You will never have real mercy for the failings of another until you know and realize that you have the same failings in your soul.
-St. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility and Pride, trans. M. Ambrose Conway OCSO (Kalamazoo, MI: Cisctercian Publications, 1989), p. 41.
Dear bookish friend,
I just finished re-reading St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride and as always when reading Bernard, found it fascinating and keenly insightful into human nature. There’s nothing quite like reading a book written in the twelfth century that still somehow speaks to us and some of our greater temptations today, with a mingled dose of sharpness and good-natured humor.
This is one of Bernard’s first books, if not the first. Written in Latin (naturally), The Steps of Humility and Pride is a riff off of St. Benedict of Nursia’s famous twelve steps of humility in the monastic life. This is befitting, as Benedict was the father of Western monasticism, and Bernard (c. 1090-1153) was the father of the blossoming of twelfth-century monastic reform. He is an immensely complicated figure in medieval Christianity—his writings on love and humility are wonderful, with capacious insight into the workings of the human soul. He also was an avid promoter of the Crusades, one of the great and pernicious sins of the medieval church.
Bernard’s book traces pride from its inception to its full growth. To perhaps our great surprise, Bernard places the roots of pride innocently enough in curiosity. What does he mean by this curiosity? Bernard is thinking of St. Augustine of Hippo’s curiositas, the busybody interest in spectacle and the lives of other people that so drives and haunts Augustine’s friend and his obsession with the gladiatorial contests. I, of course, immediately thought of social media. Substitute “monk” for “social media users” and it’s almost hilariously apt:
The monk who observes others instead of attending to himself will begin before long to see some as his superiors and others as his inferiors; in some he will see things to envy, in others, things to despise. The eyes have wandered and the mind soon follows. It is no longer steadily fixed on its real concerns and is now carried up on the crest of the waves of pride, now down in the trough of envy. (66)
I have a Twitter, an Instagram (and, slightly differently, this Substack). I feel like I cannot delete them because of my job, which includes the need to promote my writings on social media outlets. I know exactly the bobbing-boat motion of my wandering eyes on other people in those spaces: the swelling upwards of superiority because I am more tasteful/well-read/intelligent/whatever, the boat-tip down a towering wave into sloughs of envy over someone else’s brilliant piece of writing or their dreamy trip to Italy.
Bernard’s tone can come off as a bit harsh in the written word, but he was really beloved by the monks under his care, to whom this book was originally addressed. He imagined himself as a nursing mother with them, his infant sons in the monastic way (see Caroline Walker Bynum’s brilliant work on that!). So I like to imagine these words on rejecting curiositas said not in a thundering tone of judgment, but in seriousness with a laugh hiding behind the words, an acknowledgment of our mutual silliness, our inclination to be busybodies, our foolish yet beloved hearts:
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