Andrew T. J.

Kaethler

“I Become a Thousand Men

and yet Remain Myself ”
Self-Love in Joseph Ratzinger
and Georges Bernanos

‘“Each is the farthest away from himself’––as far as our-

selves are concerned we are not knowers.”
nietzsche
“O God, I pray you to let me know myself.”
st. augustine

These two quotations preface Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos:The

Last Self-Help Book1 and act as an interpretive key to the underlying
argument of the book that cryptically reveals the oxymoronic nature
of self-help. That is, self-help is like trying to pull oneself out of a
bog by pulling on one’s own hair.2 According to Percy, we can only
know ourselves through God, hence Augustine’s prayer. There is a
remarkable parallel between self-knowledge as laid out by Percy and
self-love according to Joseph Ratzinger. In both cases the self is only
that which is in relation to God. Accordingly, like self-knowledge, it
is only through loving God that one loves the self.Yet, in saying that
one is struck by the paradoxical nature of self-love. If love of God
equates to love of self can we properly speak of self-love, or would it
be better to excise the first half of the compound word (self), so that

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 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 151
we would simply be left with love? The concept of self-love raises
another quandary: how can we reconcile the dominical statements
about denying the self, losing one’s life in order to save it,3 or even
hating one’s life in order to follow Christ4 with “you shall love your
neighbor as yourself ”?5
The subject of self-love also repeatedly comes to the fore with the
protagonist in Georges Bernanos’s Mouchette and The Diary of a Coun-
try Priest. It is my contention that Ratzinger’s account of self-love,
which is based on a relational ontology, elucidates the actions of the
protagonists and adds another level of depth that is consistent with
the theme of the novels. In what follows we shall examine Ratzing-
er’s view of love, the self and the human person, and penultimately
self-love. Finally, we shall turn to Bernanos and look at what light
Ratzinger sheds on this great French novelist and how in turn these
two authors provide an answer to the aforementioned questions.

