason the Passion exists. The self-giving of the Cross is made perpetually available precisely in the form of food, so that union can be renewed daily and not merely remembered historically.

How does this connect to Lectio Divina and the broader contemplative tradition?

Lectio Divina — the sacred reading and rumination on Scripture — is itself understood by the Fathers as a form of eating the Word. St. Jerome wrote: “We eat His flesh and drink His blood in the divine Scriptures and in the Eucharist.” The contemplative tradition sees these two tables — the Table of the Word and the Table of the Eucharist — as inseparable. Bernardine’s insight deepens the Lectio practice by revealing that the Word one reads and digests in prayer is the same Word who gives Himself as bread.