By Maria Sermersheim, Meditatione Ignis
Is anything entirely gratuitous? One might say that love is, or that love motivates totally gratuitous actions … but I think that absolute gratuity as a Christian ideal is actually a popular myth and not to be found in the New Testament. (Even in Luke 14:13-14, where Jesus commands us to invite the poor, crippled, lame and blind to our banquets, he says that we will be blessed because since they cannot repay us, God will repay us at the resurrection.) The short answer is that there is always some degree of self-interest, and though that is a point to be defended in a much longer piece, my point here is simply to defend self-interest against hasty equivocation with selfishness. Self-interest seems intimately tied to self-love, so here I examine the place of self-love in the Christian life.
Popular perceptions of love of self often fall into one of two extremes: it is either totally negative, as a sign of selfishness, and must therefore be effaced, or it is totally positive, especially as a reaction against our culture so affected by social media and plagued by comparison. Instead, I would like to follow Josef Pieper’s important insight that love of self is actually the “paradigm” of all love in a way. In his excellent long essay on love, Pieper addresses this difficulty directly, and he specifies that love can be defined as saying, “It is good that you exist,” and especially saying so with joy and without reservation. Love is also willing the good for that person who happily exists, and “the good” is meant in the deepest sense: not mere pleasure or lack of pain, but true justice, perfection in virtue, completion of who God made them to be, and joy. I can say that I love myself because I instinctively affirm that it is good that I exist, and I always desire and intend my completion, fulfillment and good in the deepest sense (even if my perception of what constitutes those goods goes haywire, even if I actually choose wrongly in my attempts to be happy … the fundamental desire for the good is innate, even if the particulars are misconstrued). Ultimately and instinctively, I do want what is best for myself, and that is not a selfish desire, which has the negative connotation of desiring to possess something to the exclusion or detriment of others; it is perfectly in keeping with the way the Lord created us and the goods he desires for us to obtain.
In this way, the instinctive and thoroughgoing desire for the good and the affirmation of a person’s existence, self-love is the model for all love. This insight is found in Christian theologians, ancient philosophers, and Scripture, where Jesus says that we should love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31 and parallels), citing Leviticus 19:18. I think Aquinas’s words in the Summa were particularly illuminating for me:
“We do not feel friendship for ourselves but something greater than friendship … Everyone is at one with himself; and this being one is more than becoming one. Just as unity is closer to the source than union, so the love with which a person loves himself is the origin and root of friendship. For the friendship that we have for others consists in this, that we behave toward them as we do toward ourselves” (II.II.25.4).
According to this positive picture of self-love, we can see the depth and power that it affords to friendship. To love our neighbor as ourselves, after considering what self-love truly means, somehow becomes more forceful, demanding and beautiful.