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

pride as “the desire for a perverse exaltation.” 61 Earlier in the same book, Augustine has
already argued that human beings naturally and rightly desire happiness, but, by pride,
attempt to seize that happiness through the assertion of their own wills against others and
against God. Though created by God to find their happiness, their true exaltation, by that
humble subjection to his will which is charity, human beings have from the beginning
been tempted to grasp a certain false happiness by the exertion of their self-will. In so
contradicting their own created nature, human beings subject themselves to a “lie” or a
“falsehood”: “God created human beings upright, so that they might live not according to
themselves, but according to him who made them by preferring his will to their own.
When human beings fail to live this way, when they fail to live in the way for which they
were created, this is falsehood.” 62 It is precisely this medacium, this lie or falsehood, we
will see, that Bernard understands to be heart the self-deception human beings suffer
when they succumb to the wishful thinking of pride.
Considered more broadly, Augustine’s foundational conception in the City of
God, that of the two civitates, the city of those who live by pride and self-will and the city
of those who live by humility and love, will provide the basic framework for Bernard’s
entire spiritual theology. Though Bernard does not typically invoke Augustine’s image
of the two “cities,” he does essentially see human beings as faced with two fundamentally
opposed ways of life. By the false ascent of pride and self-will, one will grow
progressively unlike Christ in his humility and love, and so descend into restless misery
61 De civitate Dei XIV.4 (CCSL 48): “sed quia homo ita factus est rectus, ut non secundum se
ipsum, sed secundum eum, a quo factus est, uiueret, id est illius potius quam suam faceret uoluntatem: non
ita uiuere, quem ad modum est factus ut uiueret, hoc est mendacium.”
appetitus?”
62 De civitate Dei XIV.13 (SCSL 48): “quid est autem superbia nisi peruersae celsitudinis
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