Justification and Grace in Bernard of Clairvaux

I have discussed here and elsewhere the fact that Augustine's theology on grace and free will has not only shaped the theology of the Latin West but has historically been accepted as a valid Catholic theologoumenon, even if many in the Catholic Church have opposed it.  The strength of Augustine's school in the Catholic Church waxed and waned over the centuries, but it gained new momentum in the late Middle Ages.  Bernard of Clairvaux was one such notable Augustinian, and Lutheran pastor Jordan Cooper writes here that many of Bernard's views on grace, however inchoate, foreshadowed the teaching of the Reformers.

Presbyterian theologian B.B. Warfield is famous, among many other things, for his statement that the Reformation represented the triumph of Augustine's view of grace over his view of the church.  Whatever seemingly logical developments took place in the Protestant churches (therein lies one of the problems with the Reformation) as a result of the Reformers' embrace of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo wouldn't have approved of much that transpired in the Reformation, and he may very well have condemned the whole thing outright.  This is probably true of Bernard as well.

We have, as Anglicans, a way to unite the theology of sovereign, unmediated grace and that of the mediated sacramental grace of the Church.  We even have an pre-Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, who with Bernard saw no conflict between the two.  And given our susceptibility to the Anglican Disease, it's time we get going on the project to restore Catholic authority in our church.

That was the word we received from the recent International Catholic Congress of Anglicans, and I was happy to see this statement from Arthur Middleton, whose paper was read there by Bishop Keith Ackerman (emphasis mine).

It has always been the Anglican claim that in faith and order the Anglican Communion is continuous in identity with the Primitive Church. It is no new Church. Today's contest is between modern liberal ecclesiology and the Anglican mind in a time when the majority of people in the Church and the nation have been brainwashed by the secular mind, which they use to displace the claims of the Anglican mind. It is the presuppositions of this secular mind and its politically correct ideology that is determining the Faith and Order of the Anglican Communion that must be displaced. This is not a matter of politics but a matter of faith and theology. Like the divines of the seventeenth century the way forward is by pursuing the Anglican way back to prescriptive sources by upholding Canon A5 which states that the doctrine of the Anglicanism is grounded in the Holy Scripture and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.