According to George MacDonald in Lilith, self-loathing (repentance) is good. It is a step forward in the forgetting of the self.
“Those are not the tears of repentance!.. Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith
I will never call GMac unorthodox again.
Here’s another from Gmac:
Our neighbor is our refuge; self is our demon-foe ~~ George MacDonald
I’m not sure those are the same thing at all. We can turn away - repent - of many things, such as fear, lack of love etc. that do not involve loathing but certainly require a change.
Repentance is turning away from. It’s a change of mind. We turn from sin to Christ. Our focus shifts from evil self to God and others. We deny self (lose old self) See GMac on Self Denial in Sermons. We despise self and turn away from self to Christ beholding the glory of Christ we are transformed from glory to glory in His image. The mentally healthy and righteous Gmac disagrees with your unorthodox views. So does the righteous Job in the book of Job after he repents for His theological errors.
Then Job replied to the Lord:
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
> Therefore I despise myself
> and repent in dust and ashes.
It’s a proper self-loathing. Not all self-loathing.
I change the title to "proper self-loathing Dave.
“Self-Loathing” whether “Proper” or “Improper” is not tantamount to “Repentance.”
“Repentance” means “Mind Change.” You can change your mind about something—even about the way you have been living, and thus change your way of living. “Self-Loathing” has no part in repentance.
Indeed, a person who hates himself has no desire to change his way of living. He feels that he’s no good and worthless and unable to change.
Well, feeling bad about yourself can lead you to change. George MacDonald says this along with the righteous Job. It’s also in this article from a psychologist in “Psychology Today”:
Quote from the article:
In other words, self-hatred is psychologically damaging but it can also make you more motivated to change.
The following is part of an article from www.healthyplace.com/blogs
When you have low self-esteem, you dislike yourself. You struggle to see any of your positive qualities or you diminish them. And you turn yourself into a bad person by giving yourself negative traits you don’t have or by exaggerating those you do. Any mistake you make is blown out of proportion. You always beat yourself up.
Self-loathing or self-hatred is something quite different. When you deeply hate yourself, you cannot stand yourself. You view yourself as the absolute worst person on the planet. People with low self-esteem may not want to be friends with themselves. But those who carry the burden of self-hatred turn themselves into an enemy. Self-hatred encourages feelings of intense rage, disgust, and vitriol towards oneself. It becomes impossible to believe that you are valuable, lovable, or capable of anything.
People may end up hating themselves if their low self-esteem spirals out of control and goes unchallenged. Self-hatred is also a symptom of many mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, depression, and borderline personality disorder.2
Self-loathing can make you vulnerable to suicide because it tends to foster beliefs about how you’re a burden, a failure, broken, and unsalvageable. If you hate yourself, you may want to do harm to yourself, which can take the form of self-injury, engaging in behavior that could potentially be fatal, such as excessive drug and alcohol abuse. When you think of yourself as this unforgivable, despicable character you may genuinely wish you never existed and think you don’t deserve to live.
In this way, self-hatred can lead to suicidal thoughts, which, if left unchecked, can be taken as sacrosanct and authoritative. Not everyone who has suicidal thoughts will make plans and act on them, but, of course, these thoughts are always precursors to the act of suicide. People who experience self-loathing are often suffering immensely. They would do anything to make the pain go away. Suicide becomes a viable option.
Preventing suicide depends on working with the deep-seated issue of unworthiness. The emotional hardship of self-hatred can be soothed and resolved in all sorts of ways. Isolation lets self-hatred fester. This is why it’s crucial that people who struggle with self-loathing surround themselves with people who will lend them an empathetic ear – this could be friends, family, a spouse, a neighbor, a therapist, a support group, or an online community.
Well, the righteous job and George Macdonald disagree with that. They are talking about a proper self loathing like the psychologist in the article psychology today. It’s also been my experience.
Furthermore, although persons should consider their own poverty and worthlessness, they should not be grieved or depressed, but rather they should feel happy and consoled; for You daily choose the humble and those who are despised by the world to be Your special friends and servants. ~~ Thomas A. Kempis - Roman Catholic Monk
Clearly Kempis says we find our value in Christ.
In Unspoken Sermons “Self Denial” GMac is speaking to his self:
If I were to mind what you say, I should soon be sick of you; even now I am ever and anon disgusted with your paltry, mean face, which I meet at every turn. No! let me have the company of the Perfect One, not of you! of my elder brother, the Living One! I will not make a friend of the mere shadow of my own being! Good-bye, Self! I deny you, and will do my best every day to leave you behind me.
More from the humble Catholic monk Thomas A. Kempis in “The Imitation of Christ”. Next to the Bible “The Imitation of Christ” is the most read book by humanity. It has helped millions:
But if they are firmly grounded in humility and filled with charity; if they seek purely the worship of God - looking upon themselves as nothing and sincerely despising themselves; and if they desire to be despised by others, then they may really hope that they have advanced spiritually and that in the end they will have the reward of God for all their labor.
I have often told you, and I repeat it again: forsake yourself and renounce yourself, and you shall enjoy great interior peace.
