There’s a common notion these days that underneath it all, everyone is well-intentioned and good. On the other hand, some cynics believe that everyone is selfish, even if they may outwardly appear to be altruistic. Some people even think it would be a good thing for everyone to put self-interest first. (I see you, Objectivists!)
But human life, and the human psyche, is more complex than that.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) identified four types of love that drive human life. Here they are in the traditional Christian and biblical language:
Love of the Lord- Love of the neighbor
- Love of the world
- Love of self
We’ll put them in more contemporary language, and describe each one more fully, in a moment.
No two people have the exact same love driving them. These are the four general categories of love, but they are differentiated into as many different specific kinds of love as there are people. No two people are ever the same, and no two people are ever motivated by exactly the same love.
What we love most of all determines everything about our life and character. This is what Swedenborg calls our “ruling love” or “primary love,” and it is our true inner self. Everything else about us arranges itself around the primary, central love that drives us.
Once we understand the four different kinds of love, and the concept of a person’s ruling love, human society and the people around us start to make a lot more sense.
Let’s take a closer look.
The four basic kinds of love
These four basic kinds of love can be expressed in many different ways. Here is a more contemporary version of them:
- Loving God
- Loving the people around us
- Loving material wealth, possessions, and pleasures
- Self-love
If we keep them in this order and priority, these are all good and healthy loves. But if we love ourselves or material wealth more than we love other people and God, then the third and fourth ones become evil and destructive drives. In fact, all the human-inflicted pain and suffering in the world comes from people putting personal wealth and power ahead of everything else in their priorities and motivation.
Let’s look at them one at a time, starting from the bottom.
The positive version of self-love
The Objectivists (followers of Ayn Rand) don’t have it completely wrong. There is a healthy self-love that provides a foundation for everything else in our life.
Healthy self-love means taking care of our physical and mental health so that we can be in a position to love and serve God and our neighbor. Here’s how Swedenborg explains it:
People often say we should love ourselves, meaning we should take care of ourselves first. But the perspective on kindness shows how we should understand this idea. We should all provide ourselves with the things we need to live: food, clothes, a place to live, and the many other things we need to live in our society. We should do this not just for ourselves, but for our family too, and not just for the present, but for the future as well. Unless we obtain for ourselves the things we need to live, we will not be in any position to show kindness to other people, since we will not have enough of anything ourselves. (The New Jerusalem #97)
He goes on to say:
We should all provide food and clothing for our bodies before we do anything else. But our reason for doing this should be to have a healthy mind in a healthy body. We should all provide food for our minds too, meaning intelligence and wisdom. The reason for this is to put ourselves in a position to work for our fellow citizens, human society, our country, and religion, which means working for the Lord. When we do this, we are doing a good job of providing for ourselves to eternity. So you can see that the important thing is the reason we provide for ourselves, since this reason is what we have in mind in everything we do. (The New Jerusalem #98)
He compares this healthy form of self-love to building a sound foundation for the house of our character and life. But, he says, the foundation is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to support the house, which is where we will actually live. Thinking that self-love should be first in our priorities, he says, is like thinking that building the foundation is the main goal. But really, the house and living in it is the main goal.
So yes, we do need to love ourselves and take care of ourselves. But that is only the foundation for a good life. And the foundation is at the bottom of the house, not the top.
The negative version of self-love
What if we do put self-love at the top? What if we truly love ourselves more than anything or anyone else, and put ourselves first in everything we think, say, and do?
That is when self-love becomes destructive. When we love ourselves more than anything else, we put ourselves at the center of everything—and we think that everyone else should put us at the center of their lives, too. In other words, we think that we should be in charge of everything, and everyone else should serve us.
At the core of unhealthy self-love is a driving desire for personal power and privilege. This is the type of love and desire that drives people to attack, dominate, and humiliate other people. It is what drives nations and their leaders to attack other nations and reduce their people to servitude. When this is the kind of love that drives us, we consider everyone who loves and supports us to be “our people.” But everyone who does not love and support us we hate, and we therefore want to dominate and destroy them.
And by the way, when people love only their family, friends, and supporters, this is just an expanded version of self-love. It is loving only my people: people I consider to be extensions of myself. This type of person has no use for, and even actively hates, anyone who is not part of his or her own circle. This is the source of all the tribalism, racism, and xenophobia that rears its ugly head in our world. (See “Black Lives Matter.” And no, it’s not about the Black Lives Matter organization.)
When self-love becomes our primary love, it becomes a love of power based on self-love. This is the source the worst evil, atrocity, and destruction in human society.
