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

desires, captive to sin, and ignorant of itself insofar as it is subject to self-deception and
given over to curiosity about others. Operating within the reason, the Word recalls the
soul’s curiosity to itself, instructs it in the Truth about itself, and delivers it from its
bondage to sin and its enslavement to the desires of the flesh. Most significantly for
Bernard, the Word enables the rational power to share in his own prerogative as divine
Judge: “Making the reason as it were his vicar, the Son establishes the reason as its own
judge, that out of reverence to the Word to which it is now conjoined, it might execute
the office of Truth as prosecutor, witness, and judge against itself.” 244 More than a mere
moral exemplar, then, inspiring the reason to self-judgment by his exemplary display of
humility, 245 the Word moves the reason inwardly to recognize and judge as false the self-
deception of superiority the soul’s unchecked amor propriae excellentiae has proposed
for its belief and to accept as true the reality of its sin and weakness. For its part, reason
is no passive partner in this graced action, but rather rendered capable of judging the soul
for itself just as it is judged by God. Thus, “from this first conjunction of the Word and
reason, humility is born.” 246
In the second place, the Spirit, who is Charity, 247 finds the soul’s second power,
the voluntas, still bound to concupiscent desires, but now judged by reason as such.
244 Hum 21 (III, 32): “Mirabiliter utens tamquam pro se vicaria, ipsam sibi iudicem statuit, ita ut
pro reverentia Verbi cui coniungitur, ipsa sui accusatrix, testis et iudex, contra se Veritatis fungatur
officio.”
245 For Bernard, the Incarnate Word is indeed the preeminent moral exemplar of humility. In
condescending to wash the feet of his disciples, the abbot explains, Christ offers them the very “form of
humility” to be imitated. See Hum 20 (III, 31). Yet, here, Bernard goes further, to insist that if the soul is
to imitate Christ’s exemplary humility, its reason must be conjoined to and moved inwardly by the Word.
246 Hum 21 (III, 32): “Ex qua prima coniunctione Verbi et rationis, humilitas nascitur.”
247 In his roughly contemporaneous work On Loving God, Bernard implies that the divine attribute
of charity may be appropriated to the divine person of the Spirit when he writes: “What preserves that
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