The problem with Randians, of course, is that they are not selfish enough.
In an ongoing series of periodic essays on the ethics of selflessness versus selfishness, C. Bradley Thompson—perhaps best known online for his polemic against “the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans”—has turned his sights on Jesus Christ himself. Thompson argues that “the eradication of the self is the highest fulfillment of Christ’s self-abasing philosophy.” Because Christianity is a faith of self-denial, it is also one of self-abnegation: “Self-denial (i.e., the rejection first of self-love and then ultimately of the self itself) is the fundamental Christian virtue.” For Christians, not just selfishness but the pursuit of one’s own self-interest is immoral. Thus the true heart of Christianity (at least in its Puritan variety) is “nihilistic self-hatred.”
Thompson is a scholar, a man of honor, and a friend. He has done his homework; his essays quote extensively from the Bible and the Christian tradition—Chrysostom, Augustine, Winthrop, Hooker. But for all his erudition, Thompson’s account of Christianity is incomplete. It leaves out the very thing he and other Randians are most interested in: selfishness.
In his commentary on Hooker, Thompson refers us to Matthew 16.24: “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself.” He does not refer us to the very next verse, Matthew 16.25: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” The omission is telling. It is true, as Thompson says, that Christ preaches “a turning away from the self and from this world.” But he does so only so that we may turn towards something else: not nihilistic self-hatred but rather, as it were, enlightened self-interest.
“I have come,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “that they may have life and have it superabundantly.” The reward of Christian generosity, the First Epistle to Timothy tells us, is not just eternal but real life—“that which is really life.” We may perhaps ask whether these and other similar promises are mere empty fantasies. We cannot reasonably ask whether they are mere nihilistic self-abnegations.
No doubt, the pages of the New Testament are replete with calls to self-sacrifice (and Christians would do well to take these calls so seriously as does Thompson). But they are also replete with promises: promises of glory, gladness, and Godlikeness—promises even of self-interested gain. The point of suffering with Christ is not mortification but glorification with him. The point of forsaking earthly treasures is not to become destitute but to store up Heavenly treasures for ourselves—self-interestedly. The point of the cross is not the death of the Word but the life of the world. And the point of selflessness itself is not self-denial but self-fulfillment.
The paradoxes arise, of course, because Christian love—what is in fact “true love”—is at once both selfless and self-interested. It is selfless in the sense that it may demand everything of us: certainly many earthly pleasures and sometimes even our very lives. But it is self-interested in the sense that it is not just the concomitant but the essence of all true joy. Loveless joy is an impossibility; you cannot get what you really want unless you care about more than what you yourself want. You cannot save your life until you lose it.
Thompson writes as a student of Ayn Rand, who famously proclaimed selfishness a virtue. But Rand’s philosophy, unabashedly selfish though it is, still is not selfish enough. Two decades before Rand published The Virtue of Selfishness, Lewis wrote:
The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
What is there to say about someone content with a mere earthly lifetime’s worth of private property rights? Like Lewis’ child, he has turned down an incalculably greater offer; he is far too easily pleased. For my part, I am a follower of Jesus; I am zealous for my own self-interest; and I am far too selfish to turn down an offer of infinite and inexpressible joy. You may call me crazy or credulous, a blind believer in false gods and old wives’ tales. You may not call me un-self-interested.
For what Christ encountered among the Randians was not an excess but a deficiency of self-interestedness. What he met among the Nietzscheans were Untermenschen who refused to say Yes to life. And the skeptics he found unskeptical, and the rationalists irrational, and the plutocrats impoverished, and the libertines enslaved. They were none of them yet Christians. They were none of them yet themselves.
And so he came to make them themselves—to give them their genuine self-interest. He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, but also the writings of C. Bradley Thompson. The “morally self-interested man ‘allots to himself the noblest things and the greatest goods.’” Thus Thompson (quoting Aristotle); thus also, and even more so, Jesus Christ.