Taken from In Silence With God by Benedict Baur, this is just the first section of Chapter VII, that describes self-love. Applies to the series on Tough Love
Chapter VII: The Enemy
It is no small matter to be called to participate in the divine life, to be a branch of Christ, the Vine, receiving the inflow of His divine nature until we can say, “I live, but not I; Christ lives in me.” He desires to live in us; it is a necessity of His divine nature to identify Himself with the soul inhabiting us and determining our thoughts, our will, our actions. With His spirit He desires to fill our lives; and in this He is constantly opposed by the enemy that disputes His sovereignty over us. This enemy is not so much Satan, not so much the world; it is the enemy in ourselves. The enemy who was born when we were born and who, even before we attain the full use of reason, gets us into his clutches. He retains his hold on us through our passions, through the dimness of our understanding, through our weak will and our sins, evil inclinations, bad habits; and his power over us increases daily. The enemy who boasts of his conquests even when we have wrung victory from him; who finds nourishment even in our virtues, being fed and strengthened by our failings. The enemy who rises with us in the morning and stands all day by our side, watching for a chance to do us harm, poisoning and belittling all that we do and leave alone.
This enemy is self-love. This is the enemy we must fight. If we conquer, then the sovereignty of Christ is assured. Then indeed “Not I, but Christ, liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).
1. Self-Love: What It Is
We meet it every day, at every turn, in a thousand guises, always externally prosperous, well-dressed, versatile, charming, polished, full of seduction and persuasive art, full of sophistication, lies, and sham.
Self-love is the driving force in the bustle of daily life. “All seek the things that are their own” complain the Apostle Paul (Phil 2:21). Self, personal profit, personal interest, egotism, selfishness. Self-love is the deep, secret root of vice and sins that are incessantly driving mankind to destruction. Laziness, weakness of character, disloyalty, treachery, untruth, greediness, avarice, and the sins of the flesh and spirit. Self-love is the mother of all crime and wrongdoing of mankind—of historic injustices that cry to heaven, of tyranny, uncharitableness, of wars, the destruction of our happiness and that of others. It is self-love that tears faith and religion out of people’s hearts and robs millions of their hope of Heaven.
Side by side with the pursuit of self there is an even more refined variety of self-love—that of the pious: a “spiritual” self-love. This, too, one meets daily in the hearts, the thoughts, the impulses, words, and actions of the pious.
The soul does its best to fly from sin. But self-love creeps subtly in. The soul becomes confused, then, seeking to avoid it not so much because it is an insult to God but because it might cloud the soul’s beauty. Or it may adopt an attitude of “superiority” to such weakness.
Self-love demands revelations and compensations, particularly showy graces and gifts. It likes to compare its own gifts with those of others, inclining to envy and jealousy.
Self-love misleads the soul as to the actual goal of spiritual zeal. Instead of recognizing this simply as God’s will in all and above all, it begins to look upon the improvement of life conditions and personal perfection as the main things to strive for. This false aim then perverts our motives. The soul tends to attach itself to schools of thought and “improvement” of its own choosing, never guessing that its anxiety for self-improvement is a delusion and another form of self-glorification.
Self-love puts the soul into a pother about its sins and failings. It becomes depressed and cast down by its petty inhibitions and limitations. It begins to hate the sight of its own insignificance and gets so impatient with the slow working of God and His grace that it becomes discontented. Hadn’t it formed a totally different opinion of its own powers, regarding grace as a sort of magic? The slowness of God gets on its nerves.
Self-love is fond of setting too high a target. It keeps the example of Christ and the saints in view, vaingloriously aiming to imitate these patterns. Hasn’t it done its best? But it simply cannot grasp why it falls short of what it sees in Christ and the saints. Then it gets discouraged.
Self-love keeps its own good deeds constantly in sight: the conscientiousness with which the soul fulfils its duties, the zeal with which it enters into prayer and pious practices. Soon the incense of self-praise swells the soul with pride.
