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

the descent of humility begins the soul’s ascent to self-knowledge, first as an image
disfigured and then as image renewed.
In Chapter 2, we will expound Bernard’s theory of pride and the self-deception it
brings through an analysis of the abbot’s On the Steps of Humility and Pride. In
particular, we will be concerned with that work’s understudied second part, in which
Bernard identifies twelve steps of pride to match Benedict’s twelve steps of humility.
Whereas most previous scholarship has found in these steps of pride little more than
amusing, satirical portraits of various proud monks, we will argue that Bernard’s steps in
fact narrate how pride, the obsessive desire for one’s own superiority, gradually lures the
monk into the delusional but obstinately held belief that he is what he so wants to, holier
than everyone else in his community. In the grips of this self-deception, the monk who
imagines himself superior to his brothers, and even his appointed superiors, soon
presumes to assert his own will over theirs, even to the point of his expulsion from the
monastic cloister to the world. There, freed from the salutary disciplines of obedience
and the regular life, the former monk’s self-deception now assumes a still more perverse
form as he first entertains, and then accepts as true, the belief that he is superior not only
to his former brethren, but even to God himself. In imitation of Lucifer and humanity’s
first parents, he dares to exalt his own will against the will of his Creator by embracing a
life of sin. Yet, by the paradoxical dynamics of humility and pride, his apparent ascent
ultimately results in his descent into the chains of sinful habit and a life of restless misery
among the ephemeral pleasures of this passing world.
In Chapter 3, having traced Bernard’s account of the proud and self-willed soul’s
descent into self-deception, we will trace the abbot’s parallel account of the soul’s ascent
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