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

inward movement in the soul. In any event, for Bernard, it is only by the prevenient
grace of Christ, who is Truth himself, that the monk may be recalled, or converted, to his
heart and there face himself in the very light of Truth.
Further, it is equally important to note that, for Bernard, the monk’s return to
himself effected by the Word entails not his passage from some sheer self-ignorance to
true self-knowledge, but rather the judgment of his defective self-knowledge as false and
the eradication of that amor propriae excellentiae which stands at the root of this self-
deception. So the monk’s conversion involves a radical reordering of his affective life,
his passage from the love of his own superiority to a love for Truth himself. Bernard
writes:
Those whom Truth causes to know, and therefore to revile,
themselves must now find bitter all those things they once loved,
including their very selves. Standing before their own face, they
are compelled to see themselves and to blush at what they see.
Displeased with what they are, they long to be what they are not,
but they know they cannot achieve this by themselves alone. 238
By the prevenient grace of the Word, the monk who once delighted in the delusion of his
own superiority now bitterly laments how far his former self-image is from the harsh
truth of his own sin and weakness. Painful as it is, this true self-knowledge achieved in
the eradication of self-deception is a blessing, for in revealing the chasm between what he
is, a truly sinful monk, and what he longs to be, a truly holy one, this self-knowledge
opens his eyes to the journey his must now undertake if he is to become what he was
created to be.
238 Hum 18 (III, 29): “Quos itaque Veritas sibi iam innotescere, ac per hoc vilescere fecit, necesse
est, ut cuncta, quae amare solebant, et ipsi sibi amarescant Statuentes nimirum se ante se, tales se videre
cogunt, quales vel a se videri erubescunt. Dum que sibi displicet quod sunt, et ad id suspirant quod non
sunt, quod utique per se fore diffident.”
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