I. Love
What is love? Ratzinger’s fundamental reflection on love echoes Josef
Pieper’s notion that love signifies affirmation: “It is good that you
exist; it’s good that you are in this world!”6 With this phrase we hear
the affirmation “and it was very good” of Genesis, and this connects
us to another important aspect of love that Pieper highlights: unity.
Looking at the root of the word love, he writes, “amor and amare have
something to do ‘with the radical notion of likeness.’ More specifi-
cally, they are related to the Greek háma (‘at the same time’), the
Latin similis and English ‘same.’” 7 Herein lies the connection with
the affirmation of Genesis: love is based on a pre-existent relation-
ship. That is, we can love because God loved us first (1 Jn 4:19). The
premise of love is relational unity. Thus, love is not simply union but
reunion. It is the reuniting of what was broken in the Fall.
Love is the affirmation of one’s existence. There are two sides to
this coin. First, the lover delights in the very being of the beloved and
not simply in her attributes. This is the ecstatic outward movement
152 logos
that is directed to the other and for the sake of the other. Here the
lover is blind to his own needs or wants, and this brings us back to
creation. In an article on creation Rowan Williams lucidly writes,
“God loves us so that we may come to our highest good, not so that
God’s good may be served.”8 Creation does not serve a divine need;
similarly, affirmative finite love begins as a selfless movement. How-
ever, in the second moment the outward movement returns back
upon the lover like a boomerang:9 “It is only in a second moment
(not of time but of fact) that the lover discovers that in this way,
because your existence is good, my own existence too has become
better, more precious, happier. By saying ‘yes’ to another, to ‘you,’ I
receive myself made new and can now in a new way say ‘yes’ to my-
self thanks to you.”10 Be that as it may, the “second moment” cannot
switch places with the first, for if it does it defeats both; first things
must come first.11
The affirmative yes that makes anew is, for Ratzinger, clearly a
creative act. He goes so far as to call it a new creation.12 What this
means is that biological birth is insufficient and incomplete; a baby
needs his mother’s affirmative love as much as his mother’s milk.
Affirmative love endows the beloved with personality, with a true
“I.” Thus, the lover becomes a creator, albeit a co-creator, who par-
ticipates in the making of a person. In this way human love mirrors
God’s love as expressed in both creation and redemption. Creation
ex nihilo was an act of love––God’s first Yes. His second Yes, a yes far
more powerful than our no, was manifest by Christ on the cross. By
making Christ’s redemptive Yes my yes I am born again and made
a participant in the life of Christ. With Christ’s Yes “we have been
asked to continue his creation, to be co-creators, by giving being to
the other in a new way in the affirmation of love––letting the gift of
love now really become a gift.”13
The boomerang movement of love foreshadows self-love and
brings us back to the notion of love as unity. Another way of ex-
pressing unity as such is to say that we can love because the other is
loveable, or the unity of love is intrinsic to our very being. Therefore,
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 153
through the act of love we affirm our being. In other words, by lov-
ing another we are being true to ourselves. As a result, it only makes
sense that love rebounds, that it is dialogical. Ratzinger provides
a powerful image of this in his description of the goal of creation,
which is based on the notion of exitus and reditus.14 Exitus is God’s free
act of creation in which he brings about a contingent other as some-
thing good and real. Ratzinger argues that it is God’s will that the
other “should exist as something good in relation to himself, from
which a response of freedom and love can be given back to him.”15
Reditus, the free act of response and return, is man’s coming home
to himself. The outward movement (exitus) is created for the move-
ment of return (reditus). What is important to highlight is the notion
of return as a homecoming. In this return we are united and made
complete. We are made to be in unity––we are loveable.
There is one other aspect that is important. In the affirmation
and confirmation of the beloved the lover indirectly affirms being in
general. As many of us have experienced, love makes the world look
much rosier: “The lover would as it were like to embrace the whole
world in and with his beloved. The encounter with the one person
restores the whole to me afresh.”16 In this sense, the lover is given
a god-like vantage point in which he can recognize the goodness
and lovableness of all people. Quoting Goethe, and contra Freud,17
Pieper writes, “A heart that loves one person cannot hate anyone.”18
The rosy experience of love extends “it is good that you exist” to “it
is good” and presupposes the goodness of being that is vouchsafed by
God. He grounds our love in the reality of his good creation. Hence,
Ratzinger maintains that “love needs truth,”19 the truth that being is
good,20 and therefore I can truly love.

II. Relational Ontology

Before we can examine self-love we must look at the notion of the
self. What is it that makes the self the “I”? Or more broadly, what is
the person? God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are persons
154 logos
in the fullest sense. Ratzinger maintains that “they are real existing
relations. . . . In God, person means relation. Relation, being relat-
ed, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person
itself.”21 Thus, God is not a purely egotistical being, for “the true
God is, of his own nature, being-for (Father), being-from (Son),
and being-­with (Holy Spirit).”22 Ratzinger argues that his relational
structure is laid out in Johannine theology. To make his point Ratz-
inger quotes two verses from John’s Gospel: “The Son can do noth-
ing of his own accord” (Jn 5:19), and “I and the Father are one” (Jn
10:30). The relational structure given here is then transferred from
Christ to his disciples when Christ says, “Apart from me you can
do nothing” (Jn 15:5), and he prays “that they may be one, even
as we are one” (Jn 17:11).23 God calls the disciples into the pure
relationality of his trinitarian relation, and “it is in this way that he
[the human person] truly comes to himself and into the fullness of
his own, because he enters into the unity with the one to whom he
is related.”24 The human person is created in such a manner that he
finds his home in returning to God, the movement of reditus. The
human person is created for relation; he is called out of himself. But
has Ratzinger leaped too far by defining the human person in light of
the trinitarian person? This is where Ratzinger turns to Christology,
and it is through Christology that his Johannine claims make sense,
where human and divine persons come together.
Christ, so maintains Ratzinger, is the fullest expression of the hu-
man person; thus, Christ is referred to as the “second/last Adam”
(1 Cor 15:45). With the Chalcedonian definition in mind––Christ
has two natures that form one person25––Ratzinger makes three in-
terrelated points. First, he argues that “the human person is all the
more with itself, and is itself, the more it is able to reach beyond
itself, the more it is with the other, then the person is all the more
itself the more it is with the wholly other, with God.”26 He makes this
argument by distinguishing the nature of spirit from the nature of
matter. The spirit is that which is and knows and has itself. It is its na-
ture to put itself in relation. Thus, it knowingly throws itself forward
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 155
into relation and is never more itself. Whereas, matter is that which
is thrown upon itself.27 This is the distinguishing feature between the
human spirit and other forms of creation. Therefore, what consti-
tutes the human person is relationality. The more the human person
transcends herself the more she is herself.28
Second, Christ is the ultimate reality of being with the other, for
in him two natures are held together––divine and human. Ratzinger
concludes that “in Christ, in the man who is completely with God,
human existence is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility,
which consists in transcending itself into the absolute and in the in-
tegration of its own relativity into the absoluteness of divine love.”29
Third, Christology takes us beyond Martin Buber’s notion of the
I-Thou relationship.The dialogical relationship always includes a “we.”
Christ is the space in which, as Christians, we all gather. In Christ I
am brought into relationship with every other person who is hid with
Christ in God (Col 3:3). Ratzinger argues that Christ “is not only an
example that is followed, but he is the integrating space in which the
‘we’ of human beings gathers itself toward the ‘you’ of God.”30 Conse-
quently, he concludes that ‘“the Body of Christ’ means that all human
beings are one organism, the destiny of the whole the proper destiny
of each.”31 That is not to say there is no I but that the I is always known
and judged in relation to the whole, to the we. By being myself I am
in fellowship.32 Or, as beautifully described by Desmond Tutu, “My
humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.”33

