The Second natural inclination: self-love

The second natural inclination: self-love

The second inclination that the author of nature incessantly imprints in our will is the love of ourselves and of our own preservation. We have already said that God loves all His works, that it is His love alone for them that preserves them, and that He wills that all created spirits have the same inclinations as Himself. He wills therefore that they all have a natural inclination for their preservation and their happiness, or that they love themselves.

However, it is not just to place one’s ultimate end in oneself, and not to love oneself in relation to God; since in effect, having of ourselves no goodness nor substance, having no power to make ourselves happy and perfect, we ought to love ourselves only in relation to God, who alone can be our sovereign good [6].

If faith and reason teach us that there is only God who is the sovereign good, and that He alone can fill us with pleasures, we conceive easily that we must therefore love Him, and we turn toward Him with enough facility; but without grace, it is always imperfectly and by self-love that we love Him—I mean by an unjust and disordered self-love. For although we may love Him perhaps as having the power to make us happy, we do not love Him as sovereign justice, we do not love Him as He is. We love Him as a humanly good-natured and accommodating God, and we do not wish to accommodate ourselves to His law, to the immutable order of His divine perfections. Pure charity is so far above our strength that not only can we not love God for Himself, or as He is in Himself, but human reason does not easily understand that one can love otherwise than in relation to oneself, and have any other ultimate end than one’s own satisfaction.

Self love is divided into the love of being and of well-being, or of greatness and pleasure.**

By the love of greatness we affect power, elevation, independence, and that our being subsist by itself. We desire in some manner to have necessary being: we wish in a sense to be like gods. For there is only God who properly has being, and who exists necessarily, since everything that is dependent exists only by the will of the one on whom it depends. Men therefore, wishing for the necessity of their being, also wish for power and independence that put them beyond the power of others. But by the love of pleasure they desire not simply being, but well-being, since pleasure is the manner of being that is the best and the most agreeable to the soul: I say pleasure precisely, insofar as it is pleasure. So that if one takes pleasure in general, insofar as it contains reasonable pleasures as well as sensible ones, it seems to me certain that it is the principle or the sole motive of natural love, or of all the movements of the soul toward whatever good it may be, for one can love only what pleases. If the blessed love the divine perfections, God as He is, it is because the sight of these perfections pleases them. For man being made to know and love God, it was necessary that the sight of everything that is perfect should give us pleasure.

It must be noted that greatness, excellence, and independence of the creature are not manners of being that make it happier by themselves, since it often happens that one becomes miserable as one grows greater. But for pleasure, it is a manner of being that we cannot receive actually without becoming actually happier—I do not say solidly happy. Greatness and independence are most often not in us, and they ordinarily consist only in the relation we have with the things that surround us. But pleasures are in the soul itself, and they are real manners that modify it, and which by their own nature are capable of satisfying it. Thus we regard excellence, greatness, and independence as things proper for the preservation of our being, and even sometimes as very useful according to the order of nature for the preservation of well-being; but pleasure is always the manner of being of the mind, which by itself makes it happy, and if it is solid makes it perfectly content, so that pleasure is well-being, and the love of pleasure is the love of well-being.

Now this love of well-being is stronger in us than the love of being; and self-love sometimes makes us desire non-being, because we do not have well-being. This happens to all the damned, for whom it would be better, according to the word of Jesus Christ, not to be than to be as miserable as they are; because these unhappy ones being declared enemies of Him who contains in Himself all goodness, and who is the sole cause of the pleasures and pains we are capable of feeling, it is not possible that they enjoy any satisfaction. They are and will be eternally miserable, because their will will always be in the same disposition and the same disorder.

Self-love therefore contains two loves: the love of greatness, of power, of independence, and generally of all things that appear to us proper for the preservation of our being; and the love of pleasure and of all things that are necessary for us to be well—that is to say, to be happy and content.

These two loves can be divided in several ways; either because we are composed of two different parts, soul and body, according to which one can divide them; or because one can distinguish or specify them by the different objects that are useful to us for our preservation. We will not, however, stop at that, because our design not being to make a moral treatise, it is not necessary to make an exact research and division of all the things we regard as our goods. It was only necessary to make this division in order to relate with some order the causes of our errors.

We will therefore speak first of the errors that have for their cause the inclination we have for greatness and for everything that puts our being beyond the dependence of others; and afterwards we will treat of those that come from the inclination we have for pleasure and for everything that renders our being the best it can be for us, or that satisfies us most.