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

himself, to accept their exalted opinion of himself over the lingering protests of his own
conscience.
Once this monk has, by the sixth step of pride, arrogantia, embraced the
falsehood of his own superiority as the truth about himself, he soon exalts his own will
over the will of his own superiors, renouncing obedience to feed his growing craving for
domination. When his disobedience results in his expulsion from the monastery, his self-
deception assumes a still more sinister form as he begins to consider, and then to embrace
as true, the delusion that he is not only superior to his fellows, but even superior to God
and exempt from God’s law. With his concupiscent desires loosed from the salutary
constraints of regular monastic life, he begins to indulge each, delighting in the varied
pleasures the world affords. When, in turn, he finds that his sins go unpunished, he
concludes that God is a god of mercy, but not justice, a god who will not, or perhaps
cannot, punish him for his transgressions. So, having constructed an idol to match his
self-deception, he plunges headlong into a life of sin, only to find that his repeated sins
have enchained him in the bonds of vicious habit and enslaved him to the desire for
everything which is not God, and therefore cannot fulfill his deepest, inward yearnings.
Thus his apparent “ascent” of self-exaltation proves to be a true “descent” into restless
misery. By falsely judging and showing contempt for his brothers and his Creator, he
has, in fact, falsely judged himself and subjected himself to the severest form of self-
contempt. Without the intervening grace of the Word, Bernard concludes, this proud
soul’s self-contempt will culminate in eternal death.
In Chapter 3, then, we traced how, for Bernard, the Word indeed resounds in the
souls of the self-deceived proud, calling them back before their own self-disfigured faces,
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