God in the Dock, from the chapter titled “Two Ways with the Self.”
SELF-RENUNCIATION IS THOUGHT to be, and indeed is, very near the core of Christian ethics. When Aristotle writes in praise of a certain kind of self-love, we may feel, despite the careful distinctions which he draws between the legitimate and the illegitimate Philautia,1 that here we strike something essentially sub-Christian. It is more difficult, however, to decide what we think of St. François de Sales’s chapter, De la douceur envers nous-mêsmes,2 where we are forbidden to indulge resentment even against ourselves and advised to reprove even our own faults avec des remonstrances douces et tranquilles,3 feeling more compassion than passion. In the same spirit, Lady Julian of Norwich would have us ‘loving and peaceable,’ not only to our ‘even-Christians,’ but to ‘ourself.’4 Even the New Testament bids me love my neighbour ‘as myself,’5 which would be a horrible command if the self were simply to be hated. Yet our Lord also says that a true disciple must ‘hate his own life.’6
We must not explain this apparent contradiction by saying that self-love is right up to a certain point and wrong beyond that point. The question is not one of degree. There are two kinds of self-hatred which look rather alike in their earlier stages, but of which one is wrong from the beginning and the other right to the end. When Shelley speaks of self-contempt as the source of cruelty, or when a later poet says that he has no stomach for the man ‘who loathes his neighbour as himself,’ they are referring to a very real and very un-Christian hatred of the self which may make diabolical a man whom common selfishness would have left (at least, for a while) merely animal. The hard-boiled economist or psychologist of our own day, recognizing the ‘ideological taint’ or Freudian motive in his own make-up, does not necessarily learn Christian humility. He may end in what is called a ‘low view’ of all souls, including his own, which expresses itself in cynicism or cruelty, or both. Even Christians, if they accept in certain forms the doctrine of total depravity, are not always free from the danger. The logical conclusion of the process is the worship of suffering—for others as well as for the self—which we see, if I read it aright, in Mr. David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, or that extraordinary vacancy which Shakespeare depicts at the end of Richard III. Richard in his agony tries to turn to self-love. But he has been ‘seeing through’ all emotions so long that he ‘sees through’ even this. It becomes a mere tautology: ‘Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.’7
Now, the self can be regarded in two ways. On the one hand, it is God’s creature, an occasion of love and rejoicing; now, indeed, hateful in condition, but to be pitied and healed. On the other hand, it is that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference. This claim is to be not only hated, but simply killed; ‘never,’ as George MacDonald says, ‘to be allowed a moment’s respite from eternal death.’ The Christian must wage endless war against the clamor of the ego as ego: but he loves and approves selves as such, though not their sins. The very self-love which he has to reject is to him a specimen of how he ought to feel to all selves; and he may hope that when he has truly learned (which will hardly be in this life) to love his neighbour as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbour: that is, with charity instead of partiality. The other kind of self-hatred, on the contrary, hates selves as such. It begins by accepting the special value of the particular self called me; then, wounded in its pride to find that such a darling object should be so disappointing, it seeks revenge, first upon that self, then on all. Deeply egoistic, but now with an inverted egoism, it uses the revealing argument, ‘I don’t spare myself’—with the implication ‘then a fortiori I need not spare others’—and becomes like the centurion in Tacitus, “immitior quia toleraverat.”8
The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind Kills the selfness. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one.