4 December, Antonio, Cardinal Bacci: Meditations For Each Day

True Love of Self

1. There is a passage in the Gospel which might lead us to believe that we are forbidden to love ourselves. “Amen, amen, I say to you,” Jesus declares, “unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. He who loves his life, loses it, and he who hates his life in this world, keeps it unto life everlasting. (John 12:24-25)

These words command us to hate ourselves in this world if we wish to attain salvation in the next life. In what sense, however, does Christ mean that we are to hate ourselves? He certainly means that we should mortify our lower inclinations, deny our selfish ambitions, die to the world, and be prepared to lose life itself rather than offend God in any way. This is the kind of hate to which He urges us, a hatred of any perversion of our nature or of our faculties. If we prefer our own will to that of our Creator or love Him less than we love ourselves or, worse still, if we forget and ignore Him in favour of passing pleasures, then we invert the order of spiritual and moral values established by God and create a disorder which could lead us into sin.

Instead, we should love God above all things and subjugate our thoughts, desires, and affections to Him. We should be prepared to forget ourselves for His sake and even to sacrifice life itself for His honour and glory. Then our self-hatred will become a sublime love which will bring us victory in our battle against our sensual inclinations. It will give us peace and resignation in suffering, and at the hour of death will give us that consolation and joy which the martyrs experienced when they shed their blood for the sake of Jesus Christ.

2. St. Thomas writes that man genuinely loves himself when he directs all his activities towards God. (S. Th., I-II, q. 100, a. 5 ad. 1) True self-love, then, consists in dedicating all our thoughts and actions to God, Who is our highest and only true good.

Anything which does not lead us to God is vain and useless. Anything which keeps us away from God separates us from our true good and therefore leads us towards everlasting spiritual ruin. We should love ourselves, then, by loving ourselves in God and for God. If we fail to do this, we hate rather than love ourselves, because we make folly, sin, and eternal damnation the objects of our lives. Christianity, we may now conclude, cannot be said to condemn self-love. It does not condemn it, but simply puts it right.

The Church has always been opposed to any form of Quietism or Puritanism which would advocate the pure and disinterested love of God to the extent of excluding any thought of our own happiness as the reward of our actions. As if it would be possible to love God when one had lost Him! On the contrary, if we love God in Himself and above all things, we love ourselves also, because only in loving God can we achieve our own perfect happiness. The pure love of God does not exclude self-love, but elevates and completes it.

3. Any other kind of self-love is not true love, but is a distorted affection which diverts us from the pursuit of our final end. Let us examine ourselves on this point. What is the object of our thoughts, affections, and actions? Is it the glory of God and the triumph of His kingdom? If so, we can claim to love ourselves as we ought. Otherwise, our self-love is distorted and sinful.