A Dialogue on Self-Love

asking my favourite theologian some tricky questions

One of the best ways I’ve ever found to think through a concept which is a bit beyond me, is to find someone much wiser and pester them with my musings and questions.

So that’s why I’ve cajoled theologian Ross Byrd into this written dialogue. I was thinking through the popular modern conception of ‘self-love’ and why something about it feels off, and I knew that Ross was the perfect person to help me untangle the knot.

What follows is the back-and-forth between two ordinary men trying to get a handle on something extraordinary — true love. So while we ask for your forgiveness for any oversights, we do hope you find at least some of this to be edifying.

AAK:
Hi Ross. If it’s okay with you, I want to start with something I scribbled in my notebook the other day:

“Self-love is not the answer. In fact, it’s logically impossible.”

Basically, when I properly consider the nature of love, it doesn’t seem like it can exist without two separate persons. So to speak of self-love is to speak of an ontological impossibility. A singular being cannot love itself, for the nature of love is the giving of something to another, a loss to the giver for the benefit of the receiver. Love cannot be self-contained.

But then I second-guessed myself, because the narrative of ‘self-love’ and ‘working on yourself’ and ‘don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm’ is so pervasive in our culture today, that it seems nearly heretical to claim that we actually can’t love ourselves. That it’s no form of love at all.

What are your thoughts on that?

RB:
I like this. I think you’re onto something deep here, so, naturally, I’m going to throw some wrenches at it, with the hope that we can get some place even deeper together. I agree with your premise that “love cannot be self-contained.” In fact, I would go further and say that the current ‘self-care’ narrative which dominates a great deal of our culture, far from proving you wrong, is probably proving you right, despite itself. Now for the wrenches.

I don’t think self-love is impossible, for two reasons.

First, Jesus seems to assume that it is not only possible but good when he says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Lewis has a bit on this, I think in Mere Christianity, where he says something like, “If you wonder how to love your neighbor, don’t over-spiritualize. Just do exactly what Jesus says. Think how you naturally love yourself: every day, even when you aren’t particularly fond of yourself, you feed yourself, care for yourself, forgive yourself for any number of wrongs. Thus, Jesus says, you should do the same for your neighbor.” I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the gist. And I think this is a helpful conception of self-love — not as a goal in itself, mind you, but as a naturally occurring phenomenon which serves as the analogue for our true calling: to love God and neighbor. And this leads me to my second reason:

The very fact that self-love is at least real enough to serve as an analogy for neighbor-love means that there is something very interesting and mysterious about the self. Which is to say: the self is not exactly one. This is why you can want something and want the opposite of that something at the same time. You contain multitudes, which can be both beautiful and problematic. Love is what integrates our multitudes into oneness, and from oneness bears the fruit of new life.

But enough metaphysics. What do you make of that? And what do you think Jesus means when he tells us to love our neighbor as ourself?

AAK:
Ah, I love a good wrench, and admittedly, this one threw me for a loop! What am I to make of Jesus’ second greatest commandment (itself a reference to Leviticus) which appears to assume self-love as a given? Does this implicitly mean that self-love is central to the good life? Am I nothing more than a curmudgeon brandishing my cane at pervasive therapy culture?

I don’t think so. I’ve always read the commandment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ in the spirit of recognising that you are not better or more worthy of love than your neighbour, that there is an implicit equality between all human beings, that on some level your neighbour IS you, we are one and the same. So while Christ (wisely) assumes we all care for ourselves more than anyone else, I don’t think he’s saying ‘love yourself first and then you will be able to love others’. More that he is using our base self-obsession as an example for how obsessed we should be with the welfare of our fellow men and women, how much we should be willing to give as an expression of our love — for love is a verb, not a noun.

Augustine developed a doctrine of self-love, didn’t he? And if I’m remembering correctly, he says the ‘right-ordered’ love of self can only happen when we are first totally devoted to God. And this is where Augustine gets quite close to the Zen teachers, in my opinion, because he says something along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing) ‘you can only truly experience loving yourself when you lose all sense of self and fall totally in love with God’. Which seems kind of nonsensical, but if you accept it, then it essentially gives you this model: don’t try to shape yourself from the inside out, but from the outside in.

Am I making sense? And if I’m onto something here, how does this fit into your concept of the human self not being singular but in some ways containing multitudes? And where does self-loathing come into the mix?

RB:
“Don’t try to shape yourself from the inside out, but from the outside in.” Brilliant. Yes, you are making total sense. I said what I said about self-love only to provide a foundation for conceiving of the self as good at all, possibly even for conceiving a kind of ‘righteous self-interest’. (I know, I know, but bear with me for a moment. Then I’ll admit that you’ve been right the whole time!)

