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

possibilities of conversion and restoration in the lost divine likeness by God’s grace in
Christ.
More recent scholarship has tended to follow this same line of interpretation.
Thus, in his study of spiritual desire in Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, Michael
Casey argues that, for Bernard, “desire for God begins with self-knowledge.” 14 This self-
knowledge consists in acknowledging both one’s underlying orientation to God as
created in his image and one’s suffering as the consequence of having lost the divine
likeness through sin. In recognizing one’s orientation to God as made in his image, one
grows discontent with the ephemeral satisfactions of this life and so begins to desire
another, better life. In accepting suffering as the consequence of the loss of the divine
likeness through sin, one confesses one’s need for God’s forgiveness and healing and so
begins the journey of restoration in the divine likeness.
In his The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux, John R. Sommerfeldt
follows Gilson in closely associating Bernard’s teaching on self-knowledge with his
understanding of humility as the foundation of the spiritual life. “In Bernard’s
educational program,” Sommerfeldt contends, “the first step on the path to perfection, to
happiness, is humility” and “humility…is an intellectual virtue; it is self-knowledge.” 15
More precisely, “humility is seeing oneself as one truly is; in humility one measures this
self-knowledge against another knowledge, the knowledge of what one could be.” 16 For
14 Michael Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the
Song of Songs, Cistercian Studies 77 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988), 157.
15 John R. Sommerfeldt, The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux: An Intellectual History
of the Early Cistercian Order, Cistercian Studies 125 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 53.
16 Sommerfeldt, The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux, 53.
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