The refrain has been repeated often enough over the past 50 years that it now passes for common sense: The big problem we face is that we don’t love ourselves enough. We must learn to respect ourselves, love ourselves, and accept ourselves. You are enough in a world that tells you you’re imperfect or needy in some way.
There’s an element of truth in this counsel, especially for those who assume the religious path requires self-loathing, or the kind of self-hatred that diminishes our sense of worth as people made in God’s image. But then there are these unsettling words from Jesus himself:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, and even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26, emphasis added)
Since Jesus also told us to love our neighbors as ourselves (implying that love for self is natural, even good), his requirement here cannot mean an unqualified hatred of one’s own life. Nevertheless, in our context today, we’re too quick to explain away rather than sit with this startling saying.
Augustine and the Fear We’ve Lost
Augustine, in a famous sermon “on the ten strings of the harp,” preached at Chusa around AD 420, dared to read Jesus in a way that resists our instinct to soften the blow. He put forward a striking interpretation of Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount about “[settling] quickly with your adversary” (Matt. 5:25–26). God’s Word is our adversary “because it commands things against the grain which [we] don’t do.”
Augustine turned to Psalm 86:15, noting how popular it was to emphasize that the Lord is “compassionate and gracious, abounding in faithful love.” But the text goes on to say “and truth.” The Lord abounds in truth. If the text had stopped before that line, Augustine told his listeners,
You would already be devoting yourself to your sins with a feeling of security and freedom. You would do what you like, you would enjoy the world as much as you were allowed to, or as much as your lusts dictated to you. And if anyone tried to scold and frighten you with some good advice into restraining yourself from the intemperate and dissolute pursuit of your own desires and your abandonment of your God, you would stand there among the scolding voices, and as though you had heard the divine judgment with a shameless look of triumph on your face, you would read from the Lord’s book: “Why are you trying to scare me about our God? He is merciful and compassionate . . .”
Augustine believed the psalmist’s emphasis on truth rules out “the smugness of misplaced presumption” and instead awakens “the anxiety of sorrow for sin.” A healthy fear of the Lord must remain, even if we aspire to follow God’s commands out of love rather than fear of judgment.
When God Refuses to Be Made in Our Image
But is it really possible to follow the Lord out of love and not fear? Back in Augustine’s time, people were saying, If the Lord really wanted us to obey him out of love and not fear, he wouldn’t have made all these threats against sin. He would have come to be indulgent to everybody and pardon everybody, and he wouldn’t send anyone to hell.
To this presumption, Augustine responded with a majestic vision of God’s holy otherness. And here is where our modern preference for “self-love” over “self-hatred” comes under scrutiny in his sermon:
The one who is unjust wants to make God unjust too. God wants to make you like him, and you are trying to make God like you. Be satisfied with God as he is, not as you would like him to be. You are all twisted, and you want God to be like what you are, not like what he is. But if you are satisfied with him as he is, then you will correct yourself and align your heart along that straight rule from which you are now all warped and twisted. Be satisfied with God as he is, love him as he is.
For Augustine, the issue wasn’t whether we love or hate ourselves but whether we love God and are satisfied in him—and then learn to see ourselves in light of his holiness. It’s the desire for God’s beauty that drives us to conform ourselves to his will.
Then Augustine presses further and makes us modern readers squirm:
God doesn’t love you as you are, he hates you as you are. That’s why he is sorry for you, because he hates you as you are, and wants to make you as you are not yet. Let him make you . . . the sort of person you are not yet. . . . God hates you as you are but loves you as he wants you to be, and that is why he urges you to change. Come to an agreement with him, and begin by having good will and hating yourself as you are. Let this be the first clause of your agreement with the word of God, that you begin by first of all hating yourself as you are. When you too have begun to hate yourself as you are, just as God hates that version of you, then you are already beginning to love God himself as he is.
Everything about that paragraph jars us. God hates us as we are? And we should agree with him and hate ourselves too? What about the reality of God loving us as sinners?
Hating the Fever, Not the Patient
Augustine quickly clarifies by turning to the metaphor of illness.
Think of sick people. Sick people hate themselves as they are, being sick, and begin by coming to an agreement with the doctor. Because the doctor too hates them as they are. That’s why he wants them to get better, because he hates them being feverish; the doctor persecutes the fever in order to liberate the patient. So too avarice, so lust, so hatred, covetousness, lechery, so the futility of the shows in the amphitheater, are all fevers of your soul. You ought to hate them as the doctor does. In this way you are in agreement with the doctor, you make an effort with the doctor, you listen gladly to what the doctor orders, you gladly do what the doctor orders, and as your health improves you begin even to enjoy his instructions.
Augustine doesn’t think of the self as a static thing, to be either loved or hated wholesale. It’s a dynamic reality, shaped by what we love, so that at every moment, our self is in a particular state: a state of illness, a state of health; a state of sin, a state of righteousness; a state of struggle, a state of rest.
Seen in this light, to “hate yourself when sick” makes sense if you despise the state of sickness and its effects. You want health. You long for your self to be in a different state. And therefore, the compassionate doctor is right to hate your fever and to work relentlessly for your healing.
Courage to Hate Our Fevers
Recovery begins with the desire to be a different version of yourself, to progress into a better state. Healing demands that doctor and patient agree to “persecute” the disease. Health requires hatred—not of the person God has made but of the sinful disease that disfigures that person.
Augustine’s language is severe. The Puritan pastor Thomas Goodwin’s is more tender, though no less serious. Goodwin writes,
All Christ’s anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it. His pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father to a child that has a loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy. He hates not the member, for it is part of his body, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected all the more. The greater the misery, the greater the pity when the person is beloved.
To put it another way: God loves the person he created you to be, and he hates what sin has done to you. His compassion toward you is matched by his relentless opposition to the disease that enslaves you.
The question that comes to us from a sermon more than a millennium old is this: Do we hate our fevers enough?
Do we hate the distorting effects of sin?
Do we hate the anxiety-addled, lust-ridden, money-obsessed, power-hungry, self-righteous, selfish, sinful versions of ourselves that keep us in a diseased state and prevent us from becoming who God calls us to be?
Or do we presume on God’s kindness, forgetting that he abounds in faithful love and truth—that his Word stands over us in judgment, even as the Word made flesh has come to heal?
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