UNDECIMUS GRADUS: DE LIBERTATE PECCANDI
The Descent into False Freedom
The monk who leaves the monastery enters a deceptive liberty that plunges him into contempt of God and the unchecked fulfillment of his own desires.
After the tenth step — the one called rebellion — the monk who has been expelled or has left the monastery is immediately taken in by the eleventh. And then he enters ways that seem good to people, the end of which — unless perhaps God has fenced them off for himself — will plunge him into the depths of hell, that is, into contempt of God.✦1 Indeed, when the impious one has sunk into the depths of evil, he despises.2 Now the eleventh step can be called the freedom of sinning, through which the monk — when he no longer sees a master to fear or brothers to respect — delights all the more securely in fulfilling his own desires, the more freely he does so; desires from which he was held back in the monastery as much by shame as by fear.3
The Fading Whisper of Conscience
Even stripped of human accountability, the fallen monk retains a residual fear of God, yet reason's faint murmur is not enough to halt his gradual descent into vice.
But even if he no longer fears either the brothers or the abbot, he has not yet entirely lost the fear of God. Reason, still murmuring faintly, sets this before the will, and without any hesitation he carries out each forbidden thing from the start; but, like someone testing a ford, he enters the whirlpool of vices step by step, not at a run.45
Read the original Latin
Post decimus itaque gradum, qui rebellio dictus est, expulsus vel egressus de monasterio statim excipitur ab undecimo. Et tunc ingreditur vias, quae videntur hominibus bonae, quarum finis -nisi forte Deus eas sibi saepierit- demerget eum in profundum inferni, id est in contemptum Dei. Impius, siquidem, cum venerit in profundum malorum, contemnit. Potest autem undecimus gradus appellari libertas peccandi, per quam monachus, cum iam nec magistrum videt quem timeat, nec fratres quos revereatur, tanto securius quanto liberius sua desideria implere delectatur, a quibus in monasterio tam pudore quam timore prohibebatur.
Sed etsi iam vel fratres vel abbatem non timet, nondum tamen Dei penitus formidine caret. Hanc ratio, tenuiter adhuc submurmurans, voluntati proponit, nec sine aliqua dubitatione quaeque primum illicita perfecit; sed, sicut is qui vadum tentat, pedetentim, non cursim, vitiorum gurgitem intrat.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Prov.14.12 — There is a way that is straight before a person, but its end is the ways of death.
Notes
- 1 ↩The rare verb saepierit ('has fenced off / hedged in') is rendered as 'has fenced them off for himself,' preserving the image of God blocking or enclosing the path. The exact theological nuance — whether God actively blocks the path or permits the person to walk into a divinely set boundary — is ambiguous in the Latin.
- 2 ↩The verb contemnit is rendered 'he despises' — the object is left implicit in the Latin, suggesting a general attitude of contempt (for God, for others, for correction). The aphoristic brevity is preserved.
- 3 ↩libertas peccandi rendered as 'freedom of sinning' — the oxymoronic quality (freedom that is really bondage) is intentional in the source and preserved here.
- 4 ↩submurmurans: a rare/present-participial form rendered 'murmuring faintly' to capture the quiet, insistent quality of rationalization.
- 5 ↩ratio here carries a negative sense — self-justifying reason set against obedience — not the neutral faculty of reason.
De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae (On the Steps of Humility and Pride) companion
Humility is climbed one day at a time
Take the next step each morning with a free daily devotional in Chosen Portion.
Bernard frames humility as a ladder climbed by small repeated acts; Chosen Portion turns that into practice with one daily devotional step at a time.
- A daily 10-minute portion focused on one virtue at a time
- Re-take the 12-step self-check monthly and see real movement
- Historic texts like Bernard's, one readable portion per day