C.S. Lewis on Self
chew on this for awhile.From “Two Ways with the Self”:
Self is the one thing of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference…
…the very self-love which he has to reject is to him a specimen of how he ought to feel to all selves; and he may hope that when he has truly learned to love his neighbour as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbour: that is, with charity instead of partiality.
In a discussion of forgiveness in Mere Christianity:
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief…
I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
In honor of old Jack’s British roots, may I just say: bloody brilliant.
posted by becka @ 6:03 PM
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