The Wrong Love of the Self

Introduction short
The lecture begins with the verse “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life for My sake will keep it to eternal life” and presents two questions: what is the true love of the self? and what is the wrong love?

The main idea
True love of the self means striving for the good of the self and its true happiness which is connected to God and immortality, while the wrong love is satisfying the desires of the self by worldly means that lead to vanity and perdition.

Forms of the wrong love

1. Bodily love: giving the self its pleasure by the senses (lusts of the flesh and the eyes) which prevent fasting and vigil for piety.
2. Intellectual pleasure and fantasy: compensating deprivation by escaping into dreams and imagination instead of real work and real effort.
3. Pursuit of worldly greatness: seeking position and fame and pride that leads to fall as the devil and our first parents fell.
4. Misleading external freedom: believing that freedom in external action realizes the self while it binds from within by sin.
5. Love of knowledge and intellectual leadership: making thought a means to glorify the self and invent heresies and schisms.
6. Self-worship and narcissism: excessive admiration of the self and inability to admit fault and constant search for praise.
7. Empty activity and pursuit of appearances: much movement and participation in works without spiritual depth thought to be building the self.

Spiritual dimension – from a Coptic Orthodox faith perspective
From the Church’s perspective the true fulfillment of the self is in the purity of heart and a correct relation with God. True glory is “from within” and comes by the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, humility, meekness, kindness. The way to life is the cross: self-denial and subduing the passions to reach eternal glory.

Right building of the self (practical steps)

• Build the interior: purity of thought, purity of senses, purity of heart.
• The fruits of the Spirit as measures: love, joy, peace, humility, meekness.
• Self-control: saying “no” to the desires of the self and giving them spiritual limits.
• Striving for holiness and working for the world to come, not for the present.

Conclusion and spiritual practice
One is called to ask himself what he has built inside: which fruits? If a person wants to keep his self to eternal life he must hate his self meaning to control it and hold it in Christ not to possess it by pleasures. Make stone upon stone in building your spiritual self.

Humility

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