Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.
Having considered Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s several observations for why we should love God as well as his description of the path of growth in virtuous love, we come now to that for which his work On Loving God is perhaps most well known, the four stages of love in the spiritual life. These four stages can be characterized as follows. There is first the love of self for the self’s sake (self-centered or selfish love). Then comes love of God for the self’s sake (dependence on God). Next is love of God for God’s sake (intimacy with God). And finally, love of self for God’s sake (union with God). As we come to better understand the nature and necessity of the love of God in our lives, and to live it out in the care of souls within community, in the practice of self-discipline, and in an ever deepening and prayerful communion with God, we will begin to make progress from a primarily self-centered way of life to one that is increasingly God-centered. Let us consider Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s four stages of love and see just how helpful they are for illuminating our own journeys of conversion in recovery.
Love of Self for the Self’s Sake
The base state of love presupposed by Saint Bernard is what could be called the love of self for the sake of self. This is, without question, the state of unbridled selfish love, the domain of the unreflective and unrepentant sinner enslaved to the appetites and passions. It describes the existential state of the runaway addict who neither has honest awareness nor genuine concern for the harm their addictive lifestyle has on themselves, their family and friends, and all their relationships and communities. This mode of love is descriptive of the person deeply enmeshed in the aforementioned cyclical trap of self-preoccupation, self-gratification, and self-imposed isolation. Saint Paul aptly describes souls at this base stage of love as “those who live according to the flesh [who] fix their attention on the things of the flesh” (Romans 8:5).
Because the narcissistic gaze is so powerfully transfixed on the self, one simply cannot “see” God’s primacy or recognize His Presence in every facet of one’s life. The “ears of the heart” (to borrow a phrase from Saint Benedict) are quite deaf to the voice of God, drowned out, as it were, in the noise of one’s ego, self-will, and compulsive behavior. Selfish love is the thoroughly “blinding” and “cacophonous” realm of the slavish pursuit of power, pleasure, honor, and wealth (to borrow from Saint Thomas Aquinas) that always serve as the poisonous roots of the spiritual disease of addiction.
One could rightly ask, then, how this utterly self-centered state of being could be understood as a mode of love at all. The answer, for Saint Bernard, is that even though the love of self for the sake of self represents a grotesque caricature of true, selfless, and holy love, it nevertheless arises from a primal and inextinguishable longing for God given to us at our creation and hardwired into our very being. The saint describes it in this way: “To those who long for the presence of God, the thought of him is sweet, yet they are not satiated, but hunger ever more for him who will satisfy them…the faithful soul longs and pants for God, and rests sweetly in the memory of him” (On Loving God). His beautiful words echo the Psalmist who cries out on our behalf: “As a deer longs for running streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come to behold the face of God?” (Psalm 42:2-3).
The truth of the matter, and what Saint Bernard of Clairvaux is alluding to here, is that we cannot separate ourselves from this deepest desire for God. It is in our very nature to want to be with God, to return to the God who made us. It is what Saint Augustine so famously exclaimed in his spiritual autobiography, “You call us to delight in Your praise, and You have made us for yourself, and our hearts find no rest until we rest in You” (Confessions). Fr. Richard Rohlheiser describes it in this way: “This desire [for God] lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and the deep recesses of the soul” (The Holy Longing: The Search for Christian Spirituality). And Dr. Ralph Martin beautifully captures the mystery of our insatiable hunger for God by writing, “The deepest hunger of the human heart is for God. We are created for blessed union with him and anything else leaves a hunger, an emptiness, a ‘falling short,’ that can be satisfied only by God himself. Nothing less than resurrection from the dead will do! Nothing else than eternal life will do! Nothing less than unending love will do! Nothing else than perfection and purity and total fulfillment will do!” (Hunger for God).
Unfortunately, as many of us know all too well, our insatiable longing and hunger for God can go appallingly awry. Our desire for God can become terribly confused and intensely disordered. Plainly speaking, we can become perversely distracted from the one attachment that truly matters—God Himself in His inexhaustible love—and go wildly off track! This is largely due to the after effects of The Fall in our weakness and concupiscence, rendering us, without the grace of God, powerless over the temptations of the world, the Devil, and the flesh. We become fixated, like bugs drawn to a light, on anything and everything other than God Himself that by definition is “less than” God and thus always “falls short” of God.
Because of the illusory sustenance offered by our addictions, we are driven into an evermore frenzied search to be “filled” and “integrated” through our unnatural attachments while all the while becoming evermore “empty” and “disintegrated” in this utterly futile pursuit. We become like the pitiful and hideous creature Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkein’s epic tale The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, who is mercilessly ensnared and totally consumed by the selfish evil of the One Ring, a symbol of deep addiction and soul-crushing attachment that reflects our weakness born of our pride. Our profane and unfulfilling idols of addiction can be physically fatal to our mortal bodies and spiritually deadly to our eternal souls. This is the very definition of the insanity of addiction, of a life founded on the love of self for the sake of self.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux offers a strong warning to those immersed in this lamentable state of self-love: “Woe to you, wicked and perverse generation; woe to you, foolish and unwise people, who hate Christ’s memory, and dread His presence! And rightly so: for you do not seek deliverance from the snare of the hunter; for ‘they who wish to be rich in this world fall into the devil’s snare,’ [1 Timothy 6:9]…In that day those who set not their hearts aright will feel, too late, how easy is Christ’s yoke to which they would not bend their necks, and how light is his burden, in comparison with the pains they must then endure. You wretched slaves of Mammon, you cannot simultaneously glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the treasures of money: you cannot simultaneously go after gold and taste and see how sweet the Lord is. If you have not felt joy at his memory, you will feel wrath at his presence” (On Loving God).
To be sure, this selfish state of love, if left unconverted, is the sure path to disaster and death. Saint Paul is very clear in this regard: “The desires of the flesh result in death, but the desires of the Spirit result in life and peace. Indeed, the desires of the flesh will be hostile to God, for they do not submit to the Law of God, nor could they do so. Those who live according to the flesh can never be pleasing to God” (Romans 5:6-8). And he instructs, “Hence, I advise you to be guided by the Spirit, so that you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are opposed to the Spirit, and those of the Spirit are opposed to the flesh. They are in conflict with one another, so that you cannot do what you want” (Galatians 5:16-17).
Our Lord Himself teaches, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:5-6). Our Lord continues, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh can achieve nothing. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). What all of this speaks to is that the way out of the lifeless morass of flesh, sin, addiction, and death is to affirm and trust the fundamental and primal goodness within each of us—our belovedness before God—and to take the spiritual way out, to follow the Guide, our Higher Power, Jesus Christ, who tells us, “You did not choose me. Rather, I chose you” and who makes the most startling and wonderful claim that we could ever hear: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 15:16; John 14:6).
Souls living at the base state of self-centered love are in desperate need of awareness that what drives them into the self-destructive abyss of habitual addictive sin is the unrecognized and primordial hunger for God Himself. It is crucial that we come to understand this spiritual dynamic of addiction because it will enable us to see through the chaos of our self-destruction and affirm the original and fundamental goodness of that desire for the Holy that resides within each of our souls.
This will enable us to recognize our inherent goodness and worth, our “belovedness” in the eyes of God, an affirmation that can be so difficult, especially in the early stages of recovery. The task of conversion in recovery, then, is to affirm this deep and irresistible desire for God, this “memory” of God to use the words of Saint Bernard, and to get back on track through fellowship, formation, the sacraments, and prayer to the only “healthy” attachment that truly matters in this life and the next—Christ Jesus! This is how we will make progress and begin to evolve from a life driven by the love of self for the sake of self. This is how we grow to the next stage of love, the love of God for the sake of self.
This series will continue with Part 5.
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.