Loving material wealth, possessions, and pleasures
Similar to self-love, love for material things has a positive version and a negative version.
The positive version is that as long as we are living on this earth, we do need to be practical and provide the material necessities of life for ourselves, our families, and our loved ones, not to mention enjoy the healthy pleasures of this world for the sake of our physical and mental health. According to Swedenborg, it is not a problem to be comfortably well-off or even wealthy as long as we earn our money through honest business and service, and use it in good and constructive ways.
In fact, we are meant to engage in this world and its business and service. This is how we become good and useful people. As we develop the physical and mental skills required to provide useful goods and services to other people, we develop our character and our practical love for the neighbor and for God. “Charity,” or human kindness, is first of all being honest, industrious, and useful in our paid job or career, which is what we spend the bulk of our waking hours engaged in. For those not in the workforce, charity is demonstrated by other forms of important service that we provide in this world, such as a mother raising her children to be healthy and happy and good citizens not only of this world, but of heaven after they die. For more on this, please see:
What Does Religion Have to Do with My Profession and My Daily Work?
When our purpose for loving material possessions and pleasures is to put ourselves and our loved ones into a position to love and serve God and our fellow human beings, it is a good and healthy love.
The negative version of love for material things
It is when we put material wealth, possessions, and pleasures first that this love becomes one of the two evil types of love from which all the human-inflicted pain and suffering in the world arise.
When we love the material world and material possessions most of all, we focus our whole life and energy on getting lots and lots of money, mansions, boats, and other fancy toys. Even worse, we don’t care who we have to step on or even steal from to get it. If we can make a quick buck, or a million bucks, by engaging in some fraudulent scheme, we’re all in—as long as we think we can get away with it. In fact, if we gain at the expense of some other poor sucker, we pat ourselves on the back and consider ourselves one of the winners, not one of those losers.
In short, when making money and getting rich is our main goal in life, and we don’t care who we cheat or hurt in the process, then we have made love for the world into our ruling love. Our whole life is driven by the love of money, possessions, and material-world pleasures. This is a love, and a life, that will lead us to hell.
However, this is the second from the bottom in the hierarchy of loves for a reason. Self-love, meaning love of power over others, as a ruling love is what brings about the worst evil, pain, and suffering in human life. Love for the world as a ruling love also brings about evil, pain, and suffering, but not as bad as domineering self-love.
Domineering self-love wants to grind other people under its feet, and make them into slaves. The love of money wants to take everyone else’s money for oneself. Both are evil and destructive. But stealing other people’s money does not damage them as much as making them into slaves and oppressing them. By looking at the actions of people and even of nations who are driven by one or the other, we can see the difference, and recognize the results of putting the two lower kinds of love first.
Loving the people around us
In the original languages of the Bible, the words translated “neighbor” mean “companion, friend, people nearby.” When the Bible tells us that we are to “love our neighbor as ourselves” (for example, in Leviticus 19:18 and Matthew 22:39), it is telling us that we are to love and care for the people around us just as much as we love and care for ourselves. We are not to put our own well-being ahead of theirs, but to consider their well-being and happiness to be just as important as ours.
This is a love that leads us to heaven. When we devote our days and our lives to loving and serving the other people in our neighborhood and our community, we are building a life of heaven within and around us. After all, according to Swedenborg, heaven itself is a community of useful service to one another. And for people whose primary love is other people, being able to do things that help other people and give them happiness is the greatest joy in life.
This is the angels’ greatest joy as well. When they get up in the morning they don’t dread going to work. They look forward to it, because it means they can spend their working day making other people’s lives better. This gives them a profound sense of happiness and well-being in life.
People on this earth who put love for the people around them first can have a similar joy in life. Certainly this life has its struggles and its pain. But if we can at least engage in some sort of useful, constructive work, no matter how humble, that improves the lives of other people, then we can have an inner peace and satisfaction in knowing that our life and our actions mean something.
For example, a construction worker who thinks about how a couple or a family will live in the house he is building, and makes sure to do a good job placing every beam and nail, can feel a sense of satisfaction that his work is going to provide a good, safe, and comfortable home for people to live in every day. It may not be a glamorous job, but it is doing something good and literally constructive for other people.
People who devote their lives to loving other people in good, useful, and practical ways are building a life of heaven within and around themselves, whatever their particular religious beliefs or lack thereof may be. By believing in the good of other people, they are believing in the second of Jesus’ Great Commandments. And as we read in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31–46, people who do good things for even the least of their human brothers and sisters on this earth are doing it for God, and are on the path to eternal life.
