Never. I will never envy you. Envy is a terrible thing, a terrible sin. I will love you. As I looked at the stars, and tried to see the hosts singing in the Heavens, I prayed for the Angels to come to me as they would to anyone on the Earth. A great sweetness came over me, a quiet in my heart. I thought to myself, all this World is the Temple of the Lord. All the Creation is his Temple. I was all right. It was early morning. The stars were still there. One of the most insulting things a person can say about another in our culture without using profanity is “Man, that guy really loves himself!” It is interesting that so many of us from very different kinds of background and having various levels of sophistication consider love of the self to be a condemnable quality. In Christian circles, for example, much is said or written about the corrupted and sinful nature of mortals showing forth in one’s acts of self-love. So strong has this tendency been within the Christian church that if an individual church member were asked what the most basic or central problem of humankind is, one’s answer would likely include some form of the phrase love of self. Loving one’s self has not only become a sin, but the sin! This view of love of self would appear to have developed in spite of the teaching of Jesus, for when he said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Mark 12.31) he appears to have recognized a legitimate place in life for loving ourselves in addition to loving God and others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

At this point some might state, “Well, what difference does it make if we use the term self-love instead of selfishness or self-centeredness? We know what we mean by it.” However, more in involved than a mere loose use of words. For we are constantly exposed throughout our lives to this idea that it is wrong to love ourselves. Children are told by parents that they ought to act primarily in terms of other people’s interest and not consider their own desires and their own feelings. The child finds one’s self unable to do this and feel guilty. One may also feel quite confused when one looks about one and sees people, including one’s parents, appearing to act most of the time in terms of their own self-interest. It is important to challenge the idea that loving ourselves is wrong, because this concept is damaging to the human personality. For one thing, it leads to the glorification of self-hate. Many who were reared in the Christian Faith were exposed as children to a gospel song, the words of which are sometimes changed in more recent various. However, formerly it went like this: “Alas did my Savior bleed? And did my sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” To have people sing about themselves as worms would certain appear to be an encouragement to them to hate themselves. Yet it would hardly seem to be an accurate description of the religion of Jesus, who was accused (and correctly!) of being a friend of the greatly despised tax collectors and sinners.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

We have already examined the damage that self-hate does to the human personality and the deteriorating effect that it has on our relationships with each other. The implication that we ought not to love ourselves but ought rather to hate ourselves does us the disservice tending to perpetuate self-hate, our most basic neurosis. One of the problems arising from the glorification of self-hate is that it often leads to morbid and unproductive feelings of guilt. Particularly in religious settings this often become so pervasive a feeling that an individual will describe one as feeling guilty about everything one does. Such nonspecific feeling of guilt would appear to serve no other purpose than to rob the individual of the freedom to enjoy life. We already have seen that symptoms of personality disturbances such as bragging and bullying are not evidence that the person thinks too highly of one, but rather that one hates one’s self. The same is true of the person who has qualities that cause us to describe one as selfish or self-centered. Selfishness does not result from love of self; it is self-hate masquerading at self-love, for the selfish person is very insecure on the deeper levels of one’s personality. One is not in love with one’s self. One has never experienced one’s worth; because of one’s insecurity one must center all one’s life and interest about one. One must be selfish. Everything must turn to one’s own advantage to protect one’s self from the nagging haunting suspicion that one is worthless. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

The individual is like the miser who clings to every cent, not because one gets a healthy satisfaction from one’s skill in earning one’s living, but because one has an overwhelming distrust of the future and of one’s ability to provide. And just as the miser cannot enjoy one’s money and the thing it could provide, the selfish person cannot fully enjoy human relationships because of one’s lack of trust in one’s self. Another damaging aspect of self-hate is that it often prevents us from realistic appraisals of ourselves that could lead to growth and maturity. When we hate ourselves, we become reluctant to look closely at ourselves because we cannot tolerate what we see. So instead we tend to build false images of ourselves, often based on some pseudoconfidence. As we develop these shaky images of ourselves, built on the flimsiest of foundations, we have to build strong defenses against seeing how empty and meaningless they really are. We bitterly resent and reject any criticism or apparent criticism that appears to threaten our house of cards.  If we saw them clearly, we do not allow ourselves to see things about ourselves that we might want to change, things that may be painfully apparent to others. Our attitude toward our images might be compared to the child’s feeling about a blanket that has become important to one’s feeling of security. One drags it around with one wherever one goes. It becomes dirty and tattered and an embarrassment to one’s parents, but for one these deficiencies simply do not exist. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

