Finding the appropriate middle ground between being too soft on yourself and being excessively harsh and scrupulous is one of the most difficult challenges of Christian life. We tend to go too far in either direction right after we’ve fallen: perhaps we recognized that we have sinned gravely and choose to play it down as a harmless stumble to avoid feeling guilty, or alternatively, we become consumed by grief or self-hatred after every minor mistake.
In my experience, for those of us who strive to live a coherent, devout life, it’s usually more of a risk to fall into excessive self-flagellation than it is to become too complacent—a vice perhaps more common amongst those lukewarm or cultural Christians.
For us, who take ur faith and formation seriously, it can often happen that when we fail by relapsing into a sin we resolved against, by losing our temper with our family, or by abandoning a discipline we committed to, we respond by turning on ourselves with a severity we would never apply to anyone else, because we believe that that’s how we know we’re being honest about our failures and that self-flagellation is appropriate or even virtuous.
St. Francis de Sales wrote a chapter specifically for those men who fight against excessive feelings of guilt or despair after falling, and he proposes a counterintuitive solution to finding the virtuous middle ground between self-hatred and disordered self-love.
Who Was St. Francis de Sales?
St. Francis de Sales was a seventeenth-century bishop and Doctor of the Church mostly known by modern Catholics for his book Introduction to the Devout Life. The particularity of this book is that it was written specifically for laypeople living in the world, which makes it one of the most practically applicable spiritual texts in the entire tradition of the Church.
Going back to the problem of self-hatred that we mentioned in the introduction, in St. Francis’s book there is a specific chapter in which this great saint develops a totally counterintuitive argument to solve that problem.
It’s important to note that neither the concepts we are about to discuss (nor this article) are to be taken as defenses of softness or low standards, but rather an attempt to offer a theological diagnosis of a disorder —excessive guilt, self-hatred, unnecessary self-flagellation— that can often be hidden behind the mask of virtue, especially amongst devout Catholic men.
Self-Hatred Is a Form of Pride
St. Francis De Sales argues in Part II, Chapter 9 of Introduction to the Devout Life that the anger and irritation that you direct at yourself after sinning does not usually come from a place of purity of intention, but rather from a sense of having hurt our self image.
This is important, because it’s virtuous to feel some degree of guilt and pain from having wronged a perfect, loving God, but it’s completely different to feel bad because your ego has been shattered.
When a man beats himself up too much after sinning, the motivation behind is not usually that he has offended God but rather that he has failed to be the man he imagines himself to be.
That is, in essence, a form of pride, and St. Francis names it plainly:
“Although it is but reasonable that we should be displeased and grieved at our own faults, yet ought we to guard against a bitter, angry, or peevish feeling about them.
Many people fall into the error of being angry because they have been angry, vexed because they have given way to vexation, thus keeping up a chronic state of irritation, which adds to the evil of what is past, and prepares the way for a fresh fall on the first occasion.
Moreover, all this anger and irritation against one’s self fosters pride, and springs entirely from self-love, which is disturbed and fretted by its own imperfection.”1
Genuine contrition is oriented toward God, as a sincere grievance for the offense committed against Him, and is accompanied by a firm, immediate resolution to make amends and seek absolution. In contrast, the negative self-hatred is oriented towards the self, and is hurt more so by the damage that’s been done to one’s own image than by the betrayal of God’s trust.
It’s not always easy to identify the nuances between both attitudes, which is why St. Francis then proceeds to explain a clear-cut solution for this dilemma: his proposed response to failure is, in a way, more demanding than self-punishment, but extremely effective and applicable instantly.