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

supposes that God is a god of mercy but not justice, a god unwilling, or even unable, to
punish his sins. Liberated from the fear of God, he asserts his own will over God’s,
delivering himself over entirely to the delightful satisfaction of his fleshly desires. Yet,
by the inescapable law of divine justice, his repeated sins soon ensnare him in the
inescapable bonds of sinful habit. Voluntarily enslaved to the pursuit of all that can never
satisfy his innate orientation to and desire for God, he leads a life of restless, self-
imposed misery, wandering from one dissatisfying pleasure to the next, ever seeking but
never finding the One for whom he was made and in whom alone he will find his happy
rest. Obstinately refusing to incline his heart’s ear to the divine Voice which ceaselessly
calls him to true self-knowledge and conversion, he follows his proud self-deception into
spiritual death, contemning himself and his Creator at once. So his descent into self-
deception, which began with his curiosity, now culminates in his threefold false
knowledge and contempt of himself, his brothers, and his God. 140
To demonstrate this Bernard’s theory of prideful self-deception, we will need to
undertake a careful analysis of the twelve steps of pride found in the second half of his
On the Steps of Humility and Pride. Yet, as will be shown momentarily, Bernard’s
account of the monk’s descent through these steps of pride cannot be properly understood
apart from his reflections on Benedict’s steps of humility in the treatise’s first half.
Before turning to Bernard’s steps of pride, then, this chapter will begin with a
140 This dynamic of descent into proud self-deception we will attempt to demonstrate in Bernard’s
twelve steps of pride seems to resemble closely a seven-fold pattern of vices he unfolds elsewhere in his
corpus: (1) negligentia, (2) curiositas, (3) experientia mali, (4) concupiscentia, (5) consuetudo, (6)
contemptus, (7) malitia. See Div 14 (VI-I, 134-139); 3 Sent 19 (VI-II, 76); 3 Sent 89 (VI-II, 136); 3 Sent
98 (VI-II, 160).
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