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 cistercial 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'...

William of Saint Thierry wrote The Mirror of Faith and The Enigma of Faith shortly after he read the Theology of Peter Abelard. Writing at the cistercian abbey of Signy, which he entered in 1135 after fifteen years as a benedictine abbot, he tried to correct what he considered Abelard's failure to root his theology in the faith revealed by Christ in Scripture and explained by generations of Church Fathers. Unless we choose to believe, he was convinced, we will never understand rationally or love truly the triune God who calls us to the full 'recognition which is mutual to the Father and Sone[and] is the very unity of both, the Holy Spirit'.