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

soon tempers my bitter vision of myself.” 132 Inviting his monastic sons to share in his
experience, the abbot assures them that if they turn to God in humility, they will come to
know him as “kind and compassionately listening to our prayers, as one truly generous
and merciful, as victorious over sin, as one whose nature is goodness, who wills to spare
and to save.” 133 The monk who formerly wept to know himself as a disfigured image of
God will now rejoice to know his Creator as the God who himself is love (1 Jn 4:8). Yet,
the very occasion for his newfound knowledge of God’s mercy and love will be his
newfound knowledge of himself, no longer as an image disfigured by sin, but as an image
being renewed in the lost divine likeness by God’s grace:
In this way, your self-knowledge will be a step the knowledge of
God; he will become visible to you as his image is being renewed
in you, as you, with unveiled face, gazing with confidence on the
glory of the Lord are transformed into that same image, from
brightness to brightness, as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor
3:18). 134
For Bernard, then, the monk will come to know the love of God as he comes to know
himself as one being lovingly renewed by God in God’s own divine likeness. The monk
who once trembled to see his unlikeness to Christ in the mirror of Christ’s Incarnation,
and therefore humbled himself before Christ, now comes to see the mercy of Christ in
and through his own progressive likening to Christ’s humility and charity. With his
132 SC 36.6 (II, 7): “Ego quamdiu in me respicio, in amaritudine moratur oculus meus. Si autem
suspexero et levavero oculos ad divinae miserationis auxilium, temperabit mox amaram visionem mei laeta
visio Dei.”
133 SC 36.6 (II, 7-8): “pium et deprecabilem experiri, sicut revera benignus et misericors est, et
praestabilis super malitia: quippe cuius natura bonitas, et cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere.”
134 SC 36.6 (II, 8): “Atque hoc modo erit gradus ad notitiam Dei, tui cognitio; et ex imagine sua,
quae in te renovatur, ipse videbitur, dum tu quidem revelata facie gloriam Domini cum fiducia speculando,
in eamdem imaginem transformaris de claritate in claritatem, tamquam a Domini Spiritu.”
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