Teaching Christianity (continued)
So now, as there are four kinds of things to be loved: one which is above us, the second which we are ourselves, the third which is on a level with us, the fourth which is beneath us, about the second and the fourth there was no need to give any commandments. However far, after all, people may fall away from the truth, there remains in them love of self and love of one's own body. When the spirit, you see, takes to flight from the unchanging light that regulates all things, it does so in order independently to regulate itself and its own body; and that is why it is impossible for it not to love itself and its own body.
23. Now the human spirit thinks it has something great if it can lord it over its fellows, that is over other human beings. It is ingrained, you see, in the vitiated spirit to be striving more than anything else for what it claims as if it were its due, but what is in fact due to the one God alone. Such love of self, though, it is better to call hatred. It is, after all, a simple case of iniquity, because such a spirit is wanting to be served by what is beneath it, while refusing to serve what is above it; and it is very properly said, Whoever loves iniquity hates his own soul (Ps 11:5, LXX). And as a result the spirit sickens, and begins to be tormented by means of the mortal body. It cannot help loving it, after all, and yet must needs find itself overburdened by its perishable nature.[23] For the immortality and imperishability of the body results from the health of the spirit; and the health of the spirit consists in clinging unshakably to the one who is more powerful, that is to the unchanging God. But when it aspires also to lord it over those who are its natural equals, that is over other human beings, this is a case of altogether intolerable pride.
24, 24. So hating oneself is something nobody does. And on this point there has never been any dispute with any school of thought. But neither do any people hate their own bodies; what the apostle said is certainly true: Nobody has ever hated his own flesh (Eph 5:29). And as for what some