For more on this kind of love, please see:
Loving God
Loving God takes love for the neighbor to a whole new level. People who put love for the people around them first become good and useful members of their community. People who put love for God first have a universal love for God’s entire creation, and everyone and everything in it.
Although love for the people around us is possible even for non-religious people and atheists, providing them a pathway to heaven, obviously we have to believe in God in order to love God. People who believe in God and love God, and devote their lives to serving God—assuming their love for God is real, and not a hypocritical mask—will feel love for every living being everywhere, and for the planet and universe where we live. They will look for the good in everyone and everything, and seek to bring it out, while sidelining the evil as much as possible.
This doesn’t mean being naïve and becoming a doormat. It’s not that such people don’t recognize that there is evil in the world, and that it must be resisted. But when dealing with people, both good and bad, they seek to treat them with human dignity and respect, and look for any good that can be brought out and emphasized, even while sometimes necessarily putting limits and restraints on any evil that they might do.
Loving God also means being open to God’s love flowing into us, loving God in return, and showing God’s love to everyone around us. God loves all the beings God has created. It gives God happiness and joy not only to give us happiness and joy, but to see us giving happiness and joy to one another.
In short, love for God means loving God everywhere and in everything God has created. A life of love for God is a life of love for everyone and everything good. For more on this, please see:
How do I Love God with my Whole Heart?
The biblical source
Where did Swedenborg get the idea of these four basic kinds of love?
It didn’t just pop into his brain one day. It came from the Bible. The first two are stated plainly by Jesus Christ himself:
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40. See also Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:25–28)
Here Jesus tells us that the entire Bible depends on the commandments to love God and love our neighbor.
The other two of Swedenborg’s four basic kinds of love are mentioned in various ways in the Gospels, but the specific language comes from the Epistles. I’ve put it in italics in these two quotes:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world, for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God abide forever. (1 John 2:15–7)
And:
You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, unfeeling, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them! (2 Timothy 3:1–5)
And speaking of “lovers of money”:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (1 Timothy 6:10)
Love of money is a very common form of love of the world.
As with all of Swedenborg’s key Christian teachings, the four basic kinds of love come right out of the Bible.
Getting our priorities right
Once we understand these four basic kinds of love, and the concept of a ruling love—meaning what individuals put first in their motivation and priority—we can not only understand the world around us much better, but we can get our own priorities in the right order.
For us personally, the message is clear: loving God, the neighbor, the world, and ourselves are all good things as long as we keep them in the right order. When we put God and other people first in our priorities, we are living a good, healthy, constructive, and heaven-bound life. But when we put material possessions and pleasures, or our own power, privilege, and pleasure first, we are living a bad, unhealthy, destructive, and hell-bound life. (Sorry, Objectivists, but self-love is not the top dog!)
Here is a key statement from Swedenborg about our ruling or primary love:
Whatever we love more than anything else, we have as our goal in life. It is what we pay attention to in everything we do. It is present in our motivation like a hidden current in a river, pulling and carrying us along even when we are doing something else. It is what moves us. This primary love is what we look for and see in other people. Depending on what their primary love is, we either use it to influence them, or we work together with them. (The New Jerusalem #56)
We can figure out what our own ruling love is by paying attention to what excites us the most and gives us the most happiness and pleasure, and what leaves us bored and uninterested. If what excites us the most is making a big pile of money or having someone say how great we are, then we’ve got some serious work to do on ourselves!
And as Swedenborg says here, this is also what we try to figure out in other people. What drives them? What makes them tick? If we can get a sense of what another person’s primary, driving love might be, we will have a much better idea of how to relate to that person.
When we find people who share our goals, values, and motives, these become our close friends and colleagues. These are the people we work together with to achieve our common goals.
If we find that people are driven by something different than what drives us, that is also very valuable information. When we know what drives a person, we can use that knowledge to influence them. If they’re mostly interested in money, we can get them to do good things by paying them good money to do it. If they’re mostly interested in their own position and power, we can get them to do good things by stroking their ego and buttering them up. If we encounter people who truly care about other people, we can motivate them by showing them how doing this or that good thing will benefit others who are in need. And if they love and care about God most of all, then they will believe or do something if they see that it is in harmony with God’s will, God’s love, and God’s truth.
The four basic kinds of love, and the concept of a person’s ruling love, are the keys to understanding human society, life, and behavior. Different people are motivated by different things. We’re not all good, nor are we all selfish. Humans are complex. But these are two of the basics that can help us to see a pattern in the complexity of human society and behavior, and adjust our own words and actions accordingly to bring about the best results in any situation.
And of course, what’s most important for each of us is to get our own priorities straight. That’s what our lifetime here on earth is all about.
