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

the Truth in his own nature? Matters are only further complicated a few lines later when,
describing the soul’s descent from this vision, Bernard explains that the soul’s third
power, memory, will feed on the secrets of Truth the soul has glimpsed “when the soul
has returned to itself.” 254
Neither here nor elsewhere in the text of the Steps does Bernard attempt to offer a
solution to this conundrum concerning the soul’s seemingly simultaneous self-
forgetfulness and self-awareness in its experience of the contemplative vision of God.
Consequently, it is difficult to determine if he believes that the soul’s graced knowledge
of God in its rapture to the Father excludes or permits in that moment its knowledge of
itself as Christ’s Bride. What is, however, clear from the text is Bernard’s conviction that
the soul which has ascended the first two steps of Truth now enjoys a self-awareness
quite different from that it suffered in the first moments of her conversion to the Truth.
At its conversion, the soul was ashamed to contemplate its own face, disgusted by
the ugliness of its own disfigured countenance, and compelled to acknowledge with tears
the inescapable truth of its self-imposed enslavement to sin and misery. Now, however,
once reformed in the divine likeness of the Incarnate Word’s own humility and love by
the graced missions of Son and Spirit, the soul finds itself at peace. What is more, the
soul now even delights to recognize herself as Christ’s own Bride, led into the marriage
chamber of her King, and sees in her own face the very beauty of her Bridegroom,
without spot or wrinkle. This Anima-Sponsa may, moreover, be entirely confident that
the beauty she now discerns within herself is no self-deception, for she senses within
254 Hum 21 (III, 33): ““Ibi modicum, hora videlicet quasi dimidia, silentio facto in caelo, inter
desideratos amplexus suaviter quiescens ipsa quidem dormit, sed cor eius vigilat, quo utique interim
veritatis arcana rimatur, quorum postmodum memoria statim ad se reditura pascatur.”
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