“Love yourself!” Nowadays everybody proclaims this everywhere. However, this present day slogan is as inaccurate as the other one in older times when they exclaimed the opposite: “Sacrifice yourself!” which actually meant to hate yourself and love your neighbor (in that way). That old slogan and this new one too are inaccurate. At that time they hammered into us that if you were not ready to sacrifice yourself, you were not ready to love your neighbor yet. But the terrorists were also willing to sacrifice themselves on the 11th of September 2001. Still they were, to put it mildly, neither ready nor able to love their neighbor. Today they hammer into us: love yourself, because if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love your neighbor either. And still, in contrast to this, I constantly meet the kind of people who really look like they can love themselves and boast about it, but then when they observe someone else's need, when they should be more tender to someone else, when they should offer respect, then they are busy only with themselves and seem unable to love. So, where is the truth? It’s both false to love and not to love yourself. But before we would put the question like this, let’s examine what we mean by self-love. The problem is that what we call self-love is actually egoism and narcissism, but by no means self-love or love. We should not mix them up because then we will get nowhere. Self-love is not egoism or narcissism. Because egoism is no more than the instinct of the mother-monkey, according to Béla Hamvas, who bedecks her spoiled child and constantly feeds - really stuffs - him with sweets. Sometimes she even eats him, sometimes she does even worse things with him. This is what we call careful education, or helping service, or even diaconal work.



It’s not enough to know that I have to mean well by my neighbor. To mean well, for instance, even by pushing into the background my egoistic interests sometimes. It’s not enough to know that I mean well by myself and by others, I should also know what is my neighbor's good? That is, what is the good that I should wish for others and for myself? Although egoism and narcissism want the good for the self, they do not know what the good really is. Love is not hysteria, it is not mawkish or a sentimental meaning well, it is not the combination of caressing sentimentalism and bestiality, which is the essence of our egoism. Loving the self is not egoism. Egoism, according to Hamvas, is one’s own hunger for life, the egoist being interested only in himself, in his fear that he will not receive enough and he might miss something, being impregnated with envy towards everybody who’s got more. He lives in this self-yearning and self-rapture which has only the one joy of plundering and swallowing himself and others too. The mother-monkey’s monkey-love. The fuss of the co-dependent that I mean well by another and they don’t even appreciate it. That is why the base of a secure consciousness is missing from the egoist, which is self-esteem. He is just enthusiastic about himself, he just spoils himself, he is just enchanted with himself. This is not egoism; this is the lack of love itself. He who has had a taste of the divine love is the only one who can defeat his own egoism. Only he who partakes of the love of the Savior has a sure and definite conviction that he has been already taken into love, so he can also love. Only that one has the self-esteem and disposition to accept and lovingly understand others and oneself. He was received, so he has arrived. Because only such a person belongs finally somewhere, only such a person lives not for oneself but for love (for others).

“God is love”, this is the biblical formulation about who God is. It means: God’s love is rooted in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, it starts from the cross, from the redemption manifested on the cross, it breaks out as from a spring. I can really see there, on the cross, what love really means and what it means that God is love itself. The Crucified Jesus only makes sense if God is love and not something else. The essence of love born from the crucifixion is that it does not search for what is good for oneself, what is worthy to love, what is honest, what is saintly enough, what is dear to God and to the people, although He could evidently search for it. But he voluntarily chooses to look for what is “dirty”, what is impure and sinful, what is false and disgusting, what is lost and what is worthy to be judged, in a word, what is unworthy to love. He offers himself exactly to those, He saves those, He looks for and saves those and favors those with his mercy, and makes worthwhile to His love, in a word, He loves those who are the least worthy to be loved! So, can we endure this mystery without amazement and thankful astonishment?

The love of God continues to flow to me, then through me to others, in order to become a conscious and receiving attitude toward myself and others, which fills me up with godly dignity and human self-esteem. In this way I can accept anyone else and myself too as we truly are – after God surprised the other person as well as me with His welcome, although neither I nor the other person could ever deserve it. That’s why Jesus said: “I will not send away anyone who comes to me” (John 6:37) Do I believe it? Because when I finally believe and accept this, then I love myself at last, and also others, with the right love.