Jesus’ teaching is full of promised rewards, which at first glance, is hard to square with an ethic of self-less love. Of course his disciples are warned: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal” (Mt. 6:19). But why? What is the logic behind this teaching? Should we not seek treasures at all? Or rather, should we seek them, but only for the sake of others and never for ourselves? No and no. Jesus’s answer is weirder: “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt. 6:20-21). In other words, the desire for the treasure was never bad; only misplaced. As usual, Lewis puts it best:

“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak.”¹

In my view, we were made for nothing less than pure, unadulterated Joy. Which is to say, we were made for God. God is Joy; God is the Treasure. The problem is not that we desire such a good for ourselves—“Ask, seek, knock!”—but rather that we insist on seeking it where it cannot be found.

But how does this work? I think you were right on with your zen-like paradox. As Jesus himself puts it, “Whoever would save his life must lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt. 16:23). So, should we want to save our life? Yes. But how should we do it? By giving it up. When you love God and others, you love yourself. You finally become yourself. On the other hand, if you seek first to care for yourself, there won’t even be a ‘you’ there to care for — only a fiction, a facade, a dream that won’t survive the light of day.

The path of self-denial, in the Christian context, is Life by means of the blessed door of death. Self-sacrificial love recreates and reintegrates the disparate and disintegrated parts of the self by restoring the self to its proper function: love of God and neighbor. And this is where your “ontological impossibility” rings so true: Love was never a one-way beam; it was always a circulatory system. Love exists in the betweenness, in the relationship to the other. It literally receives by giving, just as in CPR the rescuer pumps blood out of the heart in order for blood to come in. This is how we live. And, of course, this gets at your ‘outside in-ness.’'

By contrast, the modern path of self-care and self-obsession is Death by means of grasping to that ‘life’ which was never alive to begin with. Picture a heart that only pumps blood toward itself; it would drown itself.

Anyway, if the picture we’re painting is correct — if love is indeed a circulatory system — it not only calls into question the modern secular self-care movement, but also the way many modern Christians understand ‘the gospel’, that is, as a laser beam of one-way love from God to us, where ‘knowing you are loved by God’ is the essence of salvation. This, to me, just as much fits the analogy of a heart that only pumps one way. There’s a reason the Greatest Commandment isn’t, ‘Know you are loved’. Our hearts, like God’s own heart, are not cisterns, but fountains (Jer. 2:13). As the fairy godmother in George MacDonald’s Phantastes sings:

Better to sit at the waters’ birth,

Than a sea of waves to win;

To live in the love that floweth forth,

Than the love that cometh in.

Be thy heart a well of love, my child,

Flowing, and free, and sure;

For a cistern of love, though undefiled,

Keeps not the spirit pure.

AAK:
Fascinating. I love that picture of the circulatory system, and the difference between being a spring of living water instead of gathering up the waves on the shore. It’s the ‘verb vs noun’ paradigm again: we need to be actively involved in the work of love, not seeking the possession of some abstract object we call ‘love’.

Thinking about self-loathing and self-love, I want to take another stab at the modern refrain we all take for granted: “I need to love myself before I can love anyone else.” This seems to be a disguised way of saying, ‘I need to stop hating myself so I can stop hating others’. My guess is that we are all afflicted with disgust at ourselves and disgust at others; which are frightening feelings that we don’t really know how to deal with.

The ugly truth is that I detest the weaknesses of others, as much as I detest my own weakness. But instead of finding a way to change these horrible feelings of loathing, the current wisdom tells us that the problem must lie in our self-hatred, and so we shrink back from true engagement with others in the mistaken belief we can tinker with our hearts until we no longer have these feelings. And thus we end up with our current state. We no longer have great enemies or great loves. We just have our sad, confused, lonely selves.

I do think the answer instead lies in the zen-like answer I posited above, i.e. don’t try to shape yourself from the inside out, but from the outside in. And I have a real-life example of this:

Once, at a church I attended for some time, there was a man who I found instinctively repulsive. He was annoying and cringeworthy: wearing strange clothes, getting too close when he talked to people, and he had a bad sense of humour while also being a poor conversationalist. My instinct was to avoid him while judging him in my own head.

But when I realised that I was only seeing what was unloveable about him, and when I was honest that my avoidance of him was largely due to my desire to avoid my own negative traits (which can be eerily similar to this man’s), then I was able to see everything that was loveable about him: his lack of self-importance and embarrassment, his desire to reach out and be connected, his comfort in his own skin. So I began to love him, approaching him for conversation before and after church, inviting him and his wife for meals, getting to know his story and his family.

And the strangest part was, in finding a way to love this man, I realised there was just as much to love about him as there is about me. His loveableness was infectious, in that I was less ashamed of my own negative traits, and less focused on them. I was just focused on giving. It reminds me of Tim Keller’s aphorism: “If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.” And it seems the byproduct of doing this, we find that we are lovely as well.

So what do you think, Ross? Am I onto something here? Is this the answer to our self-obsessed age?

