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

understood that it becomes possible to offer an account of how Christ by his life, death,
and resurrection reorders fallen human love in a manner suited to the specific conditions
of the sinful human heart. 227 If, as has often been remarked, Bernard displays exceptional
interest in human anthropology, this is so only because he wishes to show precisely how
the divine Word’s assumption of the human condition is intended to lead fallen human
beings from their present state to the state of glory for which they first were made. 228
What Gilson observed concerning Bernard’s doctrine of human love is likewise
true concerning the abbot’s teaching on self-knowledge. To demonstrate how Christ
leads fallen human beings by various stages to the knowledge of themselves as his own
beloved Bride, Bernard begins with the self-deception human beings suffer in their fallen
condition. To varying degrees, all fallen human beings, including Bernard’s monks, are
subject to delusions of superiority born of that love of their own excellence they have
inherited from their first parents. And they suffer these delusions of superiority precisely
because they have allowed their sensible and mental gaze to wander by curiosity from
what is their proper concern, the true knowledge of their own sinfulness and weakness
before God. If therefore fallen human beings are to be brought to this humbling self-
knowledge, and from this humbling self-knowledge to the knowledge of themselves as
being renewed in Christ, they must first be brought to themselves, moved to return to
227 Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, 33.
228 On this relationship between anthropology and Christology in Bernard’s thought, see Roch
Kereszty, “Relationship between Anthropology and Christology. St. Bernard, a Teacher for Our Age,”
271-299; Farkasfalvy, “Bernard’s Concept of the Spiritual Life,” 3-14.
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