Self-denying love of others as the height of human perfection

This was presented at the 2001 Znamenskie Readings in St. Petersburg, Russia
(I can send any references upon request, and knowing that the Russians are looser with copyright than the Americans, I'm not hesitating to post this... :-0)

When reading Russian Orthodox psychological literature about the concept of loving others, one typically comes across the idea that we must love others as we love ourselves. It is not unusual, as the latest work of respected and prolific Igumen Evmeny shows, for Orthodox psychological literature to cite only “love your neighbor as yourself” when discussing relevant Biblical material regarding love. This is held up as the ideal for human relations and in modern times is sometimes used as a justification for “loving oneself”. While I am not a theologian or a Biblical scholar, using Scripture, the works of St. Maximus the Confessor, and recent psychological research, I would like to argue that in fact “loving one’s neighbor as oneself” is not necessarily the ideal for Orthodox Christians struggling to attain salvation. It must be interpreted properly, and St. Maximus the Confessor and modern psychological works help us in this endeavor.

Let us look briefly at the Gospels in which the Savior’s words are found. Both St. Matthew (chapter 22) and St. Mark (chapter 12) place the discussion of the two greatest commandments near the end of Christ’s earthly ministry, after His triumphant entry into Jerusalem. St. Luke (chapter 10) recounts a similar episode much earlier in Christ’s ministry. In all cases, the Savior is speaking to Pharisees and scribes in the Temple. In the Lukan version, the Pharisee who asks Christ about the greatest commands then challenges Him to define the concept of “neighbor”, a challenge to which Christ responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

We immediately note that in defining the two greatest commands, Christ is directly citing the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18). He quotes these words to Pharisees and scribes, who are extremely concerned with following the letter of the Law. In the context of OT morality, which often focuses on caring for the needy, it is not unreasonable to assume that this injunction calls people to care as much about the basic needs of others as they do their own needs. In short, given the source and interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself” and the audience to whom Christ was speaking, it is not unreasonable to call this approach to love “Old Testament morality”. Nonetheless, as we will see, this does not mean we – the children of the New Testament - fully reject OT morality.

If “love your neighbor as yourself” is the Old Testament ideal of love, then what is the New Testament ideal, especially when we are speaking about relationships within the Church? To answer this, we must turn to the Gospel of St. John. In the upper room discourse, while speaking to His disciples (whom we recognize as the foundation of the Church), Christ says that He is giving them a new command, that they must love one another as He Himself has loved them (St. John 13:34), and that the highest form of love is “laying down one’s life for one’s friends” (St. John 15:13). This is a much more “severe”, self-giving morality than that of the OT.

As we mentioned above, if we limit ourselves to Scripture, we might claim that this New Testament ideal of love is applied only in the Church. However, St. Maximus challenges us to broaden our thinking, claiming that the one who has attained perfect love will love all people equally, making no distinction between believers and unbelievers.

How can we rescue the concept of “love your neighbor as yourself”? Is it still relevant to the ecclesiological life of the New Testament Church? Yes, but as the works of St. Maximus show, it may take on meanings different than expected. (We will still assume that it also implies we must care for the basic physical and psychological needs of both self and other.)

St. Maximus often speaks very negatively about “self-love”, but he is clear that this means indulging one’s body. Positive self-love, according to St. Maximus, is working toward one’s own salvation and deification (St. Maximus, 1981a, 1981b). Paradoxically, this means self-denial in both the desiring and irascible aspects of the soul. Fasting and prayer vigils transform the passions of the desiring aspect of the soul and helps us love God more purely, a love which St. Maximus sometimes refers to as eros. Forgiveness and non-attachment to created things transform the irascible aspect of the soul and help us love others more purely (and here, St. Maximus often uses the word agape). Perfect, salvific love demands showing leniency and mercy towards others but strictness and judgment towards oneself. “Loving others as oneself” now means that with equal zeal we must 1) condescend[1] and show mercy to others and 2) subject ourselves to moderate physical and psychological deprivation in order to have more authentic communion with God. In fact, according to St. Maximus, it is only through the second that we can achieve the first, and perhaps the most sound evidence that we have achieved this holy form of self-love is that we love all equally, including our enemies. And paradoxically, this all means that in fulfilling the command of Leviticus and the Synoptic Gospels, we should love others more than we love ourselves (St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius LXV; cited in Epifanovich, 1996).

