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

this reason, doctrine and spirituality remain for him always intimately and necessarily
related.
Consequently, if we are to understand the role Christ assumes in Bernard’s
theology of self-knowledge and the spiritual life, we must first begin with an account of
the abbot’s teaching concerning the Person and work of Christ, the Incarnate Word. For
while it is true, as McGinn has suggested, that Bernard and his Cistercian contemporaries
are concerned less with the metaphysical constitution of the Person of Christ and more
with the meaning of the redemption Christ has effected, it is also true that Bernard
understands well the link between an account of Christ’s Person and an account of his
redemptive work. 318 For Bernard, that is, we cannot begin to understand the nature of the
Incarnate Word’s redemptive work and its implications for the spiritual life of Christian
believers until we have first established who this Word is and how he has taken flesh for
the sake of our salvation.
Though he was the author of treatises as well as sermons, Bernard nowhere in his
corpus offers an ex professo treatment of Christ’s Person and saving work. Yet, this does
not mean that Bernard has failed to develop and articulate a rigorous, systematic
Christology. Indeed the Person and work of Christ are so essential to the abbot’s
theological imagination that they imbue all his theological writings and it is therefore
possible to glean from his many treatments of Christ a consistent doctrinal foundation
that undergirds his entire spiritual theology. In what follows, we will first attempt a brief
overview of his Christological teaching and then examine one of the abbot’s most
318 Bernard McGinn, “Resurrection and Ascension in the Christology of the Early Cistercians,”
Cîteaux 30 (1979): 8.
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