94. Self-hatred?
94. SELF-HATRED?
We’re commanded to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, so we must be able to love ourselves. Can we therefore also hate ourselves?
Properly speaking, it is impossible for a man to hate himself. For everything naturally desires good, nor can anyone desire anything for himself save under the aspect of good . . . For even they who kill themselves apprehend death as itself a good, considered as putting an end to some unhappiness or pain.
It is impossible for a man to hate himself properly speaking. But accidentally it happens that a man hates himself . . . they love themselves according to what they take themselves to be, while they hate that which they really are (I-II,29,4).
We always do love ourselves; that is why we are commanded to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, not to love our neighbors as we ought to love ourselves. If we always do love ourselves, and if we cannot at the same time hate and love the same person, then we cannot really hate ourselves.
The practical point of this logical analysis is that we always have a secure, in-place standard for loving others: we are to love them as we always do in fact love ourselves. If we think it is impossible to love stupid, ugly, selfish, bothersome people, we are wrong, because there is one stupid, ugly, selfish, bothersome person that we do succeed in loving all the time: the one in the mirror. Even though we hate some of the things we do or feel, we hate them only because we love ourselves. We feel we are unworthy of such bad stuff. All we have to do is extend that same attitude toward our neighbor: to love the sinner but not the sin, to hate the sin but not the sinner.
God gave us a securely fixed magnetic pole in our very nature: our natural and proper and inevitable and good self-love, our love of our own true good, our own true happiness. As St. Thomas notes, even those who kill themselves do it out of self-love, since the only reason they kill themselves is because they (mistakenly) see death as a better thing than life for themselves.
Since (1) it was absolutely necessary to transform our hearts from selfish hearts into unselfish hearts, hearts full of charity, i.e., full of God (for “God is charity”), and (2) since it was impossible for us all to become instant heroes of unselfish charity, great saints and mystics who simply forget ourselves completely, therefore (3) God in His wisdom and mercy made charity easy for us by uniting other-love with self-love (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”).
This is easy for two reasons: (1) loving others as you love yourself frees you from feelings. For even when you do not feel love for yourself, you always seek your own good; that’s all you have to do to your neighbor. You don’t have to feel love all the time, though that is a very good thing when it happens. God made it easy for you to transcend your feelings: He already put the beginning of charity into your heart, for you already have charity to yourself.
(2) God also made it easy for you by making you one with your neighbor in fact; all you have to do is to acknowledge and affirm that fact. We are all one body, one family. We are not angels. We are biologically one “in” Adam and spiritually one “in” Christ. When we accept this, we can love ourselves and others with the very same act of love: we can love others as parts of ourselves, as others who are also “in” ourselves—because they are!
But we have to be honest. That’s why St. Thomas says, in his second paragraph above, that we must will the truth, stand in the light, and seek our own true, real good and not something false. If we seek what is false, we will want to hide from the truth, and we will not get what we wish, for we will only succeed in hiding the truth from ourselves, not ourselves from the truth. For light comes from truth into us, not from us into truth. We must will and love what is, i.e., our true self, not what is not, not a false self. If we will a false self, we hate our true self. We must choose to hate our false self, not our true self, and to love our true self, not our false self. God, our Designer, shows us our true self. It’s Christ. Christ shows us perfectly not only who God is but also who we are, “reveals man to himself” as Pope St. John Paul II loved to say.