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

As we have already observed above, and as we will see in considerably greater
depth in this dissertation’s first chapter, one of the most significant Scriptural foundations
for Bernard’s doctrine of self-knowledge is the Bridegroom’s rebuke of his Bride in
Canticle 1:7: “If you do not know yourself, most beautiful of women, go forth, and
follow after the flocks of your companions, and feed your kids beside the shepherd’s
tents.” When he interprets this verse as the Bridegroom’s warning to his Bride to seek
self-knowledge, the abbot follows a long interpretive tradition stemming back to Origen
and Gregory the Great. 38 In this regard, the influence of Origen Homilies and
Commentary on the Canticle, in the translations by Rufinus and Jerome respectively, on
Bernard and other Western patristic and medieval commenters can hardly be overstated. 39
In the second book of his Commentary, when he turns to Sg 1:7, the Alexandrian
immediately associates this verse with the celebrated Greek maxim “Know yourself” or
“Understand yourself” (Scito te ipsum, vel Cognosce te ipsum, in Rufinus’s translation). 40
Though Origen acknowledges a tradition attributing this maxim to one of the seven
Greek sages, he insists that, long before the Greeks, it was Solomon himself who
formulated this precept when he wrote, in Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s Septuagint
text, “Nisi cognoveris te, o bona – sive pulchra – inter mulieres…” 41
38 On this tradition, see Pierre Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même: de Socrate à saint Bernard, vol. 1
(Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1974), 97-291.
39 On the subject of Bernard’s appropriation of Origen, see Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual
Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, 41-46.
40 Commentarium in Cantica Canticorum, II.5.1 (SCh 375:354).
41 On at least two occasions, Bernard himself makes reference to the Greek origins of this maxim,
in both cases associating the maxim with Scriptural verses other than Sg 1:7 which will, as we will see,
resurface repeatedly in his discussions of self-knowledge. In SC 23, he associates this maxim with Ps 38:5
when he writes, “I am concerned, according to that saying of the Greeks, to know myself, that together with
the Prophet, I may ‘know what is lacking to me.’” SC 23.9 (I, 145): “cautus, iuxta illud Graecorum, scire
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