Self-love agitates the soul, makes it impatient and discontented when it encounters disturbances, wandering thoughts, interrupted concentration, and temptation in its prayers, or when the glow of satisfaction fails to follow them, when spells of weakness and impotence set in, or spiritual aridity and rebellion against prayer occur.
Self-love leads to touchiness and impatience our fellow man. It makes us unyielding, angry, aggressive in stressing our own personality and our own rights. It makes us cold and indifferent, reserved, unjust in judgment and speech about our neighbor. Self-love delights in dwelling upon its own experiences, inspirations, difficulties, and sufferings. Self-love likes to compare its own doings and its own piety with those of others, watching them and pronouncing judgment upon them. It gives others no credit, sees only their faults, but vaunts itself in comparison and attributes evil intentions to them, sometimes even wishing them ill. In spite of all our piety, self-love lays us wide open to being easily wounded. We are put out, repelled, offended, when we are taken sufficiently seriously, or made as much of as we expected.
It is impossible to enumerate here all the forms that spiritual self-love can take. So we shall merely indicate the forms it can assume in the community life of the convent. There it often masquerades as reserve. Or it may manifest itself in the trick of obtaining some slight advantage over the rest of the community. It can be traced in the ultra-punctilious observance of rules and regulations, inkling a person to spy on others, or to assume an officious control, to be unloving and critical of superiors, complaining that they are slack or too lenient. Self-love often identifies itself with self-will, hindering us from giving our loyalty blindly, or performing what we are required to do without question. Self-love leads us to fault-finding, bad temper, discontent, want of charity toward our superiors and other members of the order.
Self-love, moreover is the source of all disturbances, excitements, panics, disappointments, unfulfilled wishes, expectations, plans, resolutions, and intentions—everything that keeps the soul in suspense, robbing it of inner peace, of concentration and the true spirit of prayer, and therefore of complete unity with God.
From the foregoing, the decision part self-love plays in a life of piety is clear. Deep down, self-love is the fundamental cause of all our sins. What is sin? A purely temporal, fleeting satisfaction gained by uncontrolled surrender to some vanity, craziness—to some idol. All this yielding can be traced to perverted self-love. The serpent steals into paradise. “Ye shall not die; ye shall be as gods” (Gen., 3:4). With these words the evil one appealed to the self-love of Eve, who allowed herself to be bemused, reached for the forbidden fruit, and shared it with Adam. Since then the torrent of sin has flown over mankind, thrusting its way into homes, into hearts, into thoughts and desires, into the will, the bodies, the speech, actions and transactions of men. All this, the fruit of self-love. Self-love turned Cain into a fratricide, the apostle into the betrayer of our Lord. Is there anything more pernicious than self-love?
Self-love is the enemy of God within us. We are created to love God. For the same reason we have been made one with Christ. The inestimable riches and graces of Christianity have been made accessible to us. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” (Matt. 22:37). ”He that loveth not abideth in death” (I John, 3:14). But who truly loves God? He who gives himself wholly, without reserve, to pleasing God and doing His divine will. He who seeks nothing for himself but lives only for the honour, the service, and the glory of God. Self-love? It simply loves itself, not God. Self-love is the direct opposite to the love of God. Place them both together on a pair of scales and instantly one will go up, the other down. Only when self-love has been supernaturalized can the paradise of divine love dawn upon the soul.
If self-love militates against the love of God, it is necessarily also the enemy of brotherly love. The love of God unifies; self-love causes dissensions. Self-love is the great trouble maker, the enemy that sows hatred, envy, strife, in the hearts of men. It is forever preoccupied with its own advantage, indifferent to the rights of others, to love, or to the commandments of brotherly love. Love, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “is patient, is kind; [it] envieth not, is not puffed up; is not ambitious, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil” (I Cor. 13:4-5).
What follows from this?—The truth that every degree of holiness, every kind of perfection, all spiritual growth, depend upon the elimination of self-love. Only from the ruins of self-love can arise the new man in whom Christ lives and rules. And a further truth: the only road to that perfection is that of cutting oneself adrift from self-love.
