Age-old debates over self-love and self-denial continue in the Christian community. Many regard self-love as incompatible with the self-sacrifice of Christ. Others, especially feminists and liberation theologians, contest the notion that self-sacrifice is the test of authentic Christian love. The resolution to this dilemma, argues Gerald Schlabach, lies with St. Augustine.
In this engaging book, Schlabach examines how Augustine reconciled self-love and self-denial in a unified Christian love. He demonstrates the crucial role that continence played in Augustine's teaching. It is much more than an attitude toward sexuality. Rather, it is the operative mode of Augustinian caritas.
Addressing historical theology, contemporary Christian ethics, feminism, and pastoral considerations, Schlabach traces the role that self-denial played in Augustine's teaching. He argues that an integration of self-love and self-denial enables us to distinguish true Christian selfdenial from mere victimization and that the good we seek when we love -- whether directed toward neighbor, enemy, or self -- is not self-serving but rather a participation in a mutual relationship with God and His creation.
Through this critical retrieval of Augustine's thought, Schlabach shows that self-denial is meaningful only when ordered to a higher good, as when Christ endured the suffering of the cross. He demonstrates practical applications of how charity working through continence can maintain right selflove and proper self-denial in our daily lives, and proposes that Christian self-sacrifice is the willing acceptance of a good derived from working on behalf of others.
Schlabach rediscovers a unity of Christian love and opens up new resources even for readers skeptical of St. Augustine. His work offers provocative reading for all who are concerned with keeping their lives and work rooted in the Christian tradition of love and service.
"Gerald Schlabach has written a book that reconciles two often estranged friends: self-love and self-denial. One might say that he records his conversation with Augustine of Hippo and with present-day Christians about how anyone might sustain a real-life commitment to Jesus Christ. While Jesus Christ remains the goal of all such dedication, Augustine's view of love within community gives us a way to integrate self-denial with self-love in everyday experience, whether the cross to be carried is violence in the home, a divided church community, or a grasping world. This is a book for those who struggle to serve neighbor, who need to re-focus self- denial, or who have questions for Augustine about love." --Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A., Collegio S. Monica
"Love is the hand of the soul. Helping us understand why Augustine's account of love and continence are inseparable Schlabach restores the Christological, and thus, the eschatological context necessary to understand why Augustine contends that in grasping we are grasped. Yet as marvelous as this book is for helping us understand Augustine, just as important, Schlabach helps us understand ourselves. This book is a model of the kind of historical work we so desperately need to avoid the sterile debates in ethics characteristic of our time." --Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
"While Schlabach has used Nygren and contemporary feminist theologians as his protagonists in this critical study of Augustine's view of self-love and self-denying agape, he has at the same time elaborated the tension that has existed in Protestant pietism and Anabaptism before it. The author's own Anabaptist perspective, which seeks to take Jesus' ethic of suffering love literally, places him in the interesting and fresh position of criticizing Augustine's view of love from the perspective sympathetic to the Donatists whom he vigorously if not violently opposed." -- C. Norman Kraus, Professor Emeritus, Goshen College
"Schlabach seeks to affirm both self-denial, emphasized inhis own Mennonite and other Protestant tradtions, and self-love, stressed by feminists and many Catholic traditions. He focuses, surprisingly, on Augustine, whom both Mennonites and feminists critique, not least for his eventual approval of imperial coercion. Schlabach argues persuasively that Augustine sometimes contradicted his own principle of caritas, where one both denies oneself, following Jesus' cross, and loves oneself as the object of the love bestowed through that cross." -- Thomas Finger, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia
