Context

This blog post has been slightly adapted from an essay I submitted on the 19th January 2024 for my Spiritual Theology module at London School of Theology. I wrote it during my second year of my Bachelor degree in Theology and Creative Musicianship. I corrected few mistakes, but I did not want to modify the essay too much so we can see the improvement over the years. So while you are reading this essay, please be merciful. This being said, let’s jump into it!

Introduction

Two schools of thought issued different views on self-love. One is highly sceptical about the self-concern because to be a Christian is to deny oneself and love God and neighbours only. In this view, self-love is easily assimilated with selfishness and unhealthy pride, interpreted as disobedience to God’s will.¹ The other sees self-love as something positive and only reached when God is fully loved.² I believe that self-love is not to be thrown away because there is a Godly way to love ourselves. Nonetheless, the gift of self-love can still be derived from its original essence and be corrupted by our humanness which leads us to various wrong behaviours (excessive pride, selfishness, narcissism, etc.). This essay aims to find the demarcation between the sanctified and the unsanctified way to love oneself and to define such ways within the 21st Century. To achieve this, we will first describe what constitutes the sanctified way to self-love. Secondly, we will study the distortion of unsanctified self-love. Thereafter, we will end with a personal note about my personal formation.

Sanctified Self-Love

In his answer to the Pharisees, Jesus provides the two following commandments: ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22:37-39). Those two commandments are to be taken with the same level of importance.³ Although we can agree with Daniel Harrington that this text does not emphasise the need for self-esteem or that we must love ourselves before others,⁴ I think, like Richard Thomas France, that the text assumes a realistic normality of the love for self that precedes the interest for others.⁵ Therefore, the two commandments set the basics of the tripoint love circle: we are to love God, our neighbours, and ourselves on the same standard: ‘with all that one is and has’. ⁶

Self-love does not exist on its own. As Stephen Post argues, it is the virtue of reciprocity that allows love to reach its ‘natural flow or dynamic’. Post adds that without any love for God, true self-love and happiness would not exist because God alone is the natural end of the self.⁷ Davidson observes that such reciprocal love is expressed in the person of the Trinity, within a divine community. Moreover, God’s love for his creation redirects all his love towards himself and pleasure in himself.⁸ Hence, God is setting a model for self-love and love for our Creator in whom all the love is to be found.⁹ One of the core components of self-love is the acknowledgement that ‘the lover needs to be loved as well as to love’.¹⁰ This applies to every peak of the triangle: oneself, the other, and God.

Even though we are created and loved by the Most High, we are to keep humility as a strong component of a sanctified self-love. Humility is a middle ground between excessive pride and self-abasement. As defined by David Augsburger, humility provides a balanced way of perceiving one’s place in society. It never overestimates or underestimates one’s value.¹¹ Therefore humility requires us to be free from self-concern and its ‘pride-shame axis’ because without humility, we always tend towards one or the other side of this axis.¹² For this exact reason, humility requires some knowledge of God, of our relation to Him, and self-knowledge.¹³ Shortly said, we must understand how God sees us to see ourselves and the others with the most unbiased perspective possible.

Although we must keep a humble view of ourselves, we also need a more positive one. Indeed, we all need to see ourselves with a ‘sense of self-worth, and whose life is meaningful and valuable’ simply as a crucial aspect of our psychological health.¹⁴ Just as humility can be virtuous, so can pride. Indeed, it can be seen as a virtue defined as ‘the disposition to practice proper and demanding moral standards.’¹⁵ John Lippitt postulates that the virtue of pride is not about what has been done and what we can boast about, but rather is future oriented. Thus the virtue of pride encourages moral actions and helps to believe in one’s goodness in attaining that wished moral character. It nourishes healthy self-esteem.¹⁶ Accordingly, virtuous pride seeks to give us a rightly esteemed view of ourselves with positive thinking for the future which again is gained through self-knowledge.¹⁷

Another major aspect of sanctified self-love is self-denial. Indeed, we are taught about self-denial very clearly in Matthew 16:24 when Jesus asks his disciples to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow him. In this context ‘deny’ means to get rid of one’s interest and the willingness to give one’s own life.¹⁸ It also implies a notion of suffering because this verse tends to link Jesus’s sufferings to those of the disciples.¹⁹ Although suffering cannot be the consequence of pure godly love, suffering is the consequence of the presence of sin in a fallen world. Therefore, sanctified self-love is attained through the renunciation of our sinful selves, and through a ‘willingness to endure any amount of ill for the neighbour’s sake’.²⁰ Self-love means self-denial which implies suffering. These three aspects are intrinsically connected.