We are often in a similar, but less humorous, predicament with our self-images. We are so certain at the deeper level of our personalities that our real selves are unlovable that we show the World spurious selves to which we cling desperately lest they be tampered with and our fragile security lost. We do everything possible to conceal our self-hate from ourselves. In this way we prevent ourselves from heathy appraisal of our abilities and liabilities, which might lead to personality growth. We become our own worst enemies. And often it might be said of us, as one novelist described a character, “He was not so much a human being as a civil war.” It is this war within ourselves brought on by self-hate that keeps us from realizing our potentials more fully. In certain circles one hears much praise of selflessness as a human motive. It is said that the ultimate in goodness is to have no concerns for one’s own welfare and to be concerned only for the welfare of others. It is unlikely that such indifference to the self can exist. And it is likely that the ideal exists, because we have tended to think that self-interest and the interest of others are mutually exclusive. We have been taught to say to ourselves, “If I am concerned with following my own feelings and satisfying my own desires, I will be destructive to those around me. Therefore, if I am to love another person I must suppress my own interests and be as they want me to be.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

If we could see that even this effort to subjugate ourselves to others is a striving to enhance ourselves and gain a feeling of self-worth, we would become more realistic about the all-important role of self-interest in our lives. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, begins with these two verses: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness!” Thus begins what is certainly one of the most human, richest and beautiful classic that we humans are heir to, no matter what our language. In exile from Florence for political reasons, Dante found his personal hardship turned into a great gift to humanity. He wrote this epic not only in poetry but in what would seem to be the most arduous kind of poetry. Each of the three parts, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, consist of thirty-three Cantos, each one of which is made up of forty or fifty three-line verses. Each of the Cantos ends in the word “Star”: “And we walked out once more beneath the Stars” ends the first book, “perfectly pure, and ready for the Stars” the second, and the third, “by the love that moves the Sun and the other Stars.” It would seem that such architectonics would make the Comedy rigid and hard to read. However, it does just the opposite. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

The piercing of human experience so deeply that it can be expressed only in poetry means pushing one’s thoughts to a deeper form. A tension is required to write such poetry, and this tension in turn requires the poet to express one’s thoughts on a deeper level of art. I have said earlier that art is arriving at form in human life. The fact that the poet, in this case Dante, confronts the cadence, the sense of proportion, the form of poetry, requires Dante’s feeling for the depths of the human soul. Poetry comes out of one’s most profound sense of being alive. The self-perception, the depth of intuition, the capacity to experience suffering and joy so deeply—for all these reasons poetry speaks out of levels which yield us new truth every time we read it. “Deep calleth unto the deep” describes the experience of being a poet and the reading of poetry. In the expression of beauty through literature, we also find a basis for reconciliation among nations. In this country we, indeed, hate the very idea of a police state, as Russian was cruelly called the evil empire by President Reagan. However, let us not forget that the great contribution of Russia to the World is its surge in the arts in the second half of the nineteenth century. This produced Tolstoy’s War and Peace, often called the greatest novel ever written and the source of enchantment for millions, plus the amazingly penetrating psychological novels of Dostoyevsky such as The Brothers Karamazov, plus the important dramas of Chekhov, which has made such a contribution to the stage. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

Russia’s many other works of literature are paralleled by their musical creativity, which includes Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and host of others. There is surely good reason for the fact that many cultural authorities speak of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century as the Second Renaissance, next in importance only to the Italian Renaissance which launched the modern age. We may well, when we are thinking of beauty which transcends all politics and nations, bravely speak of the great arts as the basis for the reconciliation of the warring factions of humankind. In art and poetry and literature there is, to paraphrase St. Paul with a slightly different meaning, “neither male nor female, neither slave nor free, neither Russian nor American.” It is significant that art is the only human institution which is never destructive. Religions turn into wars, as in the Crusades and the endless holy wars which continue even in our own day. Economic systems set country against country, as is happening now all over the modern World. However, art—not its economic status or prestige status, but art itself—is always a win-win situation, the one human institution which never turns person against persons. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

It is because absence of any finality or intention is the essence of the beauty of the World that Christ told us to behold the rain and the light of the Sun, as they fall without discrimination upon the just and the unjust. This recalls the supreme cry of Prometheus: “The Heavens, where the common orb of day revolves for all.” Christ commands us to imitate this beauty. Plato also in the Timaeus counsels us through contemplation to make ourselves like to the beauty of the World, like to the harmony of the circular movements that cause day and night, months, seasons, and years to succeed each other and return. In these revolutions also, and in their combination, the absence of intention and finality is manifest; pure beauty shines forth. It is because it can be loved by us, it is because it is beautiful, that the Universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of wisdom of the Stoics. We have a Heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that is should be difficult yet possible to love it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9