Augustine thought, to try to get to neighbor-love too quickly, taking too much for granted, assuming we knew what the neighbor was, and therefore what he needed. In a sermon contemporary with the Confessions, he asked why it was not enough to say, “You shall love your neighbor,” and replied that if we did not know how to love ourselves, we should go wrong in loving our neighbor. “So the Lord resolved to give you a form for your love of yourself in the love of God, and only then entrusted you with your neighbor, to love him as yourself.”6 Without a self-love shaped to the love of God we are not
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