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

monk’s descent into this deepest form of self-deception is intimately related to his
descent into a false knowledge of God. In his final two steps of pride, libertas peccandi
and consuetudo peccandi, the abbot traces this descent briefly but with typically astute
psychological insight.
According to Benedict, the second step of humility is that one should “love not
his own will, nor take delight in the satisfaction of his desires, but imitate in his actions
that saying of the Lord, ‘I came not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’
(John 6:38).” 223 As long as the proud monk remained in the monastery, he was to some
extent prevented from doing his own will and gratifying his own desires by the
obligations and disciplines of regular life in community. Yet now that he has been loosed
from these restraints, he finds himself, in the eleventh step of pride, free to sin, free to
indulge his sinful desires as he wishes with all the created goods and pleasures the
outside world has to afford. Though free to sin in this respect, the former monk
nevertheless retains from his monastic formation some scant fear of God and God’s
punishments for sin which serves to check to some extent his sinful impulses. So, with
his reason or conscience meekly murmuring some protests against his will, he takes his
first steps into the life of sin tentatively, with some hesitation. In Bernard’s image, he
does not plunge headlong into the whirlpool of vice, but proceeds cautiously, like a man
testing the waters of river before attempting to ford it.
When, however, the proud man does take these first, hesitant steps into the
whirlpool of vice, he soon finds, contrary to his fear, that God does not in fact punish his
223 RB 7.31: “Secundus humilitatis gradus est si propriam quis non amans voluntatem desideria
sua non delectetur implere, sed vocem illam Domini factis imitetur dicentis: Non veni facere voluntatem
meam, sed eius qui me misit.”
146