Here is a shorter video version of this article:
For further reading:
- How do I Love God with my Whole Heart?
- How Do I Love My Neighbor?
- Spiritual Growth 101 with Mike Tyson: “The Virtue of Selfishness”
- Self-Esteem is Made to be Broken
- Why is Evil Sexier than Good?
- Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Sir Woofenden… I love your insights but… Did you really say about the angels : “When they get up in the morning…” I just hope they never sleep… Take care, Sir. Emile
Hi Emile,
I think they must take turns being our guardian angels. After all, even angels need a break!
I posted a question a few weeks ago and I’m still waiting for a response.
Hi Ola Ilori,
I have seen one comment from you here, which I answered briefly, but it didn’t seem to have any questions in it. If you did post a question, somehow it didn’t make it through. Please post it again, and I’ll do my best to respond. Or if your linked comment was meant to be a question, please let me know what your question was. Thanks, and God bless.
Thanks for your speedy response. My question was with regards to the following writings of Paul. Swedenborg never explained what Paul meant by the text. What’s your interpretation?
.Behold, I tell you a [m]mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” [1Cor. 15:51,52]
“For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” [1 Thess.4:15-18]
Hi Ola Ilori,
Ah, you submitted it as a spiritual conundrum. I did receive it. It’s a good question. I even contemplated replying to it. However, I receive far more spiritual conundrums than I can possibly answer. Hundreds of them by now. Most of them I don’t ever get to because there’s just not enough time to answer them all. It takes me at least a day, and sometimes several days to a week, to write, edit, and post each new article on the blog. Here in the comments sections I can give quicker answers without needing to look up all the supporting references and get everything written out carefully and in an organized way.
About these passages and other similar ones, it’s important to know and understand two things:
If you read 1 Corinthians 15:35–58, which is the context of the verses you quoted, you will see that Paul talks about a physical body and a spiritual body, but makes it sound as if the physical body becomes a spiritual body, which is not actually how it works. But for people who are physical-minded, it’s probably as close as they can get to understanding that when they rise from death they will be in a body that is solid and real. So Paul’s words are adapted to the understanding of physical-minded people.
What really happens is that we leave our physical body behind, and begin living in our spiritual body. Paul seems to understand this when he says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:50). But the whole chapter is written so that physical-minded people can hang onto it and have something to believe in, which is the main purpose of the chapter. For spiritual-minded people, Paul’s words are transformed into a spiritual idea, which makes them much clearer.
Physical-minded people believe that we must resume living in our physical body because they don’t think that spiritual things are real. So the Bible speaks of a “last trumpet” at the time of a future Last Judgment when everyone will be raised from the dead together. It is presented as people literally rising out of their graves. The belief is that people’s physical bodies will be rebuilt even if they have crumbled to dust, like the bones in the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37:1–14. But that passage is also metaphorical, not literal, as is most of the prophecy in the Bible.
In reality, the Last Judgment takes place in the spiritual world, and the people who are “resurrected” are people who have been held “under the altar” (see Revelation 6:9–11) in the spiritual world. But that’s a big subject that there’s not time for here. Meanwhile, each of us individually has our own “last trumpet” at the time of our death, and we are immediately resurrected into the spiritual world, where we continue to live in our spiritual body. (At least it is clear in 1 Corinthians 15 that we have both a physical body and a spiritual body!)
However, once again, physical-minded people can’t believe this because they think that we are our physical body, and they see the physical body go down into the grave, whereas they think that the spirit without the physical body is just a wisp of air, without any solidity or reality. And since the bodies of everyone they know who has died are still in the grave, they simply can’t believe that people are resurrected immediately after death in the spiritual world. That is why the Bible is written the way it is.
We will indeed all be “changed” and raised “incorruptible,” but this will happen for each of us immediately after death in the spiritual world, not in the physical world at some future date.
Similarly, 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, which is the full passage about a future coming of the Lord, makes it sound as if all of this is going to happen here in the material world. That may even have been what Paul himself believed. Paul seemed to think that the Lord’s Second Coming would happen very soon, probably within his own lifetime. Now, two thousand years later, we know that this did not happen—and certainly not in a physical, earthly way as many Christians today still continue to believe.
But according to Swedenborg, the Last Judgment has already taken place, and it took place, not in the material world, but in the spiritual world. He wrote a book called The Last Judgment in which he described it from his own eyewitness experience of it in the year 1757. Ever since then, we have been living in a different era. The huge changes that have taken place in human life and society on this earth since then are a testimony to that. See:
Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?
