Guillaume de Saint-Thierry
v. 1085-1148 12th century
Love treated as an art, learned only from the one who gave it.
Who was Guillaume de Saint-Thierry?
Benedictine abbot of Saint-Thierry, near Reims, he longed to become a Cistercian; his friend Bernard of Clairvaux refused him for years, until he resigned and entered Signy, in the Ardennes, as an ordinary monk. There he wrote about love as about a craft that is learned, and sent the Carthusians of Mont-Dieu a letter that came to be called golden. His treatises long circulated under Bernard's name, so that he was rediscovered late.
In their own words
The art of arts is the art of love, whose mastery nature herself, and God the author of nature, have kept for themselves.
To obtain these things and to keep them, one must continually seek the help of steady and long-suffering prayer: let there be in it faith enough to hope for everything, devotion enough to seem to compel God, love enough that it feels itself obtaining, in the prayer itself, all that it asks, kindly humility enough to prefer in all things that not its own will but God's be done in it.
According to the growth of the virtues, will grows into love, love into charity, charity into wisdom.
The first place of its birth is God. There it was born, there fed, there brought up; there it is a citizen, not a stranger but a native. For love is given by God alone.