Carl Jung on Brotherly Love
Such roving about christeneth itself “brotherly love”; with these words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling, and especially by those who have been burdensome to everyone. [Nietzsche’s Zarathustra] Those are the people who go about and tell everybody how much they love them or what they ought to do for their own good, always assuming that they know what is best for them.
Or the people who want to get rid of themselves, so they unburden themselves on others. There are certain lazy dogs who want to get rid of their own destiny so they put it on somebody else by loving them. They fall on the neck of someone saying, “I love you,” and so they put the bag on his back; they call that love.
Or they go to someone and burden him with what he really ought to do and they never do. They never ask themselves what is good for themselves, but they know exactly what is good for him. Do it yourself first and then you will know if it is really good. So here Nietzsche tells other people they ought to fly-as if he could.
He cheats them as he has cheated himself. It is the same mechanism that he blames Christian l0ve for. But there is Christian love and Christian l0ve. When someone applies Christian l0ve in the right way, it is a virtue and of the highest merit; but if he misuses Christian l0ve in order to put his own burdens on other people, he is immoral, a usurer, a cheat.
You see, if he l0ves other people with the purpose of making use of them, it is not l0ve; he simply uses love as a pretext, a cover under which he hides his own selfish interests. To really l0ve other people, he must first give evidence that he can love himself, for to love oneself is the most difficult task. To love someone else is easy, but to l0ve what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to l0ve somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can l0ve yourself, and that will be the test.
So when Nietzsche blames Christian l0ve, he is simply blaming his own type. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1473-1474.