Paul may have literally believed that we will all be carried up into the air and live with Christ there. But I think it’s more likely that he was thinking of “the sky” as “heaven,” not the literal sky of this earth. In both Hebrew and Greek, the same word means both “sky” and “heaven.” From a spiritual and Swedenborgian perspective, Paul is describing events that take place in the spiritual world, not events that take place in the material world.
Perhaps at some point in the future I’ll write a post for the blog that goes into some of these things in more detail. For people who think physically and take the Bible literally, everything I say here will seem like nonsense. But that’s exactly why the Bible was written the way it was: so that physical-minded people would still have something to believe in. If they didn’t believe in a future resurrection in which their spirit would be rejoined to their physical body, they wouldn’t believe in any afterlife at all, they would lose faith, and they would live evil and sinful lives. So the Bible is written in such a way that even physical-minded people can look to it and have faith, whereas spiritual-minded people can read the same words and understand them spiritually. For a related article, please see:
How God Speaks in the Bible to Us Boneheads
See also:
The Bible: Literal Inerrancy vs. Divine Depths of Meaning
I know I haven’t covered everything in the verses you quoted. I hope this much is at least helpful to you. If there are other specific points or statements that you’d like to hear more about, feel free to continue the conversation here.
Thank you very much for your reply. I now have an answer for those who want to know why I no longer believe in a literal Second Coming. I’m taking my YouTube Channel in different direction. God bless you and your family! Ola ILORI
Hi Ola Ilori,
You are most welcome. May God bless your good work and your spiritual journey.
If love of God and/or neighbor leads, then does it really matter if love of self and love of the world are in the wrong priorities below such?
Hi K,
It might make a difference in a person’s character and approach to things, but it won’t make any difference when it comes to the person’s ultimate destination being heaven because s/he has put love for God and/or the neighbor first.
We often hear it’s imposable to love god, and at the same time hate the neighbor, But I want to know if the opposite is possible. To love the neighbor but be indifferent to god.
I sometimes feel god ignores the tough things we go through, so I resent him at times were I’m in the pitts of despair, but at the same time feel compassion for fellow human beings that are suffering as much as I am or worst than I am.
Hi tammi85,
There are many, many people who are on the level of love of the neighbor, but have not reached the level of love of God. Good-hearted atheists and humanists are among them. But even many religious people are motivated mostly by care and concern for the people around them in their neighborhood and community, and do not have have a deep sense of God’s continual presence and a resulting universal love for all of humankind. People who are motivated by love for the neighbor, but haven’t attained the high spiritual level represented by love for the Lord, will still find their way to heaven in the afterlife.
About your feeling that God ignores our pain and struggle, this is also a very common feeling. In reality, our times of struggle and despair are when God is closest to us. Hence the well-known allegory of the footprints in the sand. But precisely because we are in the pits of despair and darkness, we are unable to see or feel God’s presence. God allows this because for our most thorny and grievous evils, we must be brought to the point of despair, or we will not be broken of them, we will not give up personal and egotistical control of our own life, and we will not turn our life over to the Lord. The deepest temptations we go through are all about breaking our need to control our own life based on our own will and ideas, and getting us to the point where we realize that God is everything and we are nothing, but that with God, we can be everything God created us to be.
Here are some articles that you might find helpful along these lines:
There are more linked from the end of these ones, but these should be enough to give you the idea.
Even though it doesn’t feel like it, God is always with us. And the reason God is closest to us when we are struggling the hardest is that this is when we are at our most human. It is when we are making the tough, basic decisions that will determine the course of our lives. This is when we are exercising our human freedom at the deepest level. God will not intervene and make the decision for us because then it wouldn’t be ours, and it wouldn’t become a real and deep part of ourselves and our character.
Only looking back on our life can we see that God was with us all along. But when we’re in the middle of our deepest struggles, it certainly does feel as if God has abandoned us.
I keep thinking the point of this suffering I’m going through, is for me to use it and give others who are going through this same sadness hope and to somehow take that pain away from them as my job in the next life. That way what I’m going through now will have a constructive purpose when eventually my problems are resolved either in this life or most probably the next.
Hi tammi85,
Yes, and even so that you can help others going through it in this life. Maybe not now, because you’re still in the thick of it. But as the Psalm says, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Your current struggles won’t last forever, even if right now it seems as if they will. There will be a time when you have overcome, and you can look back on them, and reflect on the spiritual deepening and growth that came out of them. Because God never lets us face struggles if there isn’t some way that we can and must grow through them. Of course, we can give up and give in. But then all that struggle was for nothing. So keep the faith. This, too, shall pass. And God is very much with you, giving you the strength to persevere.