In chapter 22 of the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to St Matthew, we read, in the ESV translation, that a lawyer from among the Pharisees approached the Lord and:
… asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Now, this response assumes that we do or should love ourselves. But how is this to be understood? It cannot be that if I am a sinner I love myself as a sinner. Well, the first clue to its meaning must come from the context: we have just been told to love the Lord Our God and that that is the first commandment. It is a love with all our heart, soul, and mind. So it is not some sort of strong affection, which will change, like the loves we know. Neither can it be obsession or infatuation. It has to come from the whole person.
The second commandment then, is said to be like it. In Syriac, this is do.me leh. (Matthew 22:39). It seems to me that it means the commandment to love one’s neighbour as one’s self is made in the pattern of the great commandment, i.e. to love whole-heartedly, and that it must be related to the love we have for God. In other words, love of self and love of neighbour are based upon love of God; they cannot contradict it, only exemplify it.
So love of self cannot be the same as self-love. Now the word used for “self” here is nafesh. This is the same word used in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. St Luke tells us in 15:17 that “When he came to himself” he returned to his father and repented of his sin. The word used for “self” is the same. In Syriac, it reads: a.kad e.tō l.wōt naf.sheh, which can indeed be properly translated, “and when he came to himself,” although it can also have the sense of “in the presence of …”, so, “when he came to his own presence.”
But the point is that when he came to this self, he did not excuse himself, or say he was just fine and dandy as he was: it was quite the opposite—he saw his sin and was stricken with remorse. Rather than leading to pride and self-assertion, it led to self-abasement and humility.
On the other hand, the love we call “self-love” means, according to the 8th edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, “Egotism, selfishness, narcissism; the instinct by which one’s actions are directed to the promotion of one’s own welfare.” Only in a philosophical sense does it mean “the self-love that constitutes one’s proper relation with oneself.”
So I will speak about “love of self” as the love which Christ tells us we must have for each other, and I will retain “self-love” for the selfish love which takes us away from God.
There is another point here: in chapter 22 of St Matthew, love of self seems to serve as a sort of in-between, bridging, as it were, the love of God and of neighbour. This may be what is intended: that we place God first, and in the loving of Him with all our faculties and powers, we find ourselves, so to speak, and then, having some awareness of ourselves and the feeling which we now possess, we can and should love our neighbour the same way.
What does this love of self feel like? I would not like to speak dogmatically about this: not only because it may be different, at least in some respects, from person to person; but above all, because to truly know love of self must be a massive experience, and it would illuminate and transform us. It is, after all, a stream flowing from the love of God.
But what I believe we can do, and we should make every effort to do, is to refrain from hating ourselves. Now this can take many forms, and some people will say that “hate” is too strong a word. But I am not sure it is. We are all swayed from one direction to another by our likes and dislikes, our affections and our hatreds. As a general rule, it seems to me, that our likings and affections, where they are rightly ordered, or at least not wrongly ordered, are much less dangerous to us than our hatreds and our dislikes. And I do not believe anyone is free of them. They may think they are, but I doubt any human who passes childhood can be free of them.
Hatred and resentment are so widely considered good and worthy characteristics that it would be a rare soul indeed who escapes them. But I would believe, because we all do it, that we say “I am justified in this criticism, and feeling the criticism.” Or else we say, “This is righteous indignation.” Or “This anger is justified because the other person provoked me too far.” I do not believe that can be right. Even if I see that someone else has done something wrong, I can be impartial.
I am of the opinion that this sort of impartially seeing myself without giving in to either like or dislike, affection or hatred, may well be the ground spring of love of self.
May we pray to the Lord to receive true love of self, even if I spend what seems a long time in the wilderness of seeing myself, impartially and without either hatred or affection, just asking for God’s own love to enter my soul.
Amen.