III. Self-Love
Now that the preliminary pieces have been put together we can turn
to self-love. Ratzinger argues that self-love excludes egoism. Egoism
is what we could call navel-gazing. It is the solipsistic tendency we
inherit in the academy from Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.”
In response, Ratzinger approvingly quotes Franz Xaver von Baad-
er’s witty reworking of Descartes’s cogito: “I am thought, therefore
I am.”34 The navel-gazing of the egoist is an inward turn, in which
156 logos
the navel-gazer is caught in a vicious circle––what Ratzinger calls
the anthropological circle.35 The navel-gazer hopes that in turning
inward to the self he will achieve self-realization. However, what
actually happens is that the “ego becomes objectionable, annoying,
and unsatisfactory. It dissolves itself into a thousand forms, and in the
end all that remains is the flight from oneself, the inability to stand
oneself,”36 and the recourse to harmful activities.
Why does navel-gazing conclude with a flight from self? The an-
swer is simple: the human spirit is only truly itself in relationship. It
goes against the grain to seek self-realization by first turning inward.
We are “shot towards our destination like an arrow,”37 and the tar-
get is divine relationship. The inward gaze of the egoist fails to do
what love does: affirm and confirm existence, presuppose and cre-
ate unity, and expose the goodness of being. The inward gaze cannot
confirm or affirm my existence, for this can only be given as a gift,
a yes given to us by another. Likewise, navel-gazing presupposes au-
tonomy rather than unity, and therefore unity is impossible. Finally,
egoism cannot see the goodness of being because it only looks in-
ward. The I is only seen aright through the we.
Therefore, self-love is an outward movement. I love myself by
loving another. This works in two ways. First, self-love as an outward
movement conforms to reality.38 In loving another we are being true
to what it means to be a human person, and consequently we are
being true to the self. As Ratzinger poetically mused, “Man finds
his centre of gravity, not inside, but outside himself. The place to
which he is anchored is not, as it were, within himself but without.”39
To live contrary to this would cause inevitable harm. Second, the
boomerang effect of love affirms the lover’s existence. C. S. Lewis
pithily stated, “The good of one self is to be the good of another.”40
While the navel-gazer is caught in the destructive anthropological
circle, the one who affirms the other enters into a “healing circle, a
circle of salvation”41 in which the I is expanded and enriched. This is
ultimately seen in our relationship with Christ. He offers to us the
greatest affirmatory Yes.42 In return, I am enabled to respond with a
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 157
yes, Christ’s Yes, yet distinctly my own, for in him I have truly come
home to myself. Hidden with Christ in God my identity is enhanced
infinitely. While the anthropological circle ends in a flight from self,
the circle of salvation expands and sets free the self. Self-love begins
in loving another.

