Salvation and the Unity of Human Nature: Part 5, Loving Humanity Is Loving Christ

Beyond the human capacities restored in the Incarnation, there is also an ethical implication in understanding human nature as a shared ontological whole. If Christ is the new Adam as “one humanity,” then loving Christ means loving all people.

Here’s how Meister Eckhart put it:

“If you love yourself, you love all humanity as yourself. As long as you love a single person less than yourself, you have never truly learned to love yourself...”

This might seem like a confusing claim until we grasp the truth that all humanity is a shared unity. You are simply a part of the whole. To love yourself, therefore, is to love “all humanity.” Conversely, if you love anyone less than yourself, you have not truly learned to love yourself. 

And in the same passage, Eckhart pushes further into Christology:

“...Unless you love all men as yourself, all men in one man, that man being God and man.”

Again, to love Christ, to love this one man, is to love all of humanity, since all of humanity is found in this one man. With Christ identified with the whole of humanity, our love for humanity cannot be partial or piecemeal. We must love the whole of humanity, and in doing so we come to love Christ. And failing to love the whole of humanity is, therefore, a failure to love Christ.

Simply put, the logic of unity implies the following equivalences:

Loving self = Loving every single person = Loving any single person = Loving Christ.

And, correspondingly, a failure to love at any point in this equation is a failure to love the whole.