A CORE CHRISTIAN TRADITION ASKS US TO RESOLVE A FUNDAMENTAL TENSION in human life. When you read the biblical texts in which it appears, however, you might not feel the full force of the tension.
The core tradition I’m talking about is the so-called second great commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31, Mt. 22:38, Lk. 10:25-28, Gal. 5:14, Rom. 13:9, Jas. 2:8, each referring to Lev. 19:18). The command asks us to resolve the profound tension inherent in the social nature of the human species.
While this may seem to be a mostly academic concern, you only have to spend a little time with the news of the day to recognize its relevance not only to specific current debates, like those around our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to the tensions between conservative and liberal politics in general, where the basic question is how we are to adjudicate between the often-conflicting needs of the individual and the society.
The commandment links two forms of love, apparently assuming the meaning and implications of the two are well known or obvious. In fact, their meaning and implications are anything but well known or obvious.
Let’s look at what might be involved in loving “yourself.” The biblical command clearly assumes love of self is both a given in life and a positive thing. Anyone acquainted with depression, however, understands that self-loathing is almost as likely an attitude toward oneself as self-love. At the other end of the self-love spectrum, we run into the equally problematic possibility of an excessively positive attitude toward oneself that in the extreme shades into self-obsessed narcissism. In other words, love of oneself is neither given nor always positive.
Furthermore, modern depth psychology has shown us how the seemingly simple idea of self-love is greatly complicated by the need to come to terms with a host of “inner others.” It turns out we each have more than one “self” with which to contend. None of our egos is master in its own house. If we are to love ourselves, we must find ways to love the more or less autonomous “inner neighbors” that live in the shadow, not only our “neurotic” personal complexes, but also the archetypal complexes that approach us from the mystery somewhere beyond the personal.
How is one to love such difficult and challenging “neighbors” living in the soul? Clearly, this love cannot be the kind of emotional infatuation we discovered in adolescence. Instead, the biblical command must mean something more like a commitment to caring for someone’s well-being, that is, a commitment to sustained and sustaining relationships.
Commitment and caring are also the keys to the love of neighbors in the outer world. Here, so much depends on whom you see as your neighbor. The context in Leviticus suggests the issue at hand for the ancient Israelites was how one should relate to other members of one’s own community. Over time, our understanding of who is our neighbor has become more expansive. In the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5:44) and in the Sermon on the Plain (Lk. 6:27 & 35), Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:29-37) describes a neighbor as anyone who shows mercy to another (v. 37). In the Gospel of John, Jesus gives the essentially unbounded command to “love one another” (Jn. 15:12 & 17).
For some of us, therefore, the intimate command to love “your neighbor” has come to mean we are to love and be committed to caring for “the other,” whomever the other one may be and wherever we may encounter one another (even in the soul-world of the psyche).
Thus, it seems to me, the challenge to love the other as oneself leads us to a question we must try to live our way into: How is it possible to love oneself in the absence of love for the other, and to love the other in the absence of love for oneself?
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