Self-endedness

Use in the book

IV.55 supplies the first essential distinction. Self-love is dishonourable when it exists alone, and self-endedness is mercenary when it ends in oneself. A self that receives enough to overflow can turn toward its benefactor and extend love to other people. The pool must fill before it can overflow: the image makes fulfilled self-concern a basis for generous relationship, rather than treating indifference to one’s own existence as the ideal.

II.54 puts the difficulty more sharply. Love does everything for its object yet is called the most self-ended thing because it cannot endure to be displeased. This belongs to a catalogue of paradoxes: love’s excess is its moderation, its activity its rest, and its generosity coexists with a kind of covetousness. The sentence does not casually retract the book’s praise of charity. It asks how a love entirely directed toward another can nonetheless seek its own fulfilment with complete intensity.

IV.63 develops the theological stakes. If all action for one’s own glory is base, how can God seek his glory? Does every apparent generosity, including Christ’s undertaking, reduce to disguised self-interest? Traherne presents this as a question to be resolved, not a doctrine to adopt. IV.64–652 answer by identifying true glory with loving the beloved for the beloved’s own sake. God’s delight in himself as love is therefore inseparable from delight in creatures’ welfare. The desire for true glory intensifies rather than competes with their happiness.

The reader’s task is to imitate that pattern. Self-endedness becomes vicious when the end is a private self sealed against others; the positive paradox becomes intelligible when the self’s end is fulfilled through generous communion. This is not a claim that harmful conduct becomes good whenever its agent enjoys it. The nature of the enjoyment and the genuine welfare of its object govern the distinction.

Places to read

1. II.54Calls love self-ended within a series of paradoxes about its complete devotion to its object.
2. IV.55Distinguishes self-love that remains alone from satisfaction that overflows toward others.
3. IV.63States the apparent conflict between condemned self-interest and divine pursuit of glory.
4. IV.64Defines true glory through the beloved’s happiness.
5. IV.65Identifies divine self-love with love for creatures and asks the reader to imitate it.

In this edition

Do not flatten the term into selfishness at every occurrence. IV.63 poses a riddle whose solution follows. The account above follows that primary sequence without assigning the unnamed opponents to a particular modern philosophical school.