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

and love as she is loved, and the Bridegroom will rejoice over his Bride, knowing and
known, loving and loved.” 88
Yet this beatific vision, Bernard continues, this experience of reciprocal
knowledge and love between Bridegroom and Bride, is not for the present life, but is
reserved to the next. In the words of the First Letter of John, “We know that when he
appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). As long as the
Bride remains on her earthly pilgrimage, as long as she continues in her mortal and not
yet glorified body, she enjoys only a partial likeness to her Bridegroom and therefore
enjoys only a partial vision of him according to the measure of her humility and love.
Bernard illustrates this correlation of likeness and vision through an analogy to
physical sight. The human eye cannot gaze directly on the sun as it is, but only as it
illumines visible objects such as the air, a mountain, or a wall. The eye alone among all
the parts of the human body is capable of this partial vision of the sun on account of its
natural brightness and clarity, its own partial likeness to the sun. Should the eye grow
clouded and thereby lose its natural brightness and clarity, it would no longer be capable
of even this partial vision of the sun on account of its lost likeness to it. Yet, if the eye
were somehow raised above its natural condition and made perfectly like the sun in
brightness and clarity, it would be capable of gazing on the sun as it is owing to this
perfect likeness.
By analogy, the abbot argues, the human soul has been created with a certain
likeness to its Creator and is thereby capable of a certain partial vision of the Word.
88 SC 82.8 (II, 298: “Tunc cognoscet anima sicut cognita est; tunc amabit sicut amata est; et
gaudebit sponsus super sponsam, cognoscens et cognitus, diligens et dilectus.”
50