In our previous time together, I examined the mystery of how love of God, neighbor, and even ourselves, is so askew. And this lives out so differently in men and women, the well-located and the dislocated, the rich and the poor, but there are common roots to it all. We concluded with this observation of the matter–When we love our neighbor this way, forgetting ourselves in love for another, we connect with the powerful love that is at the heart of all things.  It is life-giving.  It is also impossible unless God helps us to love.  And yet we know, from those moments in life where we see it clearly, that this is what we were made for. So why don’t we love each other this way, if it is what we were made for? 

And the easy answer for some Christians is “because of sin.”  Sin is egotism born of fear and doubt.  “There won’t be enough to go around, so be sure and get yours.”  “They don’t really love you for who you are.” That is true enough, but it’s all deeper than first glance. Some are guilty of maniacal egotism and committing evil. Others are living in reaction to evil.

Repairing this is enormous and valuable work. Whether secular therapy or recovery or contemplative prayer, it is all holy and spiritual work. It is the work God is about in the world. We see this living out currently in American culture as a superficial culture war has allied with a cynical political darkness to attempt a top down fix of all things. It will inevitably fail, not because we need another political power group in its place, but because it has failed to locate the source of our deepest problems—in us.

And this brings me to an ancient writer, Bernard of Clairvaux, and his understanding of the progress of love in the spiritual life. He once set forth four stages of love in the spiritual journey of a human life. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was a French abbot, theologian, and mystic who played a pivotal role in the spiritual and political life of 12th-century Europe. A founding figure of the Cistercian monastic reform, he established Clairvaux Abbey and became renowned for his eloquent preaching, deep devotion, and theological writings. In the Catholic tradition, he is the patron saint of beekeepers, candlemakers, and the Cistercian Order.

For our purpose we turn to his book, the Four Degrees if Love. There is a logical progression in the Christian life, he writes. At first we begin in the natural state, loving ourselves for self’s sake. This is the beginning of us all. This is the first degree of love. Then, he wrote,

THe second of these degrees of love are that we “love God, not for God’s sake, but for (our) own.” The third degree, then, being that we grow to see more clearly through faith and love God for God’s own sake.

Bernard puts is this way, “The third degree of love, we have now seen, is to love God on His own account, solely because He is God.” Now we come to this mystery. Bernard writes it this way:

OF THE FOURTH DEGREE OF LOVE: WHEREIN MAN DOES NOT EVEN LOVE SELF SAVE FOR GOD’S SAKE How blessed is he who reaches the fourth degree of love, wherein one loves himself only in God!” for even an instant to lose thyself, as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial.And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: …It is therefore impossible to offer up all our being to God, to yearn altogether for His face, so long as we must accommodate our purposes and aspirations to these fragile, sickly bodies of ours.

Wherefore the soul may hope to possess the fourth degree of love, or rather to be possessed by it, only when it has been clothed upon with that spiritual and immortal body, which will be perfect, peaceful, lovely, and in everything wholly subjected to the spirit. And to this degree no human effort can attain: it is in God’s power to give it to whom He wills. Then the soul will easily reach that highest stage, because no lusts of the flesh will retard its eager entrance into the joy of its Lord, and no troubles will disturb its peace.

He has glimpsed what the mystics will call, “union.” Most will doubt anyone can actually attain that state in this life, when we enter completely into the love of God and love for God that the boundary between self and God vanishes into an ocean of divine joy and love. There is not competition for love here, no contest of wills, only harmony.

I have heard this fourfold description of Bernard’s presented in the context of a surprising reminder that when we love God wholly and completely, as in Bernard’s third degree of love, that we will proceed at last to love ourselves completely and perfectly at last, as God does. That doesn’t seem to be Bernard’s major focus here, but the point remains. To despise one’s life, to collapse into despair, to hate life so much that we want to leave it, is not the way of divine love.

Every suffering soul on this earth, we might say, is sought by the grace of God to correct their jaundiced and toxic confusions about themselves. Think of how many people you may hear who dislike this or that about themselves, the shame of a bad family origin, the pain of a body one has never learned to receive with gratitude. What might this fourth degree, even as something we only know as intuition or possibility, mean that we could say to those who suffer and struggle? “If only you could see yourself as God does,” I have sometimes said to a weeping young person, full of pain over something they had to struggle against.

“Let yourself be loved.” Right relationship is the key. To denigrate oneself is to subtly slip into a strange idolatry for one with poor self-image—judge and Lord over one’s self-understanding. At once, both worthlessness and godlike control over the final verdict on the universe and reality.

          To let ourselves be properly loved requires humility—to accept what is given to us. That this must be said in these times is a clue to how destructive our age has become to human beings. Many carry a sense of unworthiness born of bad religion, terrible suffering, and bad messages that bombard them for life. But it is the believing it that is the destructive consequence. At some point, for spiritual recovery, we must throw aside these mental constructions and simply begin a quest to see things as they might be.

          “You are valuable and loved. That is what the gospel says. That is God’s verdict. According to Romans 8, God created a universe and subjected it to these terrible risks of suffering and decay, in order to create the beauty and glory that might be and become from it.

          So this introduces a revolution in the soul. “I am not what my abuser said I am. I am not worthless as I somehow came to misinterpret my circumstances. I am not what my junior high bullies told me, or my tormenter, or my overprotective parent who gave me the unintentional message that I was not able to fight my own battles in life.”

          There is a universe of difference between ego and egotism. Narcissism is not too much self—it is an utterly broken and damaged emptiness masquerading as a person. Ego, in the Freudian sense, and clarified by Erikson’s work, is the simple interactive capacity of the self with the actual world “out there.”

Notes

Barth, Karl.  Church Dogmatics, I: 2.   Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,

            Beck, James R.  Jesus and Personality Theory: Exploring the Five-Factor Model.  Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1999.

Bernard of Clairvaux, The Four Loves

Brueggemann, Walter, et. al., Texts for Preaching: Lectionary Commentary, Year A, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1995, 541-543.

            Cranfield, C. E. B.  Commentary on Romans: The International Critical Commentary, vol. 2: 674-679.

            Luther, Martin.  Commentary on Romans.  Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Kregel Publications, 1954.