Virtuous Self-Love
To be enslaved to the passions and pleasures brings a man into disgrace and great ridicule.
... the philosopher must above all be a free man, and not a slave of the passions who can be bought or sold. A man of upright life can be the slave of others and yet suffer no harm; but to be enslaved to the passions and pleasures brings a man into disgrace and great ridicule.
St. Neilos the Ascetic, “Ascetic Discourse,” Philokalia, vol I, p. 244.
Continuing our journey through the Philokalia, we won’t find an explicit discussion of what I would term “virtuous self-love.” Limiting ourselves as we have volume I, we find no positive discussion of philautía or self-love.
Theologically this is odd; we cannot talk about sinful self-love without understanding the virtuous form from which it is a departure. Sin having no real, ontological existence, can only be known by the absent good. Let me put this slightly differently.
Love for God and neighbor does not preclude the love of self. Love of God, others, and self are like three legs on a stool.
From what we’ve seen so far, we know that sinful self-love is a love of self that falls short of the mark of the love of self to which we are called in the New Testament:
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31)
And, in another place,
For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13:9)
Finally, and maybe most helpfully,
For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. (Ephesians 5:29)
Love for God and neighbor does not preclude the love of self. Love of God, others, and self are like three legs on a stool. If I remove one or emphasize one at the expense of the others my love becomes disordered. Love worthy of the name embraces three, distinct subjects each leading back to the other two in a manner reminiscent of the relationship of the Three Persons in the Holy Trinity.
Yes, the monastic literature condemns self-love. This usage reflects the practical demands of the monastic life. It is not, nor should we take it to be, a complete treatment of love. To say the monks left something unsaid is not to criticize them or minimize their importance in the life of the Church. Rather it reflects our appreciation of the demands of their vocation and to sketch out the limits within which the example of their lives are more broadly applicable.
This tri-parte view of love is built upon obedience to the commandments. We keep the commandments—and so love God (see, John 14:15)—because we love ourselves and our neighbors. For the Christian, it is impossible to divorce the love of God, neighbor, and self.
While tragic, the opposition of love of others and love of self does simplify life. At least initially.
Pushing this a bit further allows us to see that the rupture of love’s tri-parte character leads as well to a disunity between self-interest and altruism. While tragic, the opposition of love of others and love of self does simplify life. At least initially.
Soon though we find ourselves in a downward cascade in which our God or our neighbor becomes the enemy. The only way to love the other is at the expense of the self. Likewise, love of self comes at a cost to others.
As for sacrificial love, while this might hold a romantic attraction, it too is eventually seen as coming at the cost of self-annihilation. And self-love? This too requires violence though not self-directed. Instead, it requires that I murder my neighbor and, ultimately God. “Jesus answered them, “‘Many good works I have shown you from My Father. For which of those works do you stone Me?’” (John 10.32, NKJV)
When our love is rightly ordered? Then self-interest and altruism, the love of neighbor, and self, converge. And in coming together, they ascend to God Who is both their source and object.
Returning to our early examination of the psychology of sinful self-love, I would suggest that self-interest and altruism balance each other. One without the other becomes mere selfishness. Depending on the culture, we might see a preference for toxic self-interest or an equally toxic form of altruism. But in either case, the preference is short-lived since both devolve into violence.
So, what about virtuous self-love? To find out, let’s turn to St. Neilos the Ascetic in his treatise on the ascetical life.
Virtuous self-love is not simply the absence of pride or the sinful tendencies of the passions. Rather it “is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality” (p. 245) or more simply chastity.
The saint is keenly aware of how easily we adopt the appearance of virtue while betraying the substance. His observation here follows the Scriptures
But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was (2 Timothy 3:1-9)
He appeals explicitly to the example of the ancient Greeks among whom were those who “were philosophers in name alone but lacked true philosophy.” Like St. Paul’s warning to St. Timothy, the saint criticizes those who value appearance over substance in those who “displayed their philosophic calling by their cloak, beard and staff” at the same time that they “indulged the body and kept their desires as mistresses.” These so-called philosophers are “slaves of gluttony and lust .... subject to anger, ... excited by glory, ... gulp[ing] down rich food like dogs.”
Worst of all
They did not realize that the philosopher must above all be a free man, and not a slave of the passions who can be bought or sold. A man of upright life can be the slave of others and yet suffer no harm; but to be enslaved to the passions and pleasures brings a man into disgrace and great ridicule. (p. 244)
Pausing here to reflect on the saint’s words, I realize that he uses the negative space of sinful self-love to highlight its virtuous counterpart.
Virtuous self-love is not simply the absence of pride or the sinful tendencies of the passions. Rather it “is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality” (p. 245) or more simply chastity.1
TEspecially in the West, we live in a time of unprecedented wealth and liberty. For us, idleness and bodily self-indulgence are within the grasp of all, or at least almost all, of us.
