[ 3 ] If we have a love for power that comes from loving ourselves, we
also have evils that accompany that love. They are generally the follow-
ing: despising others, jealousy, viewing people as our enemies if they do
not show us special favor, hostility, hatred, vengefulness, mercilessness,
savagery, and cruelty. Despising God is another such evil, as is despising
the divine things that are the true insights and good actions taught by the
church. If we give these things any honor, we only pay them lip service to
prevent the church hierarchy from attacking our reputation and to stave
off verbal abuse from everyone else.
[ 4 ] Love for power is different for the clergy than it is for the laity. In
the clergy this love surges upward, as long as it is given the reins, until
they want to be gods. Lay people, on the other hand, want to be mon-
archs. That is how far the imagination of that love takes their minds.
[ 5 ] In spiritually well-developed people, love for heaven occupies the
highest place and constitutes the head of what follows it; love for the world
is beneath it and is like the torso below the head; love for themselves is
below this love in the role of the lower legs. It follows then that if love for
ourselves constitutes the head, we are completely upside-down. In that
case we look to the angels like people sleeping with their heads on the
ground and their rear ends up in the air. When people like this are wor-
shiping, they look as if they are frolicking on all fours like panther cubs.
Furthermore, they look like various kinds of two-headed creatures—the
head on top has the face of a wild animal, while the other below it has a
human face that is continually pushed down from above and forced to kiss
the ground.
All people of this type are sense-oriented. They are like the people
described above in § 402.All Individual Members of Humankind
Are the Neighbor We Are to Love,
but [in Different Ways]
Depending on the Type of Goodness They Have406 We are not born for our own sake; we are born for the sake of others. That
is, we are not born to live for ourselves alone; we are born to live for others.
Otherwise society would not be cohesive and there would be no good in it.