But is it evil to love yourself?

We need to be careful not to get misunderstood. The Gospel commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves (cf. Mi 22:39); on the contrary, it does not say that we do not have to “love ourselves.” The scholastic repeated the saying, “He who is not good for himself or not can be good for others.” Christianity wants it to unite both loves – love for oneself and love of neighbor – into one love. Who this connection, he refuses, he has a love for himself, but it is selfish and perverted. Selfish love only himself and destroys himself because he breaks off relations with others and thus reduces his own “To be a person.”

Saint Maxim, the Confessor, defines philia tii: “love for one another.” True love is a source of all virtues; selfishness is the root of all vices.
But what should one do to get rid of one’s will? Even if we use the term “self-will,” it is necessary to be careful not to fall into misunderstanding. Free will is one of God’s greatest gifts.
“It is enough to want one to be saved,” writes St. John of Chrysostomus orally. To weaken the will means to make one less capable both of work and for Christian perfection, to which one is directed. In this context, there seem to be strange exhortations of St. Dorothy of Gaza, St. Benedict, and others who strictly command “completely to destroy one’s own will so that God’s will, can be accepted or the will of the authorized superior. “
We have already said that the cause of all evil is bad, the thought or urge sinning. To do this, the second attraction of a forbidden object: a penchant for greed, a desire to drink, etc. We know that we can and must oppose this offer. But sometimes, we feel like accepting them in some permissible way. And then – for example – one tries to justify greed by the need to be frugal, from having to forgive someone begins to be called the “sense of justice,” etc. Various authors call “By their own will” a tendency to justify affection to evil by holy pretexts. Obviously taken in this sense, it must be destroyed before it happens, the source of all troubles. A corrupt person not only commits all crimes but can do them all justify. It is a sad situation, and it is even sadder when seemingly pious people like to justify their hypocrisy even by using the texts of Scripture. The only cure for this perversion is to give God’s will and submit to him sincerely interprets spiritually.