Narcissism is often mentioned in these times. Generally understood as over-blown self-absorption or an excessive sense of self-importance, it is a concept used to characterize some people in public office, perhaps one such public figure in particular. The term is derived from the myth of Narcissus, a young man of exceptional beauty who fell in love with his own reflection and died staring at it.
Psychologists generally understand narcissism to be a spectrum, with most people exhibiting at least some degree of focus on oneself. The pathological end of the spectrum adds to intense self-focus a lack of empathy or understanding for others.
The question of narcissism arises as we consider the role of self-love in the Christian, biblical understanding of love. Last week I affirmed to some degree Anders Nygren’s distinction between eros, need-based, self-focused love and agape, unselfish, self-giving love. Yet when we turn to at least a couple of the key Bible texts on love, like the one for the sermon this week, Matthew 22:34-40, we find that self-love is paradoxically held up as the paradigm for loving others. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
I confess that until I began recently to work through the idea of love in Scripture and Christian life once again, I had thought that what the Scriptures and our Lord say about love is pretty much a dismissal and denigration of self-love. Other texts from Jesus about “hating” and losing one’s life for His sake suggested to me the command to “Love your neighbor as yourself” in no way contained, as I’ve heard frequently suggested, an implicit command to love oneself. Thus things like the following sentence of pop psychology are often said: “You can’t learn to love someone else until you learn to love yourself.” Then we land in the thicket of worries about self-esteem, etc., all of which seems terribly focused on oneself and begins to lose the whole direction of love for God and love for others.
So in the past I have been fairly hard on the concept of self-love, arguing that it is not a biblical concept and not something Christians should be concerned with. Instead, denying ourselves, as Jesus said frequently, we should focus on love for God and others and quit trying to love ourselves. But I have discovered that is not quite right. I’m not quite capitulating to the popular educational and psychological industry of self-esteem, but it is clear to me that the Bible and Jesus do emphasize the fact that self-love is a reality and a strange but necessary starting point for love of God and others.
The trick, the conceptual turn in all of this is that what Scripture says about love for others in relation to self-love all assumes a prevalent human tendency to self-love. To grasp that this is not just the popular idea of self-esteem, we need to realize that at least one major aspect of love is that it is a desire for the happiness, the well-being of another. That desire for happiness is, even in cases of low self-esteem, almost always operational in regard to our own selves. We want to be happy. That is self-love. Jesus and the apostles are asking us to desire for others the same happiness we desire for ourselves.
Now I don’t want to get lost again in modern psychological worries. With all our awareness of various pathologies of the psyche, we can’t quite as confidently as the ancients did declare that every human being desires happiness. Yet our very recognition that not desiring personal happiness is a pathology demonstrates that desire for happiness, and thus self-love in that sense, is a common human trait and experience.
Why then the contrast between the modern call for self-esteem, self-affirmation, individual pursuit of happiness and the Bible’s seemingly rather gloomy call to self-denial and pursuit of the happiness of others? The answer is right before us in the best examples of human love. It is just exactly when we turn from focus on our own happiness and truly seek the happiness of others in ways which contribute to their true well-being that we find our own selves most happy. This is exactly why we are called to love others as ourselves and why Jesus tells us that when we lose our lives for His sake (which includes for the sake of others) we find and save our lives. It’s the glorious and wonderful paradox at the heart of love and at the center of our nature as beings in the image of God.
So Narcissus is a warning to us all. We cannot find happiness or love by gazing into our own eyes or our own selves. That notion is where a lot of the popular psychology of self-love goes badly wrong. But we can truly love ourselves and find happiness by turning away from self and seeking for others to be as happy as we ourselves wish to be. That is what loving ourselves is truly about.