IV. Self-Love and Relatonal Ontology in Georges Bernanos

Ratzinger and Bernanos are, so to speak, natural bedfellows. Berna-
nos had a large impact on the ressourcement movement, influencing the
likes of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Ratzinger (a
second generation ressourcement theologian).43 While Balthasar wrote a
massive book on Bernanos––just over six hundred pages––Ratzinger
only mentions Bernanos in passing, but one such case concerns self-
love.44 If used as a hermeneutical key, Ratzinger’s relational notion of
self-love makes sense of the protagonist in Mouchette and The Diary of
a Country Priest and in turn sheds light on a number of events within
both novels. There are two examples we shall look at in the former
novel: (1) Mouchette’s awakening to love through Arsène and his re-
jection of her love, and (2) her final appeal for help before she kills
herself. In The Diary of a Country Priest we shall explore the priest’s
transcendence of self and how this eventually enables self-love.

Mouchette
In Mouchette the young teenage protagonist (Mouchette) has a violent
encounter with a local poacher and troublemaker, Arsène. In hopes
of using Mouchette as an alibi, the paranoid Arsène manipulatively
leads her to his hideouts. He finds in Mouchette a listening ear, and
this encourages him to recall and retell the events that led to his hid-
ing in the woods. Arsène shares with Mouchette his concern that in
a fit of rage he may have killed a man, but he is unsure of how the
event unfolded because he blacked out and had an epileptic fit. After
telling Mouchette what he could recall of the fight she looks up at his
face and Bernanos writes,
158 logos
It seemed to be the first human face she had ever really looked
at. Her attention was so absorbed and so tender that it seemed
to be an extension of her own life. . . . All the pleasure of look-
ing at it came not from him, but from the depths of herself,
where it had lain hidden and germinating, like a seed of wheat
beneath the snow. Nothing could alter its power and sweet-
ness, and it depended neither on time nor on place. . . . She
had, no doubt, occasionally thought of love, but in order to
overcome an uncontrollable physical revulsion she had had to
force herself to imagine beings as different as possible from
those around her, and her imagination was soon defeated. But
the face before her now . . . left her as untroubled as a glimpse
of her own caught in the single-looking-glass in her home. And
that indeed was what it seemed to be—a mysterious double
of her own face, but a thousand times dearer because . . . on
certain days . . . she hated and despised her face. Arsène’s face,
however, could never be hateful or ridiculous to her.45

Arsène’s tale of possible manslaughter startles Mouchette out of the

relative safety of her self-loathing.46 As a girl who experienced much
cruelty, Mouchette protectively closes herself off to the world. But
Arsène’s terrible predicament awakens her to the reality that ex-
ists outside. For the first time she encounters otherness and love;
she affirms Arsène, and this love rebounds revealing her own inter-
nal warmth. Even her face, which is a mirror of Arsène’s, takes on
new beauty in that his face “could never be hateful or ridiculous to
her.” Her face, which at times she hated and despised, is transformed
by his face. As a result of this awakening, she even begins to sing,
and her beautiful youthful innocence, which had been buried for so
long, bursts forth. J. C. Whitehouse acutely argues, “As an innocent
though deprived and brutalized child . . . She [Mouchette] can detect
in Arsène something which no one else could see in him, and which
she could see in no one else. For her, he represents a possibility of
salvation, because he is a human being to whom she could have given
herself.”47 Unfortunately, Arsène destroys this wonderful discovery
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 159
of love and self-love. In a fit of lust he rapes her and brutally vio-
lates the beautiful love he evoked. The remainder of the novel reveals
the turmoil that Mouchette is lost within: how could the man who
awakened love in her, the man she loved, violently turn on her? The
experience of love that should have led her to the waters of baptism
instead ended in a watery grave, her suicide.
As a result of the rape, Mouchette once again closes herself off
from the world, but this time it is irreversible––suicide. We see here
the close relationship between loneliness and death: “Death,” argues
Ratzinger, “is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love
can no longer advance is––hell.”48 Hell is the rejection of otherness.
Repeatedly rejected by those around her, Mouchette is pushed to-
ward her own death, to absolute loneliness—not hell. Just prior to
her suicide, as she stands in the void of indecision before her watery
grave, an old villager on horseback comes into view “and their eyes
met, but his were as indifferent as those of the horse. She would have
liked to shout, call out, and run out to meet her grotesque savior; he
plodded slowly on his way and suddenly seemed to be disappearing,
as if sucked up into nothingness. She watched his mysterious depar-
ture for a second; the man of flesh and blood seemed to have no more
substance than a ghost.”49 Her last contact with the outside world
is empty. The old, coarse, and grotesque man could have been her
saviour by simply acknowledging her existence, an act that would
have re-awakened self-love.50 Instead, his gaze is void of humanity.
Without concern and unaware of Mouchette’s great need the old
man trudges on just like his horse. While Mouchette remained open
to love, the old man was not: he was “sucked up into nothingness.”
Bernanos’s description of the old man highlights the difference be-
tween rejection of otherness and being rejected by others. He seems
to confirm what Lewis acutely wrote about the human person in
relation to hell:

