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

God in heaven. He will acknowledge that God now withholds his judgment and
punishment because he is a loving father who spares his children for a time that they
might be converted to him and learn to do his will.
As Bernard explains in the passage quoted above, the man who has reached the
twelfth step of pride adopts precisely the opposite attitude. When he sees that God does
not judge or punish he sins, he takes this not as a sign of God’s mercy before his coming
judgment, but as a sign that God is a god of mercy but not justice, that God either takes
no notice of his sins or else forbears to punish them on account of his mercy. Once he
has exchanged the knowledge of the true God for this idol of his own making, his former
fear of God evaporates, his reason ceases to mutter its protests against the will, and he
freely follows his sinful desires into the whirlpool of vice. Delighting in his own
freedom, he now refuses obedience to God as he previously refused obedience to his
superiors, claims his own will for himself, and shamelessly pursues whatever he desires
with complete contempt for God and God’s law.
In this way, the proud man’s ignorance of God and God’s justice only serves to
deepen his self-deception. Imagining for himself a god who lacks the will to punish his
sins, and therefore judging himself free from obedience to God’s will, he begins to regard
himself as a god in his own right, capable of determining for himself what is right and
wrong, and living by no law save that of his own will. In truth, however, this is only a
self-deception, for despite his delusions of divinity, he is in fact free neither from the law
of God nor the law of his own nature as God’s creature. Though at first he sins freely,
pursuing whatever pleasures he pleases, his repeated sins soon bind him in the
inescapable chains of sinful habit and what began as a matter of choice swiftly becomes a
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