"…By loving God and trying to see other things in relation to that love, we might see our neighbor’s needs more accurately, as God sees them, and not only as they appear to us when we are preoccupied with our own plans and possessions. Certainly, we would see ourselves differently. We would not exactly become the object of our own contempt, except perhaps as we saw how limited our own self-centered loves had been. We would not longer be able to measure everything in terms of how it fit into our own idea of a good life. We might find ourselves unable to love some things about ourselves that had been sources of pride and self-satisfaction when we compared ourselves to the less gifted people around us, but we might also begin to love things in ourselves because God loves them, even though we have previously seen them as failures to be denied and faults to be concealed. At that point, knowing both the world around us and ourselves more accurately than before, we might even be able safely to begin lowing our neighbors, as well as using them. “In these precepts, a man finds three things which he is to love: God, himself, and his neighbour; for a man who loves God does not err in loving himself.”"
— Robin W. Lovin, quoting Augustine (at end) in An Introduction to Christian Ethics: Goals, Duties, and Virtues (83)
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