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

share with them in that divine mercy Christ promises to the merciful. 239 By this way of
humble self-judgment and compassionate fraternal love, through which he discovers the
Truth present in his brethren as well as in himself, his mind’s eye is progressively
“purified,” that is likened to the humility and love of the Incarnate Word, and thereby
enabled to “see Truth in his own purity.” 240
Having traced this ascent of the steps of Truth from the perspective of the
progressively sanctified soul, Bernard turns in paragraphs 20-21 to a consideration of that
same ascent from the perspective of the respective operations of three divine Persons in
the soul’s three powers of reason, will, and memory. 241 Here Bernard traces what Gilson
has justly called the soul’s “progressive assimilation to the Divine life” and what we
might also be call the abbot’s doctrine of deification. 242
In the first place, prior to conversion, the divine Person of the Son, the Word and
Wisdom 243 of the Father, finds the soul’s first power, the ratio, oppressed by concupiscent
239 Hum 18 (III, 29-30): “Vehementer sese lugentes, id solum consolationis inveniunt, ut severi
iudices sui, qui scilicet amore veri esuriant et sitiant iustitiam, usque ad contemptum sui districtissimam de
se exigant satisfactionem, et de cetero emendationem. Sed cum se ad id sufficere non posse conspiciunt, -
cum enim fecerint omnia quae mandata fuerint sibi, servos se inutiles dicunt -, de iustitia ad misericordiam
fugiunt. Ut autem illam consequantur, consilium Veritatis sequuntur: BEATI MISERICORDES,
QUONIAM IPSI MISERICORDIAM CONSEQUENTUR. Et hic est secundus gradus veritatis, quo eam in
proximis inquirunt, dum de suis aliorum necessitates exquirunt, dum ex his quae patiuntur, patientibus
compati sciunt.”
240 Hum 19 (III, 30): “Ab omni ergo labe, infirmitate, ignorantia, studio ve contracta, flendo,
iustitiam esuriendo, operibus misericordiae insistendo, mundatur oculus cordis, cui se in sui puritate
videndam Veritas promittit: BEATI enim MUNDO CORDE, QUONIAM IPSI DEUM VIDEBUNT.”
241 On Bernard’s psychology and in particular his appropriation of Augustine’s triad of memoriaintellectus-voluntas
from the De Trinitate, see M. Endre von Ivanka, “La structure de l’âme selon S.
Bernard” Saint Bernard Théologien, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9 (1953): 202-208.
242 Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, 98.
243 Bernard’s appropriation of the divine attribute of Wisdom to the person of the Word is
evidently derived from the Scriptural locus classicus, 1 Cor 1:24, “Christ the power and wisdom of God.”
See Gra 26 (III, 184).
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