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

MY BELOVED IS MINE AND I AM HIS: SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN THE THEOLOGY
OF BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
Abstract
by
James U. DeFrancis, Jr.
This dissertation examines the various forms and roles self-knowledge assumes in
Bernard of Clairvaux’s overarching vision of the spiritual life. Previous scholarship on
Bernard’s doctrine of self-knowledge has correctly emphasized the significance he
attaches to humbling self-knowledge, or the soul’s honest self-recognition as a disfigured
image of God, in the soul’s first conversion and the initial stages of its return to God. A
certain scholarly preoccupation with this aspect of the abbot’s thought has, however,
somewhat obscured the full breadth of Bernard’s teaching on self-knowledge and the
diverse forms and roles it assumes across the various phases of the soul’s spiritual life,
including those which both proceed and follow its first conversion.
Prior to its first conversion, Bernard believes, the soul suffers not only from self-
ignorance, but also from a self-deception, a false self-knowledge born of pride, by which
it imagines itself superior to others and therefore not in need of conversion or healing. It
is precisely because he recognizes the seductive power of this self-deception that Bernard
so frequently insists upon the soul’s humbling recognition of its own sad disfigurement as