To go into more detail on how we empty the self (die to self) and find our sense of dignity and identity in being a child of God I recommend the contributing scholar to this forum Psychologist Richard Beck:
I think the self has to die. That’s what the bible seems to think. There must be a letting go, a surrendering, an emptying of the self. All efforts to define the self by acts of justification, the accumulation of evidence and data that the self is significant, have to be renounced. ~~ Richard Beck
As someone who has been diagnosed as schizoaffective and received tremendous healing I have to say that the psychologist Richard Beck is spot on here. Here’s the full article:
Self-Esteem as violence
experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/09/self-esteem-as-violence.html
The sense of dignity and value we are looking for comes when we are in Christ. As the psychologist Richard Beck states it:
As Thurman describes it, the eccentric identity - “the ground of personal dignity…a profound sense of personal worth” that comes to us when we receive our identities as children of God - immunizes the self from “churning fear”. Anxiety is replaced by a state of relaxation. And this relaxation - grounded in the fact that the “individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs” - inoculates the ego from fear. This relaxation or peace comes from the “awareness of being a child of God,” which stabilizes the ego and "results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power.
Self inflation causes you to be violent. When ego is turned inward then you become violent against yourself. All sin stems from ego. The solution is to deflate ego. From humility all forms of virtue spring and flourish. Those with low self-esteem paradoxically feel that way because of an intense desire to be great.
Who is arguing against that? But the fact is that neither Kempis nor George MacDonald advocate self-hatred. Indeed Kempis states in your quote of him that a person who recognizes his lack “should not be grieved or depressed” whereas, a person who hates himself is grieved and depressed.
George MacDonld says self loathing is good:
Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith
Here’s another from Gmac:
Our neighbor is our refuge; self is our demon-foe ~~ George MacDonald
Kempis explicitly teaches a despising of self in “The Imitation of Christ”. Next to the Bible “The Imitation of Christ” is the most read book by humanity. It has helped millions:
But if they are firmly grounded in humility and filled with charity; if they seek purely the worship of God - looking upon themselves as nothing and sincerely despising themselves; and if they desire to be despised by others, then they may really hope that they have advanced spiritually and that in the end they will have the reward of God for all their labor.
I have often told you, and I repeat it again: forsake yourself and renounce yourself, and you shall enjoy great interior peace
So does righteous Job:
Then Job replied to the Lord:
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.> Therefore I despise myself
> and repent in dust and ashes.
It’s a proper self-loathing that leads to repentance. Not all self-loathing. Just as the Ph.D. in psychology describes here in “Psychology Today”. Feeling bad about yourself can lead you to change.
Quote from the article:
In other words, self-hatred is psychologically damaging but it can also make you more motivated to change.
Properly used hate can be good. From “Psychologist World”:
Hate by itself is the emotional dynamic of the ability to sustain long periods of concentration and meditation. It does not require an object to focus on (it mirrors pure love in this respect) ; it is a general-purpose tool for cutting positive attachments, especially in relationships (for example, pride in hate mode rejects another person, whereas hate by itself rejects any pleasant attachment to the other person). Hate produces clear thinking and strengthens a person’s will power. It supports the desire for solitude. It cools the mind and may easily be mistaken for a mild sense of peace. It is likely to be the prevailing mood when a meditator claims that they are no longer acting from a sense of ego. The skilful way of using hate is to clear the mind of redundant attachments and desires. https://www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/types-hate
Holly Tree, I am beginning to think that what seems to be disagreement between us is actually a different understanding of the word “self.” I have a pdf of Kempis’ writing “The Imitation of Christ.” I did a search for every instance of the word “self.” In nearly every case, he refers to “selfishness” that inner attitude that seeks to maximize self-interest and pleasure. However in one instance, he uses the word “self” in the way that I was using it in opposing “self-hate.” In that one instance, he calls it his “inner self.” He wrote, “Then shall all my inner self be glad when my soul is perfectly united with God.”
Would you agree that we should not hate our “inner self”? If we did, we would become ineffective, and not even attempt to serve God.
In most cases, Kempis uses “self” to denote that selfish part of us that seeks to please itself rather than God. I fully agree that that “self” should be hated and eliminated. Here is what I found in Kempis about that self and all of which I fully agree with:
I agree. We find our true inner self “new self” by turning outward not inward. We despise the demon self and turn away from it towards God. This is repentance. We turn our focused attention off of self and on to God and others. When we lose our selves we find ourselves. Everything balances out. We love God above all else and our neighbor as our self. (true self). This is when we find a proper self esteem. Beholding the glory of Christ we are being transformed into His image from glory to glory. We find our inner self but this isn’t our focus. God is. We are transformed when we concentrate our focus and attention on Christ. Here’s how C.S. Lewis put it:
There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints. ~~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, page 226
Here Lewis captures the paradox of self-forgetfulness. By turning our focus outwards towards Christ we become our truest selves. We die to self and are resurrected. God wants us to become the creations he intended all along. Valuable, dignified, good, reflections of Christ. We love (take care of) our true self.
A good book on losing yourself to find yourself:
Just ordered Lilith by George MacDonald. GMac is solid. A true Christian
For those following this thread is a continuation of this one:
An article from “Psychology Today” showing that those with high self esteem (narcissists) are violent. It’s a myth that violent and aggressive people have low self esteem:
quote from the article:
It is important to base beliefs on scientific evidence rather than intuition, common sense, gut feelings, hunches, instincts, intuitions, and premonitions, which can often lead us astray. Although many people believe that aggressive and violent people have low self-esteem, they do not. Aggressive people tend to be narcissists. Narcissists think they are special people who deserve special treatment. When they don’t get the respect they think they are entitled to, narcissists lash out at others in an aggressive manner.