“I hate myself”

You must have uttered this phrase at least once in your life. I know I have, and more, much more than once.

But did we really mean it? Perhaps we did, on the spur of the moment. The moment might have bared its spur after we did something nasty, shameful, unkind, something we knew was wrong, something we knew we’d regret later.

Hence the precise way to describe our feelings about ourselves would have been “I hate what I’ve done” or perhaps even “I hate myself for what I’ve done.”

The sentence in the title is shorthand for that, but it’s misleading shorthand. For we tend not to hate ourselves in general. We may not like ourselves very much, but we still love ourselves. After all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything.

Such love is tantamount to knowledge mixed with hope that things will end up well for us. We may be occasionally nasty, dishonest and rude, but we wish ourselves well regardless.

This simple observation provides a clue to some essential Judaeo-Christian commandments, which otherwise may seem baffling. Take “thou shalt love thy neighbor”, for example.

What, any neighbour? What if he tosses his rubbish into your garden, blocks your driveway with his van, plays intolerable music full blast through the night? How can you love that sad excuse for a human being?

By taking another look at the commandment, is the answer to that. For the form in which it’s usually cited is truncated. The full text of what Leviticus said is actually: “though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” [my emphasis].

That’s why I started out by trying to understand how we love ourselves. For this is the only way in which we are expected to love our neighbour, figurative or literal – in spite of everything he is or does. We may hate all those things, but Leviticus says, if not in so many words, that we must wish him well in the end.

Here we must define ‘the end’, which means moving from the Old Testament on to the New. For, according to Scripture, just as there is death in life, there is life in death. The ultimate purpose of life is salvation, which gives it a teleological dimension that continues undamaged after physical demise.

Such is the ultimate meaning of a happy end to one’s life: if it’s to be happy, it’s not the end. Thus loving our neighbour only means wishing him ultimate salvation, not shrugging with benign indifference at the awful things he may be doing.

This explains Christ’s embellishment of Leviticus, who only extended love to one’s neighbour. St Matthew records Jesus’s words as saying: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

To any outsider this commandment sounds counterintuitive, to put it mildly. It also sounds like at least a correction of Leviticus, if not its outright denial. It’s neither though. What Christ said was simply a logical development, taking Leviticus to the next rational step.

The key is in the words “…pray for them…”. Pray for what exactly? That they stop doing those ghastly things to us? Such a prayer would be an exercise in futility, for those reprobates’ actions are a matter of their own relationship with God, not ours.

The only possible thing you could pray for is that, for all the horrible things that man has done, he will be saved in the end. In other words, it’s the same plea you enter not only for your neighbour, but also for yourself.

This explains why treating Christianity as pacifism is a woeful misunderstanding. Christ himself was unequivocal on the subject: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

This means Christ knew that his arrival would be divisive. Some people would accept it, others would turn against them with hatred.

They too ought to be loved, in the same sense in which we love ourselves and our neighbours. But this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be resisted, with violence if necessary.

Violence is evil, but it’s to be condoned when it prevents greater evil. Moreover, perpetrating such violence doesn’t contradict the commandment to love our enemies.

This is indirectly hinted at in Matthew 10: 28: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The final reckoning is again relegated to life eternal, not life here and now. The worst fate to befall a man isn’t the destruction of his body in this life, say on the battlefield. It’s the destruction of “both soul and body in hell” – which is to say denial of salvation.

This is something a soldier fighting for a just cause mustn’t wish on his enemy even as he tries to kill him. Killing an enemy under such circumstances doesn’t mean not loving him in the sense of wishing him salvation.

This understanding lies at the foundation of the Augustinian (later also Thomist) concept of just war. That’s how some of the greatest minds in history reconciled just war – but only that kind – with the notion of Christian love and the commandments postulating it.

The same argument can be applied to capital punishment, which neither Testament treats as either cruel or unusual. A campaign against it can only proceed from purely materialist premises. That such a campaign has succeeded throughout much of the West proves that much of the West is indeed purely materialist.

A materialist regards as the ultimate tragedy the premature end to physical life, not denial of salvation in life everlasting. An executioner’s axe was seen in Christendom as an instrument of divine justice, which is to say an aspect of divine love.

The judge passing the death sentence, the priest administering the last rites to the condemned man and indeed the executioner prayed God had mercy on his soul. That way they expressed Christian love – not only for the man to be executed, but also for the society he had wronged.

History’s greatest Christian thinker (in my view greatest thinker tout court), St Thomas Aquinas, saw no contradiction between any Christian commandment and capital punishment. Natural moral law stated unreservedly that the state had the duty (and therefore the right) to protect its citizens not only from external enemies, but also from internal criminals. The former might have involved just war; the latter the death penalty, equally just.

Our materialist world equates the abolition of the death penalty with a high moral ground, which is simply wrong. For example, the death penalty was abolished in Stalin’s USSR between 1947 and 1950, which was one of the most evil periods in human history.

Millions of innocent victims were at the time tortured to death either quickly, in Lubyanka cellars, or slowly, in concentration camps. Whole nations were being deported to a slow, but certain, death. But there was no death penalty on the books, to the hosannahs chanted by Western ‘liberals’.

By the same token, the death penalty doesn’t exist in Putin’s Russia, one of the world’s most evil extant regimes. This doesn’t prevent it from murdering people extrajudicially, nor from waging genocidal war.

This is yet another proof of how hopelessly contradictory modern, which is to say, materialist liberalism is. And how logical are Christian dogmas, when one bothers to explore them in sufficient depth.