The damned go to a place never made for men at all. . . .What

is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.” To
160 logos
be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the
will and the will offered to God: to have been a man––to be
an ex-man or “damned ghost”––would presumably mean to
consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly
uncontrolled by the will.51

While death was Mouchette’s desired end we may surmise that

the old man’s was hell: he had “no more substance than a ghost”
(or “damned ghost”) he was, in Lewis’s words, but an “ex-man.”
Mouchette’s humanity remains while the old man’s has long been
lost. Even with Mouchette’s suicide Bernanos leaves room for hope
as evidenced in her final desire for communion with the old man.
She did not close the door all the way on love and so hope remains.
Perhaps this is why Bernanos describes her suicide in such tender
terms, a sort of ersatz baptism.
Bernanos creates a deeply relational image both in Mouchette’s
encounter with Arsène and in the final events leading up to her sui-
cide. In light of Ratzinger’s understanding of self-love it is possible
to see that ultimately Mouchette cannot love herself because she, of
no fault of her own, was unable to love. She reached out in love, but
Arsène did not allow the boomerang of love to return. As a result,
Mouchette fell back into her self-loathing, which is nothing other
than the cousin of death. Both are the opposite of affirmation and
creation. In a tragic manner, Mouchette illustrates Ratzinger’s conclu-
sion that self-love is only possible if we transcend the self and love
another.

The Diary of a Country Priest

The Ambricourt Priest in The Diary of a Country Priest is the most
important of all the characters in Bernanos’s various novels.52 He
is Bernanos’s archetype of a priest, and even more broadly he is an
image of the human person who has actually fulfilled his potential;
hence, the Ambricourt priest is also an unrecognized saint.53 There
are five interrelated aspects of the priest and his life that highlight
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 161
the relational nature of reality and self-love. First, he is deeply car-
ing and empathetic. He prays, “If only God would open my eyes
and unseal my ears, so that I might behold the face of my parish and
hear its voice.”54 Meanwhile the parish turns away, cat-like, “watch-
ing askance with half-shut eyes.”55 He cares more about his parish-
ioners’ well-being and suffering than his own. Second, his ability to
pray is linked to his own suffering and to his ability to bear the suf-
fering of others. His (co-)suffering pushes him toward dependence
on divine otherness. When his debilitating stomach pain ceases he
finds that he is unable to pray (111), and his ability to pray only
returns with his encounter with Mlle. Chantal, in which he bears
her emotional pain (133). Third, the priest records in his diary,
“My inner quiet––blessed by God––has never really isolated me. I
can feel all humankind can enter” (260). His inward turn seems to
participate in what Ratzinger referred to as the healing circle, and
it opens him to the we of existence in the body of Christ.56 Fourth,
as a result of the previous aspects, the priest is able to read the
human heart.57 He recognizes the lovability of each person and is
therefore able to see truth even when it is buried beneath a façade.
The more he comes to know himself in Christ the more he comes
to know others.
Finally, although painfully aware of his own inadequacies––his
sallow and skinny face, the persistent stubble on his chin, his physi-
cal clumsiness, and his lowly birth––he comes to love himself, not
as an egoist but as a lover. This is evident in the jubilant motorcycle
ride he takes with Olivier. Here we see the boomerang movement
of love that occurs within the newly found friendship. As if looking
in a mirror, the priest sees his own youthfulness in the youthfulness
of Olivier––something he had long forgotten about. The priest re-
flects: “I think this is what they call joy. Anyway, I felt young, really
young, with this companion who was as young as I. We were young
together” (236).The motorcycle ride itself is an otherworldly revela-
tion of beauty, and it opens the priest to the joy of life, youthfulness,
even being itself:
162 logos
I climbed somewhat clumsily on to a small rather uncomfort-
able seat, and the next minute the long slope we were facing
flashed behind us, whilst the roar of the engine rose continu-
ously higher and higher till it gave out one note only, wonder-
fully pure. It was like the song of light, it was light itself, and I
felt I was watching, with my own eyes, the huge curve of that
stupendous ascent. The country side did not come towards
us, it opened out on all sides, and just beyond the wild skid
of the road, seemed to turn majestically on itself, like a door
opening on to another world. (237)

