So Edwards sees that the Bible is replete with commands for us to "seek our own good" and with warnings to "beware of misery." This means that God's word assumes the legitimacy of the principle of self-love in the simple meaning of desiring and being pleased by what we think is good for us. This, he says, is virtually synonymous with the faculty of the will. Self-love is to the soul what hunger is to the stomach. It is simply there with our creaturehood; it's the inescapable desire to be happy.
The Essential Evil of the Human Heart
So now, when we compare these two kinds of self-love, we can see more clearly what Edwards really sees as the essential evil of the human heart and the great hindrance to a public life of virtue. What is evil about self-love is not its desire to be happy - that is essential to our nature as creatures, whether fallen or not - what is evil about self-love is its finding happiness in such small, narrow, limited, confined reality, namely, the self and all that makes much of the self. Our depravity is our being exactly the opposite of public-spirited (if we understand "public-spirited" broadly enough).
So self-love is a natural trait that man has by virtue of creation, and it has become evil because of its narrowness and confinement. We are evil because we seek our satisfaction in our own private pleasures but do not seek it in the good of others. We cherish our health and our food and our homes and families and jobs and hobbies and leisure. And we do not seek to expand that joy by drawing others into it. Our self-love, our desire for happiness, is narrow and confined and limited.
If self-love were not narrow, but broad, it would not necessarily be bad. For example, Edwards said, "Some, although they love their own happiness, do not place that happiness in their own confined good, or in that good which is limited to themselves, but more in the common good - in that which is the good of others."
But that raises a serious question: If true virtue is the broadening of self-love so that what makes us happy is not just our private pleasures, but the good of others, then how broad and inclusive does self-love have to be before it stops being narrow and becomes true virtue? How public and social or even universal must self-love be to count as virtue and not vice?
What makes this question so crucial is that Edwards knows that there are great acts of moral courage and sacrifice that are not truly virtuous. "If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:3). There are acts that seem to be noble, but are not virtuous. So what's wrong with these broad acts of self-love that even sacrifice life for others?
Edwards gives a stunning answer, which is why he is the great man that he is and why he is the man we need to listen to today. He said,
If there could be a cause (like self-love) determining a person to benevolence towards the whole world of mankind . . . exclusive of . . . love to God . . . [and] supreme regard to him . . . it cannot be of the nature of true virtue.
He says that self-love is confined and narrow and selfish - and not virtuous - until it embraces or delights in the good of the whole universe of being, or more simply, until it embraces God. If self-love embraces family, but not God, it is not virtuous. If it embraces country, but not God, it is not virtuous. If it embraces all the nations of the world, and not God, it is not virtuous. Why not? Edwards simply says, until self-love rises to embrace God, it embraces "an infinitely small part of universal existence." In other words, to delight in the good of all the universe, but not to delight in God, is like being glad that a candle is lit, but being indifferent to the rising sun. Apart from embracing God as our chief delight, we are (quite literally) infinitely parochial.
Virtue Can't Be Defined Without God
What Edwards is doing here - and this is the great achievement of his life, and the great message to modern evangelicals - is to make God absolutely indispensable in the definition of true virtue. He is refusing to define virtue - no matter how public, no matter how broad - without reference to God. He means to keep God at the center of all moral considerations, to stem the secularizing forces of his own day. And the need for such vigilance over God-centeredness is even more necessary today. Edwards could not conceive of calling any act truly virtuous that did not have in it a supreme regard to God. One of the great follies of modern evangelical public life is how much we are willing to say about public virtue without reference to God.
