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

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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, 263
to judge themselves in Truth, and so to begin what we have called the “ascent” to self- knowledge that leads to salvation and eternal life. Through our study of the Steps’ first part, we saw how, for Bernard, the proud soul will return to God by three steps of truth and love which progressively overcome its false knowledge and contempt of itself, its neighbors, and God. In the first step of Truth, the Son of God, the Word and Wisdom of God, cries out in the proud soul’s depths, recalling the soul’s curious gaze to itself, and enabling it to judge itself in the full and bitter truth of its own misery by a participation in his own prerogative as Judge of all. As this soul is compelled to face and confess its sin and weakness, it suffers intense guilt and shame, but also begins to recognize this same miseria in the souls of others, and so, by its honest self-encounter, learns a genuinely compassionate charity for its neighbors. In ascending this second step of Truth, by which it comes to see its neighbors not as rivals or inferiors, but brothers and sisters in Christ, the soul is graced with the Spirit’s inward infusion of God’s own divine charity, in and through which it is enabled to love its brothers and sisters with the compassion of Christ the Incarnate Word. Once conformed to the Son and Spirit respectively, the soul now refashioned in the lost divine likeness of humility and love may be rapt to the embrace of the Father and be bound to him as his own glorious Bride. Rejoicing in the beautiful sight of its newly refashioned countenance, and exchanging its former guilt and shame for loving trust and hope, it may say with the Bride of the Canticle, “The King has lead me into his chamber” (Sg 1:3). Yet, as we saw through our study of Bernard’s “psychological drama” in his sermon-treatise On Conversion, the abbot teaches that the soul’s ascent to this Bridal self- awareness is neither swift nor easy, but passes through an arduous series of intervening 264
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MY BELOVED IS MINE AND I AM HIS: SE
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MY BELOVED IS MINE AND I AM HIS: SE
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To my Father, James U. DeFrancis, S
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Christ as the Model of Self-Knowled
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esearch: John Cavadini, Cyril O’R
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self-knowledge is the indispensible
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For Bernard, then, humble self-know
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likeness of charity. Within the Cis
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When Gilson asserted that by self-k
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Bernard, Sommerfeldt continues, hum
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a “false image” of himself. 26
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some newfound and joyous moment of
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ecognize that same sinfulness in hi
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foundations of man’s return to Go
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the descent of humility begins the
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saving work of Jesus Christ in the
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the humility, obedience, and love C
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Of particular importance to Bernard
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and second, “what it is like in i
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In his ground-breaking study of med
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direct links between the two. 52 It
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swells in one’s heart that it mov
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pride as “the desire for a perver
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The knowledge of self and God in th
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mercy until you renew all that is i
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CHAPTER 1: THE SCOPE OF BERNARD’S
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Prior to its first conversion, Bern
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Origen, Bernard here and elsewhere
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of God, they will grow ever more un
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and love as she is loved, and the B
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In the interim or “meanwhile” o
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Why do you judge yourself worthy to
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For Bernard, the lesson to be drawn
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warning and why should it compel he
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worldly things her flesh and senses
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aspired to seize a kind of parody o
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thousands of evils upon our entire
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edemptive work is suitably adapted
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emains forever, this grass too rema
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graciously condescending to assume
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Thus the abbot resolves his spiritu
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of self-knowledge enabled self-dece
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humbles himself will be exalted”
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Church, enabling scholars to instru
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Through this unflinching self-exami
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soon tempers my bitter vision of my
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edeem him, sanctify him, and offer
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As observed above, in the second ha
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modeled and effected by the Word-ma
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Ignorance of self breeds pride when
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consideration of others and their a
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consideration of his treatise as a
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symmetry between these two parts an
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Though this discrepancy at first ap
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self, God, and neighbor. Since it i
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estored in this divine likeness as
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eturn to his suffering brothers and
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much more should the monk not exalt
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for your brother’s misery and not
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sinful weakness and nothing of thei
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Finally, we should note that Bernar
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journey to which the monk will comm
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and judge others or to see how they
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condemned. Lifting his eyes in humi
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will contrary to both the law of Go
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in him by her obedience to his will
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contempt not only for herself and h
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his rule over the reprobate he woul
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in misery rather than to be subject
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descending these early steps of pri
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pleases them and avoid what makes t
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knows.” 201 Should the topic of c
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Here abbot Bernard figures the prou
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ut believe in his inmost heart that
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Asserting Self-Will Against Superio
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As so often in his narrative of the
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who he is, everyone judges him, and
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monk’s descent into this deepest
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God in heaven. He will acknowledge
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Consumed by this self-centered love
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their hearts. Hence Bernard’s fre
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done…by whoever would walk in the
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In recognizing the two distinct mom
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experience, lamenting how he has ma
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inward movement in the soul. In any
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share with them in that divine merc
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Operating inwardly within this judg
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the Truth in his own nature? Matter
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arguing from both allusions in text
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upon the “stage” of the soul an
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(Is 46:8). For Bernard, this first
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desperate need for the healing grac
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consolations afforded it by the lif
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thoroughly diseased: reason now see
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Reason’s rebuke is powerful, and
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In this vision, reason is permitted
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conscience she enjoys through the m
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Word of God, “that living and eff
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knowledge and contempt of himself,
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The Self-Awareness of the Bride in
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When the brightness of this beauty
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For Bernard, then, the soul that ha
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figure of this Ecclesia-Sponsa. On
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Conclusion Having considered three
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self-awareness as his own Bride, ra
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CHAPTER 4: SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND THE M
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Christ’s incarnate, crucified, an
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indeed to the entirety of his theol
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significant individual expressions
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The foregoing elements of Bernard
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Page 227 and 228: excursus has been labeled a “digr
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Page 231 and 232: To resolve this question, Bernard r
Page 233 and 234: You see, therefore, that Christ is
Page 235 and 236: to the Spirit, by contemplation in
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Page 239 and 240: Christ’s Ascension culminates in
Page 241 and 242: conformed to him. Then, through the
Page 243 and 244: Modeling this laudabilis curiositas
Page 245 and 246: The theme of Word’s example of vo
Page 247 and 248: equally deadly, extreme of despair.
Page 249 and 250: and humbled by God, so that there w
Page 251 and 252: as essential elements of the Word I
Page 253 and 254: led astray. Their amor carnalis Chr
Page 255 and 256: delivered us from sin and enabled u
Page 257 and 258: miseria and fires it with the confi
Page 259 and 260: death to bring about a real, inward
Page 261 and 262: sins,” “justification,” and
Page 263 and 264: these life-giving virtues, we must
Page 265 and 266: precisely through, a careful approp
Page 267 and 268: perhaps she means, “My Beloved in
Page 269 and 270: To such a soul, the abbot continues
Page 271: gradually assuming the figure of Ch
Page 275 and 276: ejoice with those who rejoice and w
Page 277 and 278: love of himself in the glory of div
Page 279 and 280: I. Works of Bernard of Clairvaux BI
Page 281 and 282: ------. Sermo 29A. Edited by C. Lam
Page 283 and 284: Courcelle, Pierre. Connais-toi toi-
Page 285 and 286: ------. “Le premier traité authe
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