Love Of God And Neigbor

[Debra Little]

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

I found a copy of the Baltimore catechism online and have made it into a Pdf document so I can have it for study without having to look it up.

I was just reading the part about loving God and our neighbor. The catechsim ( and the gospels) tell us to love God above all for His own
sake and our neighbors as ourselves.

My question is this: Is it good enough to love our neighbors as ourselves? First of all we suffer from too much of self.
Secondly isn't it better to love others as Jesus loves us?

[TeresaBenedicta]

Dear Debra,

Great questions!

The catechism answer comes from the Gospel of Matthew, when a Pharisee, coming to test Jesus, asks him what is the greatest commandment. [i]And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.[/i] [b]Matthew 22:37-39[/b] This teaching is also present in Mark's Gospel, chapter 12 verses 28-34.

But with your questions, you are knocking at the core of the problem of love- this is a question that the medievals struggled with, chewed on, and eventually brought forth a complete theology of love on!! The great Cistercian monastics (St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Aelred of Rievaulx, etc) called their way of life a [i]schola dilectionis[/i], or a "school of love." And it was all in an effort to live out these two great commandments given by Jesus.

You correctly point out that our love of self [i]isn't[/i] perfect. In fact, it is what is called "disordered." We love ourselves with a disordered, imperfect love. So how is it that we should love our neighbors as ourselves?

I want to answer your question using St. Bernard's contemplative theology of love, since what you ask is at the core of his thought.

In his work, [i]On Loving God[/i], St. Bernard teaches that there is a four-step progression in the life of charity. We begin this journey to perfect charity with an imperfect love of self. We love ourselves for own sakes. Bernard calls it a "carnal love". This love flows naturally into the second degree of love, which is loving God for our own benefit. We begin to love God because we love ourselves and loving God brings us good. The third degree of love is loving God for God's own sake. Of this degree, St. Bernard writes, "Man’s frequent needs oblige him to invoke God more often and approach him more frequently. This intimacy moves man to taste and discover how sweet the Lord is. Tasting God’s sweetness entices us more to pure love than does the urgency of our own needs." The fourth and final degree of love is that man loves himself for God's sake.

So we see love come around full circle. What began with an imperfect love of self, progressed to both a perfect love of God and love of self, for God's sake.

I believe it is the latter love of self that Jesus refers to in the second commandment of love; not the disordered love of self. We are to love God with a perfect love, we are to love ourselves with a perfect love, and we are to love our neighbor with a perfect love. We love God for his own sake, and we love ourselves and our neighbors for God's sake. This is the perfection of love.

I hope that helps!