Clearly, this echoes Ratzinger’s argument that love opens the lover
to being itself. In this case it is love as friendship. The priest writes in
his diary, “I knew that God did not wish me to die without knowing
something of that risk––just enough, maybe, for my sacrifice to be
complete when the time came” (236). The Ambricourt priest’s sense
of the goodness of life continues to grow. His last diary entry records
these words:

The strange mistrust I had of myself of my own being, has

flown, I believe forever. That conflict is done. I cannot un-
derstand it any more. I am reconciled to myself, to the poor,
poor shell of me. How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace
is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace
would be to love oneself in all simplicity—as one would love
any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in
Christ. (296)

The priest reverses the second dominical commandment––Love

yourself as you love your neighbor––highlighting self-love as con-
ceived by Ratzinger. Bernanos subtly underscores this relational no-
tion of self-love in one other way. Just preceding the priest’s final
diary entry Bernanos notes that the priest prayed the rosary. In this
manner Bernanos brings to the surface the Marian dimension. In
fact, it is fair to say, the priest becomes like Mary. That is, he recog-
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 163
nizes that his life is full of grace because his life echoes Mary’s obedi-
ence. In essence, he too says, “let it be to me according to your word”
(Lk 1:38). Hence, his dying words are, “Grace is everywhere” (298).
Ratzinger writes, “The saying with which Bernanos ends his Diary of
a Country Priest––“Everything is grace”––a saying in which a life that
seemed to be only weakness and futility can see itself as full of riches
and fulfillment––truly becomes in Mary, “full of grace” (Lk 1:28), a
concrete reality.”58 In the process of dying the priest finally comes to
see with eyes of grace so that self-loathing is impossible. It is arguable
that it was through the process of loving others that the priest finally
came to love himself––the love he showed others (including God)
boomeranged back.59

V. Conclusion
The Christocentric relational ontology of Ratzinger provides an un-
derstanding of love in which self-love is not a contradiction in terms,
nor is it opposed to self-denial.60 “Love your neighbor as yourself ” is a
tautology. I truly love and affirm my existence by loving my neighbor.
By denying myself in the ecstatic outward movement of love I affirm
my own existence: self-denial is self-love.61 With this understanding
of love and the profound relationality of the human person Ratzinger
and Bernanos provide a rich vision of the human person that is in stark
contrast to both modern and postmodern conceptions. As John Web-
ster articulates, “whereas modernity stands under Montaigne’s rubric
‘I look within,’ postmodernism more characteristically says: ‘Each of
us knows that our self does not amount to much’ (Lyotard).”62 To re-
spond in kind, both Ratzinger and Bernanos would say, “I look out
beyond myself and, in so doing, realize that we––and thus I––amount
to a lot, for we are hid with Christ in God (Col 3:3).” In Christ the
self is expanded beyond comprehension. All who participate in God
participate in his all in all and “that is why the purely private existence
of the isolated self no longer exists, but ‘all that is mine is yours.’” 63
Truly “I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”64
164 logos

