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In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, ‘selfless love’ often appears as a threat to the lover’s personal well-being. Such a perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it. It therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, this book enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up the lover’s self. It proposes that—while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self—both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing. It is shown that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being’s lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartrean existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to full, flourishing selfhood. The book closely engages Søren Kierkegaard’s earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in dialectical tension, and examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It concludes with suggestions for further bolstering Tillich’s and Murdoch’s case for linking selfless love and human flourishing.
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