It is the Christian presumption that anything other than the self’s abasement before God (or his
secular representatives, (the clergy) is a symptom of the pagan vice of pride or self‐love.
The claim that, at least in this theoretical and historical context, self‐love takes the form of a complex work of the self on itself. Christianity’s polemical interpretation of classicism and Hellenism, elides from our philosophical and ethical heritage a fertile tradition that offers us alternative images, techniques, ideas and practices for theorising the self’s relationship to itself.
In Greco‐Roman antiquity the was an ethical tradition which accentuates the self’s relationship to itself as its central concern, and whose philosophies and schools elaborate or invent a series of practices through which the self becomes an ethical agent. Here the self’s fashioning of itself is not considered antithetical to, but constitutive of, ethics. For the classical and Hellenistic philosophers, ethics is self‐cultivation
Christianity condemnsf self‐love as the ‘sin’ of self‐deification. From Antiquity to Christianity we pass from a morality that was essentially a search for a personal ethics to morality (Christianity and all Religions )as obedience to a system of rules.
Priests and teachers, and the sublime lust for power of idealists of every description … hammer into childrenthat what matters is … the salvation of the soul, the service of the state, the advancement of science, or the accumulation of reputation and possessions, all as a means of doing service to mankind as a whole; while the requirements of the individual, his great and small needs within the twenty‐four hours of the day, are to be regarded as something contemptible or a matter of indifference.
The claim that, at least in this theoretical and historical context, self‐love takes the form of a complex work of the self on itself. Christianity’s polemical interpretation of classicism and Hellenism, elides from our philosophical and ethical heritage a fertile tradition that offers us alternative images, techniques, ideas and practices for theorising the self’s relationship to itself.
In Greco‐Roman antiquity the was an ethical tradition which accentuates the self’s relationship to itself as its central concern, and whose philosophies and schools elaborate or invent a series of practices through which the self becomes an ethical agent. Here the self’s fashioning of itself is not considered antithetical to, but constitutive of, ethics. For the classical and Hellenistic philosophers, ethics is self‐cultivation
Christianity condemnsf self‐love as the ‘sin’ of self‐deification. From Antiquity to Christianity we pass from a morality that was essentially a search for a personal ethics to morality (Christianity and all Religions )as obedience to a system of rules.
Priests and teachers, and the sublime lust for power of idealists of every description … hammer into childrenthat what matters is … the salvation of the soul, the service of the state, the advancement of science, or the accumulation of reputation and possessions, all as a means of doing service to mankind as a whole; while the requirements of the individual, his great and small needs within the twenty‐four hours of the day, are to be regarded as something contemptible or a matter of indifference.
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