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

desperate need for the healing grace of the Word if it is to be delivered from its self-
imposed enslavement to sin.
As Bernard has already observed in his first act, the soul’s honest confrontation
with itself at the prompting of the Word has been an experience of shame, distress, and
deep anguish. Facing plainly the truth of its past life, the soul now realizes that it has
been obsessively engaged in a ceaseless, though unconscious, pattern of self-hatred and
self-destruction. Borrowing an image from Augustine’s Confessions, Bernard has reason
realize that by its life of sin, the soul has torn itself to pieces, like a frenzied madman
scratching his flesh until it rips and bleeds. 271 As long as reason remained distracted from
this by his unrestrained curiosity, the soul remained numb to the pain of these self-
inflicted spiritual wounds. Once more following Augustine in his Confessions, 272 the
abbot explains that reason has, like the Prodigal Son, wandered forth from his true home
and “forgetful of himself and inwardly estranged from himself, has journeyed into a far-
off country” (Lk 15:13). 273 Yet now that reason, again like the Prodigal, has “returned to
himself” (Lk 15:17), he realizes with horror “how cruelly the soul has eviscerated itself to
win some worthless piece of game.”
Bernard’s characterization of the soul’s horror and shame in the acknowledgment
of its sinful self-mutilation is characteristically vivid and perhaps to our modern ears
distasteful. Like Augustine who famously analyzed with relentless intensity his sin in
stealing a few paltry pears in Book II of his Confessions, the abbot might be accused of
271 See Augustine, Confessions III.2.4 (CCSL 27).
272 See Augustine, Confessions II.10.18 (CCSL 27).
273 Conv 5 (IV, 76): “Quid vero mirum, si propriam minime sentiat anima laesionem, quae, sui
ipsius oblita et penitus absens sibi, in longinquam profecta est regionem?”
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