RB:
You are, indeed, onto something. The antidote to our self-obsessed — and simultaneously self-loathing! — age is… to love and love and love. This is what the fairy godmother tells the heartbroken Anados in the stanza immediately previous to the one I quoted. Anados is distraught, because he now knows for certain that he isn’t worthy to have the woman he’s in love with. She will marry another, better man. So, as his tears flow down into her lap, she sings:

O light of dead and of dying days!

O Love! in thy glory go,

In a rosy mist and a moony maze,

O’er the pathless peaks of snow.

But what is left for the cold gray soul,

That moans like a wounded dove?

One wine is left in the broken bowl! —

‘Tis — To love, and love, and love.

No matter how empty we may feel, there is always one drink left in the broken bowl of our broken souls: it is the love of God and neighbor. Love is glorious even when we are not. Glorious enough to make both lover and beloved more beautiful than they were before.

Love makes us lovely. Your example of the man in church and the Keller quote are both perfect depictions of this. Of course, I think many would agree with us on this point, but I don’t think most have properly understood the way this actually works. So let me put it a bit more controversially:

Love makes us lovely, because love makes us love. It invites us to join in the circulatory system. The love-blood of life flows through our veins, not only to us and for us, but to others through us, and we become alive. When someone believes in you, shows hospitality to you, sees and enjoys the best in you, this is no static thing. You actually become what they see, and therefore you become more able to give what they have given to you.

This is why the modern term ‘unconditional love,’ while true enough, can only go so far. Love does come with conditions. God is not shy about this. All covenants with those he loves are two-sided. Of course, our failure to do our part will not stop him from doing his. That is the part of the story that ‘unconditional love’ depicts quite well. But that’s only the beginning. Love comes with conditions, because love would have nothing less than all of you and the very best version of you: “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.” It asks you to join him in his perfect dance, so that you might become perfected in love. George MacDonald again:

“Love has always in view the absolute loveliness of the beloved. Where that loveliness is incomplete, love cannot love its fill, so it spends itself to make you more lovely, that it may love you more.”²

Apologies for the many words. But that is how I think love saves and heals us, as you say, ‘from the outside in’.

AAK:
No need to apologise, because I think this kind of discussion requires nuance, and nuance can’t be reduced to pithy aphorisms. (And now I get the experience of dialoguing with not just you, but also George MacDonald, which may be the best 2-for-1 deal I’ve ever had).

I think the confusing aspect of what you (and George) are talking about above is the sense that true love does desire a change in the beloved. That ‘loving someone for who they are’ is only one half of the necessary equation for true love. The other half is the loving expectancy that your beloved becomes the purified, transformed, higher version of themselves. But, importantly, this cannot be by way of control, because (1) we cannot actually control other people, and (2) attempts at control are antithetical to love. Instead of demanding performance or setting some kind of metric, we encourage those we love toward this goal, by loving them with our own passionate and sacrificial love.

And maybe so it is with us. If there is such a thing as true self-love and self-improvement, it won’t come about by tinkering away in our garages — fine-tuning our engines — it will come by getting the vehicles of our bodies out on the road. It seems that we must give love and accept love to and from others before we have the internal ‘feeling’ of being capable of giving and receiving such love.

So returning to where we started, back to my scribbled note that “Self-love is not the answer. In fact, it’s logically impossible.” Maybe I need to revise it to something like the following:

Self-love is an end, not a means, of the good life.

We will end up in a place of true self-love by giving and receiving love outside of ourselves, to God and neighbour.

Love is best represented by the heart, the organic pump which pushes out so it can draw in so it can push out again. The heart is active, just as love is a verb.

And this reveals another aspect of true love — it desires growth and purification, not stasis and self-soothing. I don’t only crave to be loved as I am, I also desire to be loved into the very man I was made to be. I can’t do that by myself, I need to receive and give true love for that slow-but-radical transformation to occur.

Anything you would add?

RB:
A brilliant summary. I think we’ve gotten somewhere!

I would only add the small caveat: I’m sure we would both take it as a given that a certain degree of self-concern is at least part of what makes love of others possible and sustainable. Love is not always desperately self-denying; it is also steadfast. The mother who thinks only of her newborn baby and forgets to feed herself may soon become unable to feed her child. I don’t think we need any modern self-care narratives to recognize that fact.

Of course, the mother who thinks only of her own wellbeing at the expense of her child has sinned far worse, and does both a disservice. If only she had known the circulatory system of love! Which is why, as you said so well, self-fulfillment is best considered an end rather than a means. The mother’s treasure is ‘in heaven’ — that is, in the unseen realm which exists for her right now — where moth and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal.

Waymarkers is a place for poetry, fiction, essays, and the best collaborations I can dream up. As long as you don’t mind that variety, I can promise you’ll never read anything unoriginal or inauthentic.

Thanks for being here as we journey further up and further in together.

1. From The Weight of Glory.

2. From The Consuming Fire.