Tempting though it is to think otherwise, our current situation is not unique. Ours is not the first—or sadly, likely the last—age in which (as St. Nelios says) human beings “have debased the truth into play-acting. ... [F]or nothing is more compelling and inventive than the demands of the body, especially when one is idle” (p. 248).
Especially in the West, we live in a time of unprecedented wealth and liberty. For us, idleness and bodily self-indulgence are within the grasp of all, or at least almost all, of us.
This is not to suggest, I want to emphasize, that we should long for a return to material poverty and political oppression. That I misuse the blessings of liberty requires I repent not that I try and save myself by reducing you to poverty or robbing them of liberty.
But a cure exists!
So while there are differences between our age and late antiquity, men and women of both ages face the same spiritual challenges. This makes the saint’s words as applicable today as during his time.
It is difficult to treat those who suffer from chronic diseases. For how can you explain the value of health to people who have never enjoyed it, but have been sickly from birth?
But a cure exists!
It requires that we understand that just as there is in sinful self-love, there is a social dimension to virtuous self-love:
...by not following our own unconsidered impulses, we help many of our simpler brethren to be more careful and set them an example by our attitude to worldly concerns.
Here we find the door to our recovery.
Virtuous self-love demands that we not “share in the folly of those who are disloyal to their vocation.” In context, this means monastic life. But we can also extend this to other states of life as well. Whatever our vocation, it is built on the inherently collaborative character of human life. We grow in our likeness to God by fostering the flourishing of others.
Our call to a collaborative life is aptly described as love. Working together for the common good is only possible if we embrace our neighbor and work for her benefit and my own. Created as we both are in the image of God, means that serving her best interest is an essential part of what it means for me to be faithful to the demands of my vocation as a Christian.
Finally, this broader understanding of self-love including serving my neighbor’s good reveals it as the fount of obedience to God. Far from being a matter of self-indulgence (“me time”) or negative freedom (“Don’t tread on me!”), virtuous self-love is a rich, dynamic, and multifaceted reality that ties together the classical sacramental and ascetical dimensions of the Christian life as well as (I would suggest) our contemporary, psychological concerns “of personal well-being, health, and psychic security” that Lasch dismisses as merely “illusory.”2
The heart’s attraction and capture by illusion is nothing new. What Lasch dismisses as an illusion, I think, is better understood as an overemphasis. Good as they are in themselves, “personal well-being, health, and psychic security,” they point beyond themselves to God.
Remember, Lord, those who bear fruit and do good works in Your holy churches, and those who remember the poor. Reward them with Your rich and heavenly gifts. Grant them in return for earthly things, heavenly gifts; for temporal, eternal; for corruptible, incorruptible (Liturgy of St. Basil).
What we must guard against is prelest, or the delusion that causes me to confuse the contingent and transitory with the necessary and eternal. “Nothing created by God is evil,” St. Maximos the Confessor writes. “It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not esteem but self-esteem. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.”
What then is self-love rightly understood and lived?
Simply put, it is a life characterized by both inner and outer freedom, moral integrity, and balance. We see such a life in the Mother of God and the saints but also in many of the people we meet in our everyday lives.
Virtuous self-love does not preclude struggling with my passions. In the tradition of the Church, these struggles are an essential part of loving myself as Christ loves the Church.
To say a bit more, virtuous self-love is the fruit and source of a life of joyful, vocational fidelity and obedience to God. Such a way of life is characterized by a certain flexibility and creativity as one encounters obstacles and setbacks but also new challenges and opportunities in life.
Above all, virtuous self-love means, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes, to not “identify with any complete system … or … ideology.” Much less, are we to make the Gospel a complete system, ideology, or (as has become fashionable) a worldview.
All of these things are different than seeking to live we might “wholistically” since to live in this way requires me to accept willingly and with gratitude that in my life nothing is ever “finished, complete” and to live in a manner that is always “open to another dimension” as Schememann writes.
The holism, dare I say catholic, mode of living is contrary to a life that “is heavy and self-destructive.” Rather than a life “that proceed[s] with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,” striving to remove any “possible contradictions” an “openness must always remain; it is faith, in its God is found, who is not a ‘syntheses but life and fullness.”3
Erik Varden, Chastity (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023).
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979; reprint, New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).
Alexander Schmemann, The Journals of Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983 (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.) The whole quote is:
I realized how difficult it is for me ever to be wholly in one camp. In all that I love and consider mine—the Church, religion, the world where I grew up and to which I belong, I often see deficiencies and lack of truth. In all that I do not like— radical ideas and convictions—I see what is right, even if relatively right. Within religion I feel stifled, and I feel myself a radical “challenger.” But among challengers I feel myself conservative and traditionalist. I cannot identify with any complete system with an integral world or an ideology. It seems to me that anything finished, complete and not open to another dimension is heavy and self- destructive. I see the error of any dialectics that proceed with thesis, antithesis and synthesis, removing possible contradictions. I think that openness must always remain; it is faith, in it God is found, who is not a “synthesis,” but life and fullness (46)