What confirmation (or refutation) of St. Maximus’ view might psychological research provide? First we must ask, do people somehow “love” others better by sacrificing themselves? Daniel Batson’s experimental laboratory research on helping behavior suggests a positive answer to this question (cited in Franzoi, 2000). Batson’s work has shown that people who help out of empathy for a victim (rather than out of a desire to alleviate their own personal stress at seeing another suffer) offer help even in cases where they can avoid helping. The state of empathy by its nature is a self-sacrificial state: one puts aside their own concerns and perspectives to enter the world of another. Such a state allows people to help others even when they could easily pass up the opportunity to help. So at least in one series of studies, it does seem that one type of self-sacrifice and quality of care for another are related.

This leads to the questions, is self-sacrificial love somehow “higher” than a love that caters equally to self and other, and does this kind of love somehow contribute to the salvation of the “lover”? There are very few answers to these questions in psychology, but some of the recent work on the psychology of interpersonal forgiveness begins to answer them. Briefly, “forgiveness” in psychological work is general defined as actively overcoming a negative orientation and developing a positive orientation toward an offender. Theoretical work on various understandings of forgiveness places “forgiveness based on love” as a more mature perspective on forgiveness than “forgiveness offered to improve one’s own mental health” (Gassin & Enright, 1995). Empirical work in the USA (Enright, Santos, & Al-Mabuk, 1989), Taiwan (Huang, 1990), Korea (Park & Enright, 1997), and France (Mullet & Girard, 2000) shows that indeed older (presumably more mature) people are more likely to view forgiveness as being offered out of love, or at least not being conditional on external factors such as receiving an apology from the offender.

While it is clear from psychological research that forgiveness is beneficial for the psychological (and probably physical) health of the forgiver, is there any evidence that forgiveness offered out of love is more “salvific” for the forgiver than forgiveness offered only from other motives? Currently there is very little work addressing this question directly. Huang (1990) compared psychological and physiological measures of people who had forgiven either out of duty or out of love. Those who reported forgiving out of love demonstrated lower blood pressure readings and less facial tension while retelling their forgiveness stories than those who forgave out of duty. There were no differences between the two groups on self-report measures of anger. While this study cannot prove cause and effect, it suggests that those who forgave out of love developed a psychological peace so much deeper than those who forgave out of duty that the difference was reflected only in physiological – but not psychological – measures. In that peace stunts the passions of anger and anxiety, this study offers some suggestion that forgiving out of love may be related to the dispassion of the offended person.

Despite the emphasis here on self-sacrificial motives for forgiving another, we should also recognize that clinical experience shows that people often begin the forgiveness process out of self-oriented motives (e.g., to help alleviate depression) but ends in a balance between self- and other-oriented motives. This observation is still consonant with St. Maximus’ ideas about “loving others as oneself”, for in forgiving out of mixed motives, a person offers mercy to an offender from the strength he or she gain by fighting the passions of depression, hurt, and anger in him- or herself.

Although the psychological evidence is far from complete at this time, there is a suggestion, especially in the forgiveness work, that loving another in a self-sacrificial way is connected to better outcomes for the self, although this does not completely preclude forgiving for self-oriented reasons as well. In many cases, these better outcomes for the self are related to the Orthodox conception of salvation and include less anger and depression and more peace and hope. This is consonant with St. Maximus’ idea that holy self-love involves self-renunciation, while true love of another involves mercy and forgiveness and is achieved on the foundation of this holy self-love. These ideas should force Orthodox psychologists to rethink their widespread reliance on the OT definition of love as found in the Synoptics, interpreted in isolation from the ascetic patristic tradition, and their consistent disregard of Christ’s new commandment in the Gospel of St. John, to love others in the same kenotic, self-sacrificing way that Christ Himself loved us. In following St. Maximus’ definition of holy self-love and the Johannine definition of New Testament other-love, we fulfill the likeness of God in ourselves, the likeness of Crucified Love[2] that saves even enemies, and in turn experience our own Resurrection and Pentecost, our own union with God, our own deification.

[1] I have chosen this word in English because it is the usual translation of the Russian word sniskhoditelnost’. While the English word carries negative connotations, the Russian word carries positive connotations and describes the state of patiently and empathetically bearing with the faults of another.
[2] I am indebted to Archpriest Anatoly Frolov for his insistence that the ultimate meaning of being created in the image and likeness of God is not our ability to think, our position as the master of creation, or our ability to create, but instead our capacity to show saving, crucified love for others.