Dear Father, Can you please explain how we should love ourselves, and how this is not selfishness?
You are right in that we should have a healthy love for ourselves, which is not only legitimate but morally obligatory, as I will explain.
When it is lived in a proper way, this self-love forms an important part of the virtue of charity. After all, Jesus tells us to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mt 22:39). This commandment presumes that we should first love ourselves.
Love for oneself is natural, stemming from our nature as free human beings. It is one of the most spontaneous tendencies we have. It leads us to look after ourselves: to eat properly, to take care of our health, to get sufficient rest and exercise and, in extreme circumstances, to defend ourselves against threats to our life. If we experience such threats, we naturally do everything to save ourselves.
Love for oneself is so natural that it is not the object of a special command from God. But, as you imply in your question, it can become disordered and then it becomes the sin of selfishness, or egotism, especially as a result of original sin.
The healthy love of self stems from love for God, where the person loves himself because God loves him, because he is a son or daughter of God. This love of self grows together with love for God, and therefore with holiness. It is by striving for holiness that we love ourselves in the best way.
St Thomas Aquinas explains in his Summa Theologiae: “We may consider charity from two standpoints: first, under the general notion of friendship, and in this way we must hold that, properly speaking, a man is not a friend to himself, but something more than a friend, since friendship implies union … whereas a man is one with himself which is more than being united to another.
“Secondly, we may speak of charity in respect of its specific nature, namely as denoting man’s friendship with God in the first place, and, consequently, with the things of God, among which things is man himself who has charity. Hence, among these other things which he loves out of charity because they pertain to God, he loves also himself out of charity” (STh II-II, q. 25, a. 4).
St Francis de Sales explains how this love for self can be well-ordered: “A well-ordered love requires that we should love the soul more than the body; that we should be more solicitous to acquire virtue than anything else; that we should set a higher value on the favour of heaven than on a base and perishable honour” (Introduction to the Devout Life).
So, we should seek the good of our soul, of our supernatural life in God, of our life of virtue, more than that of material possessions or other goods of the body. As Our Lord says: “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Mt 16:26)
The word “life” in this context refers to one’s supernatural life, his soul. The one good we cannot afford to lose is our soul, our eternal life with God in heaven. And, as St Francis says, we should seek the favour of God, that God looks on us with favour, rather than the favour, the good opinion, of our fellow men.
As regards sins against this love of self, we sin by all our sins, especially mortal sins, which endanger our eternal salvation. And, of course, we also sin by any harm we do to our body or soul, and by exposing ourselves to dangers to body and soul.
Love for oneself takes precedence even over love for one’s neighbour.
St Thomas explains: “Just as unity surpasses union, the fact that man himself has a share of the Divine good is a more potent reason for loving than that another should be a partner with him in that share. Therefore man, out of charity, ought to love himself more than his neighbour: in sign whereof, a man ought not to give way to any evil of sin, which counteracts his share of happiness, not even that he may free his neighbour from sin.” (STh II-II, q. 26, a. 4)
As a result, for example, we should not jeopardise our eternal salvation to save another from a life of sin, and we do not need to risk our life to save that of another. Love for self comes before love for neighbour.
