The Fourth Stage of Love—Love of Self for God’s Sake
The pinnacle of growth in virtuous love is rarified air, a degree of love that is truly mystical and extraordinary. It is a degree of love signifying complete union with God, and is entirely the prerogative of God and God alone. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux says this about the love of self for the sake of God: “How blessed is he who reaches the fourth degree of love, wherein one loves himself only in God!…I would count him blessed and holy to whom such rapture has been vouchsafed in this mortal life, for even an instant to lose yourself, as if you were emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial” (On Loving God).
In other words, this kind of love is entirely supernatural, a pure gift from God, the singular movement of God in our souls not unlike what Saint Teresa of Avila describes when she speaks of passive recollection or the “Prayer of Quiet,” when God takes possession of the soul entirely and the self is purely and effortlessly receptive to God’s presence and action.
Saint Bernard explains further: “In this life, I think, we cannot fully and perfectly obey that precept, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind’ (Luke 10:27). For here the heart must take thought for the body; and the soul must energize the flesh; and the strength must guard itself from impairment. And by God’s favor, must seek to increase. It is therefore impossible to offer up all our being to God, to yearn altogether for His face, so long as we must accommodate our purposes and aspirations to these fragile, sickly bodies of ours. Wherefore the soul may hope to possess the fourth degree of love, or rather to be possessed by it, only when it has been clothed upon with that spiritual and immortal body, which will be perfect, peaceful, lovely, and in everything wholly subjected to the spirit. And to this degree no human effort can attain: it is in God’s power to give it to whom he wills. Then the soul will easily reach that highest stage, because no lusts of the flesh will retard its eager entrance into the joy of its Lord, and no troubles will disturb its peace” (On Loving God).
What I think the great saint is trying to express when he talks about the love of the self for the sake of God is that it represents a seemingly paradoxical state of perfect “selfless self-love,” a mode of love and being in which the self and loving the self only makes sense wholly united to God. The individual self, as it were, is in a sense annihilated in God’s infinite Self, and that the love of self possessed completely by God’s love is what it means to love self for the sake of God. To be sure, after reading Saint Bernard’s description of this fourth stage of love, one comes to the conclusion that such perfection is not ordinarily attainable in this mortal life, but only in Heaven, where God will bring to perfect completion in our glorified bodies the love of self for the sake of God.
How does this fourth and ultimate stage of love relate to us in recovery? In this life, our journeys of conversion in recovery should hopefully look a lot like the second and third stages, a kind of fluid movement in which we are progressively purified of the love of God for the sake of self and come to rest in the love of God for the sake of God. This is why I have come to the understanding in my own journey that recovery is not primarily about sobriety, self-control, and the like vis-a-vis any unhealthy attachment, but rather is a transformation in love, of learning how to love rightly, justly, and mercifully just as we are by God Himself. Indeed, the only point of recovery, of following the Twelve Steps, of serving and caring for others, of receiving the sacraments, and of prayer, is to love God. Nothing more and nothing less.
This is the pathway to sainthood and no doubt we hope that once our mortal life has come to an end, in God’s good and mysterious time, He will finally and wonderfully liberate us from “the bondage of self” and all that detracts and separates us from Him so that in Heaven we may do His will effortlessly and perfectly and continue to love our neighbor as ourselves as we ceaselessly intercede for our brothers and sisters in the Church Militant until all things have been restored in Christ.
“Call me when my life shall fail me. Bid me come to Thee above, and with Thy Saints sing Thy love, world without end. Amen” (from the Anima Christi version by Saint John Henry Newman).
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Grovetown. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for the CIR Daily Reflections. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life and on September 30, 2023, was invested as an Oblate novice of the Order of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA.