Sermon 37 on the Song of Songs — Bernard of Clairvaux
On the Twofold Knowledge and the Twofold Ignorance, and on the Evils or Losses Which They Beget
1. I think we have no need now to exhort you to be watchful, since without doubt that reproving sermon is keeping you awake, being still recent, which yesterday was charitably delivered by us and well awakened some of you. You hold then in memory that I hold your assent: that no one is saved without knowledge of himself, from which indeed the mother of salvation, humility, arises, and the fear of the Lord, which itself, just as it is the beginning of wisdom, so also is the beginning of salvation. No one, I say, is saved without that knowledge, who yet has the age and faculty of knowing. This I say on account of little children and the mentally deficient, whose case is different. What if you are ignorant of God? Can there be hope of salvation with ignorance of God? Not even this. For you can neither love one whom you do not know, nor possess one whom you have not loved. Know yourself therefore, that you may fear God; know him, that you may likewise appease him. In the one you are initiated into wisdom, in the other you are also brought to perfection, because the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Ps 110:10), and the fullness of the law is love (Rom 13:10). Both ignorances therefore must be guarded against by you, just as without the fear and love of God salvation cannot exist. The rest are indifferent, having neither salvation if they are known, nor damnation if they are not known.
2. I do not say, however, that knowledge of letters is to be despised or neglected, which adorns the soul and instructs it, and makes it able to instruct others also. But those two things ought and are expedient to come first, in which the preceding argument declared the sum of salvation to consist. And see whether he was not contemplating and teaching this order who said: Sow for yourselves unto justice, reap the hope of life; and then at last, he says, illuminate for yourselves the light of knowledge (Hos 10:12). He placed knowledge last, as a painting, which cannot stand upon an empty surface; and therefore he set those two things before it and placed them beneath it, as if he were laying something solid beneath a painting. I shall now attend to knowledge in safety, if first through the benefit of hope I shall have received security of life. You therefore have sown for yourself unto justice, if from true knowledge of yourself you have been awakened to fear God, have humbled yourself, have poured forth tears, have lavished alms, and have given yourself over to other works of piety, if you have afflicted your body with fasts and vigils, if you have wearied your breast with beatings and heaven with cries. For this indeed is to sow unto justice. Good works are the seeds, good pursuits are the seeds; tears are the seeds. They went, he says, and wept, casting their seeds. But what? Shall they weep forever? Far from it! But they shall come with exultation, carrying their sheaves (Ps 125:6). Rightly with exultation, when they carry back the sheaves of glory. This, you say, will be at the resurrection on the last day, and the waiting is too long. Do not be broken in spirit, do not fail from faintheartedness of spirit; you have in the meantime from the first fruits of the Spirit what you may reap in exultation for the present. Sow, he says, for yourselves unto justice, reap the hope of life. He does not send you now to the last day, when the thing will already be in reality and not in hope; but he speaks of the present. Truly great is the joy and much and exceedingly great the exultation, when life shall have come.
3. But shall the hope of so great a joy be without joy? Rejoicing in hope, says the Apostle (Rom 12:12). And David said not that he would rejoice but that he had rejoiced, because he hoped he would go into the house of the Lord (Ps 121:1). He did not yet hold life, but he had assuredly reaped the hope of life; and he was experiencing in himself the truth of the Scripture that testifies that not only the reward but the very expectation of the just is joy. This is brought forth in the soul of the one who has sown for himself unto justice: the presumed pardon of sins, if indeed the pardon itself is attested by the efficacy of grace received for living more holily henceforth. Everyone among you who feels these things being worked within himself knows what the Spirit speaks, whose voice and working never disagree with one another. Therefore he understands the things that are said, because what he hears outwardly he feels inwardly. For he who speaks in us and works in you is one and the same Spirit, dividing to each as he wills (1 Cor 12:11): to some indeed to speak, to others to work what is good.
4. Whoever among you therefore, after those bitter and tearful beginnings of his conversion, rejoices that he has breathed again into hope and, lifted up on the wings of grace, has flown forth into a certain serenity of heavenly consolation; he indeed already reaps, receiving the temporal fruit of his tears; and he himself has seen God and has heard the voice of him who says: Give to her from the fruits of her hands (Prov 31:31). For how has he not seen God, who has tasted and seen that the Lord is sweet? How sweet and gentle you were felt to be, Lord Jesus, by him to whom not only were his sins forgiven by you, but also the gift of holiness was granted; and not that alone, but moreover the promise of eternal life was added to the heap of good things! Happy is he who has already reaped so much, having in the meantime indeed his fruit in sanctification, but the end eternal life! Rightly he who wept upon finding himself rejoiced upon seeing the Lord; at whose merciful regard he has already lifted up such great sheaves: remission, sanctification, hope of life. O how true is the word that is read in the Prophet: They that sow in tears shall reap in exultation (Ps 125:5). Where both kinds of knowledge are briefly comprehended: the knowledge of ourselves indeed sowing in tears; but the knowledge of God reaping in joy.
5. When therefore this twofold knowledge has gone before in us, knowledge that may perhaps have grown up afterward does not at all puff up, since it can bring nothing of earthly advantage or honor that is not indeed inferior to the hope conceived, and to the joy of hope already more deeply rooted in the soul. But hope does not put to shame, because the love of God has been poured forth in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:5). Therefore that hope does not put to shame, because this love pours in certainty. For through this love the Spirit himself bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God (Rom 8:16). What then could come to us from our knowledge, however great, that would not be less than this glory, by which we are numbered among the children of God? I have said too little: not even the world itself and its fullness can be regarded in comparison with it, even if the whole of it should fall to any one of us as a possession. Moreover, if ignorance of God holds us, how shall we hope in him whom we do not know? If ignorance of ourselves, how shall we be humble, thinking ourselves to be something when we are nothing? But we know that neither the proud nor those in despair have part or fellowship in the lot of the saints.
6. Consider therefore now with me how great the care and solicitude with which we ought to repel from ourselves both these ignorances, of which the one begets the beginning of every sin, the other the consummation; just as of the two kinds of knowledge on the other side, the one begets the beginning of wisdom, the other the perfection: the one the fear of the Lord, the other love. But this concerning the two kinds of knowledge was shown above. Now see concerning the ignorances. For just as the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Sir 1:16), so the beginning of all sin is pride (Sir 10:15); and just as the love of God claims for itself the perfection of wisdom, so despair claims for itself the full consummation of all wickedness. And just as from knowledge of yourself the fear of God comes into you, and from knowledge of God the love of God likewise; so on the contrary, from ignorance of yourself comes pride, and from ignorance of God comes despair. But ignorance of yourself begets pride in you in this way: when your deceived and deceiving thought falsely tells you that you are better than you are. This indeed is pride, this is the beginning of all sin, when you are greater in your own eyes than before God, than in truth. And therefore he who first sinned this great sin (I speak of the devil), of him it was said that he stood not in the truth, but is a liar from the beginning (Jn 8:44); because what he was in his own thought, he was not in truth. What if he had disagreed with truth in this, that he thought himself lesser and lower than the truth held him to be? His ignorance would without doubt excuse him, and he would not at all be reckoned proud, nor would his iniquity be found so much to be for hatred, as his humility perhaps for grace. For if we could clearly know in what state God holds each one of us, we should neither depart above nor below, acquiescing in the truth in all things. But now, because this counsel has placed darkness as its hiding place, and the word is hidden from us, so that no one knows whether he is worthy of love or of hatred (Eccl 9:1), more justly and more safely surely, according to the counsel of Truth itself, we choose for ourselves the last place, from which afterward we may be led up higher with honor, than we presume a higher place, from which we must soon withdraw with shame (Lk 14:10, 9).
7. There is therefore no danger, however much you humble yourself, however much you think yourself less than you are, that is, less than the truth holds you to be. But it is a great evil and a dreadful danger if you exalt yourself even slightly beyond the truth, if in your thought you set yourself before even one person whom the truth perhaps judges to be your equal, or even your superior. For just as if you were passing through a doorway whose lintel, to speak so as to be understood, were too low, it would not harm you however much you stooped; but it would harm you if you raised yourself even a finger's breadth more than the measure of the door allows, so that you would strike and be bruised with your head battered; so in the soul there is plainly no humiliation however great to be feared, but rather the slightest self-exaltation rashly presumed is to be dreaded and exceedingly feared. Wherefore do not compare yourself, O man, to those greater, nor to those lesser, nor to any, nor to one. For what do you know, O man, whether that one person whom you perhaps consider the most vile and most miserable of all, whose most wicked and singularly foul life you shudder at, and on that account you think him to be despised not only in comparison with yourself, who perhaps already trust that you live soberly, and justly, and piously, but also in comparison with all other sinners as the most sinful of all -- what do you know, I say, whether by the change of the right hand of the Most High he is to be better than both you and them in himself, and indeed in God already is? And for this reason he willed us to choose not a middling place, not even the second to last, not even a place among the last, but: sit down, he says, in the last place; so that you alone sit as the last of all, and do not, I will not say place yourself before anyone, but do not presume even to compare yourself to anyone. Behold how great an evil comes from ignorance of ourselves: namely, the sin of the devil and the beginning of all sin, pride. What ignorance of God also brings forth, we shall see another time. For now the shortness of the hour does not permit, since today we assembled late. Let it therefore suffice for now that each one has been admonished not to be ignorant of himself, not only by our sermon but also by the condescension of the Bridegroom of the Church himself, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is over all things God blessed forever. Amen.
Translated from the Latin by AI. Source: Migne, Patrologia Latina 183.