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

(Is 46:8). For Bernard, this first word “seems to precede all those who convert to their
hearts, not only calling them, but leading them back to themselves and setting them
before their own face.” 266 For this divine Voice, the abbot continues, is also a divine
Light penetrating the soul’s depths and “announcing to human beings their sins and
illumining things hidden in darkness.” 267 Introducing for the first time the characters of
reason and memory, Bernard recounts how the divine Light now “illumines reason and
opens the book of memory before its very eyes” that reason might read within this book
“the sad history” of the soul’s past life. 268
Though Bernard does not here explicitly mention the soul’s return from curiosity
and the eradication of its prior self-deception, this is surely implied by his description of
conversion as a return to the heart and the illumination of truths long shrouded there in
darkness. The soul’s memory of its past sins can never be entirely effaced because the
record of its sin has been indelibly “inscribed within the book of memory by the pen of
truth,” 269 but this memory can be cloaked in darkness, the darkness, presumably, of the
pleasant self-delusions the soul entertains as true so long as its amor propriae
excellentiae swells unchecked by honest self-judgment.
Here too, as in the Steps, this first moment of honest self-judgment is depicted as
the soul’s participation in the Son’s own prerogative as Judge of all. For as the divine
266 Conv 3 (IV, 72): “Redite, praevaricatores, ad cor. Hoc nempe initium loquendi Domino, et hoc
verbum ad omnes qui convertuntur ad cor, praecessisse videtur, et non modo revocans eos, sed et reducens
et statuens contra faciem suam.”
267 Conv 3 (IV, 73): “Est enim non tantum vox virtutis, sed et radius lucis, annuntians pariter
hominibus peccata eorum et illuminans abscondita tenebrarum.”
268 Conv 3 (IV, 73): “Aperitur siquidem conscientiae liber, revolvitur misera vitae series, tristis
quaedam historia replicatur, illuminatur ratio, et evoluta memoria velut quibusdam eius oculis exhibetur.”
269 Conv 4 (IV, 75): “Volumen grande, cui universa inscripta sunt, stilo utique veritatis.”
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