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

cleansed and forgiven and to see even its past life no longer as a tristis historia, but a
witness to God’s mercy. It allows the soul, in other words, to pass from the terrifying
courtroom of self-judgment to that beautiful garden wherein the Bride rejoices in the
peace of her good conscience. The soul’s very self-understanding is now configured by
the mercy of Christ, and as Christ’s Bride, she now sees herself as a beautiful, living re-
creation of her Bridegroom’s healing and transformative love.
Bernard underscores this point when he shows precisely how the soul seeks and
finds the mercy for which it longs. The soul that pines for God’s mercy must obey the
Word’s counsel in the fifth beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain
mercy” (Mt 5:7). In the Steps, the abbot associates this fifth beatitude with the fraternal
compassion the monk learns by the Spirit’s gift of divine charity into the will. Here in
On Conversion, however, he relates this beatitude to each aspect of the soul’s threefold
relation to itself, its neighbors, and God. If the soul is to enjoy God’s mercy, it must first
show mercy to itself, by exchanging the self-mutilation of a life of sin for the joyous
freedom and fulfillment of a life lived in pursuit of righteousness. By this way of lifelong
conversion, expressed in the monastic conversatio, the soul that once eviscerated itself by
the self-hatred of sin will be reconciled to its very self.
Having shown such mercy to itself, the soul must then extend this mercy to the
hearts of its neighbors by the genuinely compassionate love Bernard has described in his
Steps. In showing mercy first to itself and then to its fellows, the soul is not only
reconciled to itself and them, but also reconciled to God who now comes to the soul with
“the kiss of his mouth” (Sg 1:1). In the Steps, Bernard showed how the monk descending
into the self-deception by the twelve steps of pride simultaneously descends into the false
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