MY BELOVED IS MINE AND I AM HIS: SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN THE ...

consideration of others and their apparent spiritual condition. As he shifts his sensible
and mental regard to others, his latent desire for his own superiority, the lingering
consequence of his share in the sin of Adam, soon swells in his heart and subtly proposes
for his belief the thought that he is, in fact, morally and spiritually superior to all those he
beholds around him. At the same time, as the monk shifts his sensible and mental regard
away from himself, he gradually ceases to seek true self-knowledge and so deprives
himself of that honest, critical self-judgment which would ordinarily expose as false his
delusions of superior holiness. With time, and by a series of steps Bernard articulates
with great insight and care, the monk gradually comes to accept as true the specious self-
understanding his amor propriae excellentiae continually proposes for his belief and, like
the proud Pharisee, comes to judge himself superior to his brothers and to despise his
brothers as inferior to himself.
Once convinced that he is holier than all, the self-deceived monk can no longer
bear obedience to his monastic superiors, but presumptuously asserts his own will over
theirs, arrogating the right to govern himself and others. When, inevitably, he is called to
account by his superiors, he clings to his treasured self-deception and pursues a course of
self-justification which eventually results in his condemnation and expulsion from the
monastic cloister to the world. There freed from the salutary disciplines of the regular
and common life, his self-deception assumes a still more sinister form as his ever-
growing desire for his own superiority now proposes for his belief the thought that he
might, in fact, be superior even to God, above and exempt from obedience to God’s law.
As no immediate divine judgment greets his first forays into the life of sin, he gradually
cultivates a false knowledge of God to complement his false self-knowledge. He
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