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

writings many and varied schematizations of the soul’s journey to God by its progressive
restoration in the lost divine likeness, he consistently maintains that the soul’s return to
its Creator, however it may be charted, originates in this humbling but salutary self-
awareness. Thus in his earliest spiritual treatise, On the Steps of Humility and Pride
(1125), Bernard describes the fallen soul’s recognition of its own miserable plight as the
“first step of Truth,” the first and indispensible rung in the three-step ladder of the soul’s
ascent to Truth himself. And again, at the very end of his life, in his On Consideration
(1151), Bernard can be found once more extolling the virtues of this self-knowledge,
exhorting his former novice, pope Eugene III, “[L]et your consideration begin with
yourself and end with yourself. Wherever it wanders, call it back to yourself with the
fruit of your salvation. You must be first and last in your own consideration.” 76
Certainly, then, previous scholarship has been right in underscoring Bernard’s
insistence that the soul’s self-knowledge, understood as its self-recognition as a
disfigured image of God, is indispensible for conversion and the origin of the soul’s
journey to God. Yet, as we will argue in this dissertation, a certain scholarly
preoccupation with this aspect of the abbot’s thought has unfortunately obscured the full
scope of Bernard’s teaching on self-knowledge and the spiritual life. Beyond his
reflections on the soul’s self-knowledge in the moment of its first conversion, Bernard
has, in fact, carefully thought through the question of the soul’s self-awareness in each of
the various phases of the soul’s journey to God.
76 Csi 2.6 (III, 414): “A te proinde incipiat tua consideratio; non solum autem, et in te finiatur.
Quocumque evagetur, ad te revocaveris eam cum salutis fructu. Tu primus tibi, tu ultimus.”
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