Notes
1. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Saint Martin’s
Press, 2000).
2. Ratzinger uses the illustration to point out the absurdity of assuming that meaning
is derived from knowledge. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R.
Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 73.
3. “And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For
whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and
the gospel’s will save it.’” (Mk 8:34–35). All biblical quotations are from the Revised
Standard Version.
4. “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and
children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my dis-
ciple” (Lk 14:26).
5. Mk 12:31.
6. Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, trans. Richard Winston, Clara Winston, and Mary
Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 164. I am indebted to Fr.
Vincent Twomey for reminding me of the large influence that Pieper had on R ­ atzinger.
7. Ibid., 159.
8. Rowan Williams, “‘Good For Nothing’? Augustine on Creation,” Augustinian Studies
25 (1994): 20.
9. “But we can only understand love by sharing in it, by loving,” Joseph Ratzinger, God
is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnur,
trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 99.
10. Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love, trans.
Robert Nowell (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 90.
11. As Bernard of Clairvaux perceptively noted, “Whoever seeks anything else in love
except love will lose both love and the joy of love at the same time.” Quoted in
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 244.
12. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 90.
13. Ibid., 91.
14. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2000), 28–34.
15. Ibid., 32.
16. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 92.
17. Freud claimed, “A love that is not selective seems to us to forfeit part of its value by
doing the object an injustice.” And in relation with the previous quote “All men are
not loveable.” Pieper gets both quotations from Freud’s Gesammelte Werke, 14:461; see
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 200, 202.
18. Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 200.
19. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 93.
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 165
20. “In any genuine human love there is an element of bowing down before the God-
given dignity of the other person, who is in the image of God.” Ratzinger, God is Near
Us, 83.
21. Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” ed. David L.
Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, trans. W. J. O’Hara, Joseph Ratzinger in Communio,
vol. 2, Anthropology and Culture (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2013), 108.
22. Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 248.
23. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 109.
24. Ibid.
25. Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 56.
26. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 116.
27. Ibid., 115.
28. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it”
(Mt 10:39).
29. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 116.
30. Ibid., 117.
31. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, ed. Aidan Nichols, trans. Michael
Waldstein, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988),
190.
32. “Precisely in renouncing individualistic self-determination, I enter into the intimacy
of my own being, through communion with Christ. This is how we become ourselves
and, finding authentic communion with God, attain true freedom.” Joseph Ratzinger,
The Renewal of Moral Theology: Perspectives ofVatican II andVeritatis Splendor, ed. David L.
Schindler, trans. James M. Quigley, Joseph Ratzinger in Communio, vol. 1, The Unity of
the Church (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 192. “The eucharistic fel-
lowship of the Church is not a collectivity, in which fellowship is achieved by levelling
down to the lowest common denominator, but fellowship is created precisely by our
each being ourself. It does not rest on the suppression of the self, on collectivization,
but arises through our truly setting out, with our whole self, and entering into this
new fellowship of the Lord.” Ratzinger, God is Near Us, 82.
33. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 31.
34. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 247.
35. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 99.
36. Ibid.
37. Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 235.
38. “Reality is self-transcendence, and when man is led to transcend it, he not only com-
prehends God but, for the first time, also understands reality and enables himself and
creation to be what they were meant to be.” Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic
Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 345.
166 logos
39. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 171.
40. C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, found in Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 247.
41. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 104.
42. “Man comes in the most profound sense to himself, not through what he does, but
