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

in return. Just as the mundicordes must first be the misrericordes, so the misericordes
must first be the mites or meek.
As he traces the link between the recognition of the Truth in oneself by humble
self-judgment and the recognition of the Truth in one’s brother’s by compassionate love,
Bernard does not conceal from his readers the fact that this encounter with one’s own
sinfulness and weakness will be a bitter and troubling experience. Following Augustine,
he defines humility as “that virtue by which one grows vile in one’s own eyes because
one knows oneself most truly.” 158 To discover and confess one’s fallen condition is by no
means pleasant and it is for this reason, as Bernard will soon show, that fallen human
beings are prone by their excessive self-love to flee this bitter self-knowledge and seek
some relief in more comforting self-deceptions. For Bernard, however, to inquire into
and acknowledge this humbling truth about oneself is, in fact, the truest form of self-love,
for it is only through this humble self-knowledge that one may begin to know and love
the Truth in one’s neighbors by compassionate charity and thereby come to know and
love the Truth in his own nature by contemplation in this life and the beatific vision in the
next.
In undertaking this way of humility and love, the monk must moreover be
instructed and guided by the example of Christ the Incarnate Word who, Bernard argues,
willed to know human miseria that he might learn by experience a human misericordia to
complement his eternal divine mercy. If Christ has humbled himself to become like the
monk in every way that he might learn mercy for the monk in his fallen condition, how
158 Hum 2 (III, 17): “Humilitas vero talis potest esse definitio: humiltas est virtus, qua homo
verissima sui cognitione sibi ipse vilescit.” Cf. Augustine, In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 25.16 (CCSL
36): “tu, homo, cognosce quia es homo; tota humilitas tua, ut cognoscas te.”
105