If charity really promotes our highest interests and, even in its most disinterested form, ministers to our good, how is it that it is so often compared with self-love?
When we speak of self-love, we do not mean the true love of self that is identical with charity. We mean the love of our lower self. We mean the choice of some immediate good instead of the far higher and nobler good that we shall secure by sacrifice of the lower good. Self-love is the love of the child for the unwholesome sweets that it knows will produce sickness on the morrow. How often my self-love has led me to grasp at the passing enjoyment instead of the solid happiness that I should have gained by renouncing it.
Self-love does a still more mischievous work. It leads us to thrust ourselves into a position we know is a false one so we may gratify our desire for independence and for liberty. Self-love hates subjection and is thus diametrically opposed to charity, which loves to be subject. Self-love hates the lowest place or humble work and yearns after notoriety or prominence. Charity appreciates the nothingness of self and desires that God should be all in all.
Self-love, again, cannot endure any sort of reproof or correction. It rebels against those things and longs to revenge itself. It is thus no true love of self, for he who really loves himself or rather who finds his highest happiness in preferring God to self, welcomes anything that tends to lower self and to make God the exclusive object of his love. Thus, in hating self, he loves self with a true self-love and will reach charity. Is this my relation to self?
- text from Charity, Meditations for a Month by Father Richard Frederick Clarke, SJ