IT IS COMMONPLACE in Western religious ethics to depict the highest form of love as utterly heedless of self. We imagine the saint, who stands high above the sphere of ordinary human experience, to be wholly devoid of self-concern. It is typical to sharply distinguish the self-referential motives of mutual love from the heights of love at its selfless best. Thus Dostoevsky's image of the saintly monastic Zosima, who counsels the faithless Mrs. Khokhlakov: And if you achieve complete self-abnegation in your love for your fellow man, you will certainly gain faith, and there will be no room in your soul for any doubt whatsoever (64-65). The seventeenth-century French Quietist Francois de F6nelon wrote on the degree of absolute indifference to reciprocation necessary for love to qualify as pure (46). Kierkegaard extolled love for the dead, since it eliminates every possibility of repayment (320). Respecting twentieth-century ethics, Anders Nygren's condemnation of all self-love whatsoever has left a lasting impression (131). Such idealization of selfless love not only misleadingly exaggerates the valid principle of unselfishness, it rests on an unsatisfactory concept of God. Mutual love or reciprocity is the only appropriate fundamental norm for human interrelations, and for the divine-human encounter as well. The idealization of selfless love inevitably obscures divine suffering, a serious negative consequence that has yet to be adequately considered. Divine love, so often understood as the perfect example to which human love must conform, is mistakenly interpreted as containing no element of self-concern. This view is based on the false assumption that the divine neither needs nor seeks the mutual good of fellowship with humanity.