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

Through this unflinching self-examination, Bernard suggests, the monk is truly
compelled to see himself in the Truth because he is compelled to see himself in the eyes
of Christ, to compare himself not now to his unreliable perceptions of his brothers’
relative virtue or vice, but to the manifest and incontrovertible humility and charity of the
Incarnate Word. Contemplating himself in the mirror of Christ’s humility and love, he
sees reflected in relief the full measure of his pride and self-will. Beholding his own face
in the face of the infant Jesus, he must acknowledge that he is not, as he supposed, holy
and like to Christ, but like a beast before Christ’s manger, subject to his curiosity and
obedient to his sinful flesh: “Seeing himself in the clear light of Truth, will he not find
himself in a region of unlikeness and groaning from the depth of a misery he can no
longer dissemble, for he is truly miserable, cry out with the Prophet, ‘In your Truth you
have humbled me’ (Ps 118:75)?” 129
Having once imagined himself to like Christ, the monk now must see that he is in
truth like Adam, a descendent of Adam, and justly subject to the miserable consequences
of Adam’s primordial sin. In one of the most striking accounts of this self-discovery to
be found in his entire corpus, Bernard asks:
How can he not but be humbled by this true self-knowledge when
he perceives himself to be burdened by sin, weighed down by his
mortal body, entangled in earthly cares, stained with the impurity
of his fleshly desires; when he sees that he is blind, bent over, and
powerless, entwined in many errors, exposed to a thousand
dangers, trembling before a thousand fears, anxious over a
thousand difficulties, vexed by a thousand suspicions, troubled by
129 SC 36.5 (II, 7): “Nonne ita se intuens clara luce veritatis, inveniet se in regione dissimilitudinis,
et suspirans misera, quam iam latere non poterit quod vere misera sit, nonne cum Propheta clamabit ad
Dominum: IN VERITATE TUA HUMILIASTI ME?”
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