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

perfectly like him in his beauty, she will see him as he is. In this beatific vision, this
chaste and consummated union of reciprocal knowledge and love, the Bride’s journey of
self-knowledge will reach its eschatological culmination for she will then know herself as
her Bridegroom knows her, as a perfect likeness to himself. Her knowledge of herself as
her Bridegroom’s own beloved and beautiful Bride, radiant with his own humility and
charity, will be eternally confirmed when she will hear from his own lips, “You are
completely beautiful, my love, and there is no flaw in you” (Sg 4:7).
Conclusion
The preceding study of SC 34-38 has yielded several conclusions which, taken
together, suggest the need to offer a fuller picture of Bernard’s doctrine of self-
knowledge than that which has been offered in previous scholarship. First, in addition to
his teaching on the soul’s humbling self-awareness at its first conversion, Bernard’s
doctrine of self-knowledge includes a nuanced account of the defective self-knowledge,
or self-deception, the soul experiences prior to that initial conversion. More than mere
self-ignorance, this self-deception consists in a false self-understanding born of pride, the
excessive love of one’s own superiority over others. Second, though the soul’s self-
awareness at its initial conversion is indeed bitter and humbling, the interior conversion
the soul experiences in this humbling self-knowledge moves the soul to undertake the
journey of its restoration in the divine likeness and, in this journey, to discover itself
anew as an image of God being refashioned in the likeness of its divine exemplar. More
precisely, this new self-knowledge consists in the soul’s developing self-awareness as the
Bride of Christ ever more conformed to the beauty of her Bridegroom’s own humility and
love. Third, the soul’s growth in this new and far more joyous self-knowledge is both
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