through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be re-
ceived as a gift. It cannot be ‘made’ on one’s own, without anyone else.” Ratzinger,
Introduction to Christianity, 267.
43. Lewis Ayres, Patricia Kelly, and Thomas Humphries, “Benedict XVI: A Ressource-
ment Theologian?,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catho-
lic Theology, ed. Flynn Gabriel and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 423–39.
44. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 98–99.
45. Georges Bernanos, Mouchette, trans. J. C. Whitehouse (New York: New York Review
of Books, 2006), 40–42.
46. “Once again her fear and her anger turned inwards upon herself; it was herself she
hated.” Bernanos, Mouchette, 89.
47. J. C. Whitehouse, “The Human Person in the Novels of Georges Bernanos,” The Mod-
ern Language Review 80, no. 3 (July 1985): 579.
48. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 301.
49. Bernanos, Mouchette, 89.
50. “By portraying suicide in his fictional works, Bernanos explained it as a principle of
self-destruction, which he called ‘this mysterious hatred of self that we call original
sin.’” Astrid Heyer, “Suicide in the Fiction of Georges Bernanos and Stefan Zweig:
The Death of Two Female Adolescents,” Christianity and Literature 56, no. 3 (Spring
2007): 449.
51. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Centenary Press, 1941), 113–14.
52. In fact, as a novelist obsessed with his own characters, the Ambricourt priest is
Bernanos’s own hero. W. M. Frohock, “Georges Bernanos and his Priest-Hero,” Yale
French Studies 12 (1953): 59.
53. J. C.Whitehouse, “The Human Person in the Novels of Georges Bernanos,” 575, 582.
Whitehouse, however, is deeply mistaken in asserting that for Bernanos the saint is
one who recognizes that he is an individual and autonomous person. For Bernanos
the exact opposite is the case. One would be hard pressed to make sense of the Am-
bricourt priest from an autonomous individualistic perspective.
54. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (Philadelphia:
Da Capo Press, 2002), 28.
55. Ibid., 40.
56. The priest’s openness to the “we” of the Church is also reflected in the fact that Ber-
nanos does not give the priest a name. Gordon Leah points out that the Ambricourt
priest is the only priest in all his novels who remains unnamed. Leah furthers the
argument: “Malcolm Scott in his monograph on the novel asks the rhetorical ques-
tion: ‘Is it not significant that the curé himself has no name, except that of the parish,
 self-love in joseph ratzinger and georges bernanos 167
Ambricourt, to which he has given his entire essence? Does his namelessness not
convey the integrity of his person and his one-ness with his flock?’” Gordon Leah,
“‘Become as a Little Child’: Reflections On Georges Bernanos’ Diary Of A Country
Priest And Other Works,” The Heythrop Journal (2014), doi: 10.1111/heyj.12228.
57. For example, he illuminates the thoughts and motives of Mme. la Comtesse, her
daughter (Chantal), and Seraphita.
58. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 280.
59. “It is at moments of the greatest openness and unselfishness that their [Bernanos’
saint heroes] selfhood is most pronounced.” J. C.Whitehouse, “The Human Person in
the Novels of Georges Bernanos,” 583.
60. Ratzinger’s view of self-love is similar to Aquinas’s view. One of the key differences
is that Aquinas’s argument is grounded teleologically. Stephen Pope concludes, “Self
and neighbor are depicted by Thomas as two interrelated foci that are loved together
as participating in an affective union with God, the summum bonum.” Stephen Pope,
“Expressive Individualism and True Self-Love: A Thomistic Perspective,” The Journal
of Religion 71, no. 3 (July 1991): 399. Accordingly, self-love, as love of God, precedes
love of neighbor. Whereas, Ratzinger’s relational approach emphasizes the fact that
both love of God and love of the other require similar acts of self-transcendence that
fulfil the self. Nevertheless, there is a difference between these two loves. Love of
God inevitably means love of neighbor and self. Love of neighbor may translate to
love of self, although this is not always the case (e.g., in Mouchette Arsène shattered
the arc of love), nor does it necessarily lead to love of God. There is a qualitative and
quantitative distinction.
61. With Ratzinger’s relational notion of love and self-love “love your neighbor as your-
self ” is rescued from the moralism of a command ethic or deontology in which being
and duty are separated. The second commandment can be read through Ratzinger
as primarily a statement about reality, about being. Pieper expresses this well in his
distinction between prudence and moralism: “Moralism says: good is what obligation
requires, and because obligation requires it. The doctrine of prudence says: good is
what accords with reality; it is obligatory because it responds to reality.” Josef Pieper,
The Christian Idea of Man, trans. Dan Farrelly, (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press,
2011), 16.
62. John Webster, “Eschatology, Anthropology and Postmodernity,” International Journal
of Systematic Theology 2, no. 1 (March 2000): 24.
63. Ratzinger, God is Near Us, 145.
64. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 141.
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