However, suffering is not the end. Indeed, Jesus promises in John 10:10 an abundant life, standing for eternal life we shall perceive today and receive in the age to come.²¹ The promise of the fullness of life holds a threefold meaning. The first one is the fruit of sanctified self-love.²² The second is the reward for the suffering engendered by self-denial and the cost of love.²³ The final one is that the promise itself is one of God’s means to counteract the ‘thief’ (John 10:10) who only comes to harm and kill his sheep.²⁴

Unsactified Self-Love

Generally, the diversion of self-love from its primary status is caused by a shift in the focal point: instead of focusing on God’s love and will, the focus is put on ourselves and our interests.²⁵ As Sondra Wheeler says, everything is brought back to individuality because the self becomes the centre of ‘experience, meaning, and values’.²⁶ The secularisation of our society changed our view on the nature of humankind. Indeed, an assumption has been made that people are genuinely good. Therefore self-realization is obviously a good thing.²⁷ The sanctified view differs from this because it postulates that our humanity has been broken since the Fall. Thus, we need the love and grace of God to pursue his will whereas self-realization (as put by Verhaeghe) is preoccupied with the cultivation of self as best as one can and with the pursuit of one’s happiness without God.²⁸

This constant obsession with oneself, one’s pleasure and happiness can easily drip into a pathology known as narcissism. Hannelie Wood defines narcissism as a ‘distorted view of the self’ leading to ‘narcissism as pathology of self-love with dire consequences for relationship with the self, God, and other human beings.’ She adds that the biggest issue with narcissists is that their love is not pointing to themselves but to an impression of them created by them. They are incapable of truly loving themselves.²⁹

Social media are developing narcissism by forcing us to create an online persona on their platform that is no less than a fantasy version of ourselves.³⁰ Then, we are to show appreciation or not to some of our ‘friends’, but we are also searching for recognition, love, and interest in our persona. We want it to become big with the most followers or friends possible because we all seek those moments of inclusion and immersion, but the mistake is to think that technological innovation will bring them to us and rid us of loneliness.³¹ Paul Verhaeghe reminds us that, just as with any other innovation, information technology can magnify human obsessions.³² Indeed, the amplified obsession of validation on social media leads to negligence of one’s peculiarity. This ends in exclusion as Kester Brewin says in his chapter on the liquid self: ‘Refusal to acknowledge our individualities in a blind attempt to include everyone is simply another route to exclusion.’³³ As opposed to that, sanctified self-love acknowledges our individuality and includes everyone in a communal love shared between neighbours and centred on God.³⁴

Personal Spiritual Formation

I already observed a biased concept of love and egocentrism while I was on social media, and I think this is characteristic of our century. This essay helped me to understand how and why social media created such pressure on the youth to become a member of their platform while instrumentalising them to feel that need for love and inclusion. Indeed, we are pushed forward to share and interact with others to feel included, however, we do not feel more loved or even more connected to our friends. That is precisely why I quit every social media, and it made a whole difference in my personal life. I feel like I am searching for love at the right place now: in my relationship with God and with my closest friends. I am living a true friendship-based relationship in which we can each take and give the love we all need. This implies self-denial and suffering sometimes; however, such a thing is not possible through our current means of socialising. It is not a question of virtuality, but rather a question of authenticity. Social media are precisely made to give an idealised view of ourselves which is therefore not representative of our reality. How are we supposed then to apply the proverb ‘Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another’ (Proverbs 27:17) if neither I nor my social media friends are true? The same applies to loving one another. How are we supposed to love an almost accurate version of one another? I could not bear that superficiality and this individualism at its paroxysm under the cover of a social platform deforming the nature of human relationships.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we argued that self-love was created by God and used for his glory alone. Therefore we first defined what are the components of a sanctified way to love oneself. First, we argued that self-love does not imply the self only, but it includes God and our neighbours with whom we experience a bidirectional love relationship (we all give and receive love to and from the other). Moreover, we need to nourish healthy self-esteem by looking at ourselves through divine humility and pride. Then, we defended that self-love leads to self-denial which generally brings suffering, but our hope resides in the promise of fullness of life (John 10:10) in which God gives a higher perspective of eternal life. After that, we looked at the unsanctified self-love and what it looks like. Unsanctified self-love in the 21st century tends to switch the focal point from God to self-centeredness instead. Everything is brought back to the individualism and hedonism. We also saw the ravage of narcissism encouraged by our culture of idealized self, present on social media. More and more virtual but not yet virtuous, our society confuses love with fame, followers with friends, and God with self.

Bibliography

• Augsburger, David. Dissident Discipleship. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006.
• Brewin, Kester. Other : loving self, God and neighbour in a world of fractures. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010.
• Davidson, Bruce W. “The Four Faces of Self-Love in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards.” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2008: 87-100.
• France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.
• Harrington, Daniel. The Gospel of Matthew. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.
• Kellenberger, James. Dying to Self and Detachment. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
• Lippitt, John. “True self-love and true self-sacrifice.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion vol. 66, no. 3 (2009): 125-138.
• Post, Stephen. “Communion and True Self-Love.” Journal of Religious Ethics 16 no 2 (1988): 345-362.
• Thompson, Marianne Meye. John a commentary. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015.
• Verhaeghe, Paul. What About Me? Brunswick: Scribe Publications, 2014.
• Wheeler, Sondra. What we were made for. San Francisco: Wiley, 2007.
• Wood, Hannelie. “A Christian Understanding of the significance of love of oneself in loving God and neighbour: towards an integrated self-love reading.” HTS Theological Studies 72 no 3 (2016): 1-10.

Notes