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

consideration of his treatise as a whole and, more particularly, with an analysis of his
doctrine of the three steps of Truth.
The Structure of the On the Steps of Humility and Pride
Though the first of his spiritual treatises, Bernard’s Liber de gradibus humilitatis
et superbiae, written in 1125 in response to a request from Godfrey of Langres, Bernard’s
former prior at Clairvaux and then abbot of Clairvaux’s second foundation, Fontenay, is
by no means a juvenile composition. 141 The fruit of Bernard’s some ten years of
experience as abbot of Clairvaux, the treatise bears early witness to his capacity for both
theological rigor and rhetorical subtlety. 142 As scholars since Étienne Gilson have
observed, it is here that Bernard articulates the main lines of a systematic and mystical
theology which would remain remarkably consistent throughout his subsequent career. 143
141 On the Liber de gradibus humilitatis et superbiae as Bernard’s first published work, see Jean
Leclercq, “Le premier traité authentique de saint Bernard?” Recueil d’études sur saint Bernard et ses écrits,
vol. 2 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966): 51-67. For a general introduction to the treatise, its
author, and its recipient, see M. Basil Pennington, “Introduction,” in The Steps of Humility and Pride, trans.
M. Ambrose Conway (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1973), 1-24. Dated, but still useful are the
introductions by Barton R.V. Mills in The Twelve Degrees of Humility and Pride, trans. Barton R.V. Mills
(London: SPCK, 1929), vii-xxxv and George Bosworth Burch in The Steps of Humility, trans. George
Bosworth Burch (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 3-112.
142 On this point, see Denis Farkasfalvy, “St. Bernard’s Spirituality and the Benedictine Rule in
The Steps of Humility,” 249.
143 As Jean Leclercq notes, “At thirty-five years of age, the time of the publication of his first
work, [Bernard] had reached full maturity. Gilson always felt this conclusion confirmed, for he could
recognize no further development in the Abbot of Clairvaux.” See Jean Leclercq, “Introduction: Étienne
Gilson, St Bernard, and the History of Spirituality” in Étienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint
Bernard, xxi. Similarly, Farkasfalvy writes, “As Étienne Gilson observed, Bernard’s later works show very
little change in basic outlook or doctrine, so much so that any attempt of tracing development or evolution
in his thought has failed so far.” Farkasfalvy, “Saint Bernard’s Spirituality and the Benedictine Rule in the
Steps of Humility,” 249. On the Liber de gradibus humilitatis et superbiae as an expression of Bernard’s
consistent systematic and mystical theology, Roch Kereszty writes that behind Bernard’s changing
paradigms and descriptions of the stages of the human being’s spiritual journey to God, the abbot possesses
“an integral and consistent vision of all reality, complete with a metaphysic, anthropology, epistemology,
and experiential psychology” and that this “unified vision appears already in De Gradibus Humilitatis, and,
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