Egoism

EGOISM. - From "ego," I, e. is the false and exaggerated love of self, which leads to a veritable idolatry of the "I," erected as the sole measure for relations with all other persons and things, the sole goal of all one's efforts. One may also say that e. is a practical system according to which the end of every human action is nothing but the individual interest of the agent, more or less veiled. Therefore it is not a special vice, but a disequilibrium in the general order willed by God, a latent element, at least initially, in every sin (Sum. Theol., 1st-2nd, q. 77, a. 4), insofar as it is aversio a Deo and conversio ad creatura (the created I); a corrosive of charity, both as a specific virtue and insofar as it is the informing principle of all the other virtues.

According to the order of love, God must be loved first and to the highest degree, because in Him is the essence and perfection of the good; there follows then the love of self, insofar as the Lord made it the measure of the love of neighbor, but preserving between self and neighbor the order of values: our eternal salvation, then that of neighbor; the good of our body, then the bodily health of neighbor; our goods, then those of others.

Thus on the one hand man cannot and must not consider his being with all its natural tendencies, aptitudes, tasks and energies except within the sphere of the love of God, and in dependence on Him. On the other hand he cannot fail to attend to a second limit, a consequence of the due consideration owed to persons and to the rights of others, who are like him an image of God and called to the following of the Savior. The excessive complacency in oneself, or incensing of one's own I, creates instead a disorder in the sphere of love and, with the mirage of one's own exclusive and temporal happiness, places the I in the foreground, imprisoned in the darkness of its own personality, with the consequent dethronement of God from the place that belongs to Him, as the end of all things, and with the sacrifice of the persons with whom one has relations, considered exclusively as an instrument to be used. For this very reason it is absurd to say that ascetics fosters e.; there is nothing egoistic in the pursuit of one's own sanctification, which does not subsist without the pursuit of God and charity toward neighbor. E., instead, supposes not a simple reordering of values, but a complete overturning.

This egocentrism, if pushed to excess, can also be a source of psychic illnesses, but more often it is an effect rather than a cause of these abnormalities. Characteristic, for example, is e. especially in hysteria. The hysteric is devoured by a morbid e., whereby everything tends to be referred to himself, to his own utility, to his own honor, by the strangest and most refined means. But even outside these morbid states, in the present condition of man, following upon original sin, e. constitutes a serious danger for every Christian, insofar as it is so insidious and subtle as to infiltrate even the holiest works; it is a danger continually lying in wait insofar as it is inhumanly within us. Hence the requirement that the Christian continually watch over himself and forestall the danger with self-abnegation (v.) of self (Mt. 16:24; Lk. 17:33; Jn. 12:25). Moreover, among the evils that characterized the world before Christ, and that, according to the Apostle, will characterize the age that must precede the end of time, there stands in the first place e. (2 Thess. 3:2), individual and social. The ethics of the ancient world had been in substance a great e., which had conceived the problem of practical life in the form of a relationship between man and other men as an element that had to be taken into account insofar as good or evil might arise from it: but nothing more. All the realities around the I appeared as means for one's own satisfaction. The greatest virtues of the Greeks were all virtues of the mastery of one's own passions, for the sake of one's own individual equilibrium. And the Platonic-Aristotelian justice was an objective system of relationships, whereby to each should belong his own; a system that was fitting, respected not only for the common good, but also for one's own advantage. The gods themselves were venerated not out of sincere devotion, but as a supreme instrument of individual interest. Only in the light of Christ's redemptive plan, which recalled God's creative plan, has the position of the I between God and neighbor appeared to us in its true reality, the first being the term of individual perfection, the second the testing ground of the very love of God.

Pietro Palazzini