Maurice Nédoncelle and reciprocity

I can think of some reasons why people may fear reciprocity:
1. People who want to keep to themselves, and fear that, if others help them, then they must do something in return and so get dragged into a tangle of obligations with others, as for example, Silas Marner after having been unjustly ejected from the enclosed group to which he belonged, because of which he cut himself off, as much as possible, from contacts with others.
2. People who think that all reciprocity is do ut das, 'I give (to you) so that you may give (to me)', that is, only some form of transaction for mutual benefit, as in trading, and so they dislike it while others like or at least go along with it.
3. Those who take 'altruism' seriously and think that the only way of doing good is doing good to others and that doing good for oneself is 'egoism' and therefore wrong. And so they would do good to others but not have any done to themselves.
I can't think of why any personalist should fear reciprocity except possibly for the second and third reasons. As for the second, commercial transactions, in a wide sense, are inevitable in any society above that of the level of self-sufficient households. Even in them there is bound to be some differentiation of roles which creates a steady routine and reduces the chances of getting in each others' way, and thus operates for mutual benefit. Furthermore, in any society such as ours we inevitably meet many persons in transactional relationships in which the one provides goods or services for the other who in return provides money for the former. We cannot be Macmurrian friends with many such people for time and circumstances do not permit it. Nevertheless, we can act in a friendly manner towards each other, as by saying, 'Please' and 'thank you', words missing from some people's vocabularies, and smiling. As Macmurray so rightly said, as against any Romantic rejection of the 'limitations' of roles: 'the functional life is for the personal; the personal life is through the functional life,' ('Persons and Relations', 1941, in John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Papers, 149). What this second attitude leads to, is a rejection of 'trade', specifically the markets of an exchange economy, and a Utopian dream of a moneyless society, as in William Morris' Erehwon in which individuals and groups miraculously know what to produce, and how much, so that they can provide something which others want and collect from others what they require, as the baker collects flour from the miller and he in turn wheat from farmers, fuel from miners or charcoal-burners, etc. Or it ends up with a self-sufficient household bereft of medieval conveniences, let alone modern ones.
Macmurray demolished the third attitude, the ethics of 'service' in Freedom in the Modern World, pp. 192-5, and also in 'Self-realization' in John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, but he retracted all that in Persons in Relation, p. 159, where he states the ideal of personal existence is 'a universal community of persons in which each cares for himself for all the others and none for himself'. This encapsulates the basic error of 'altruism' which that it is self-contradictory and so impossible. If to attend to my good is selfish, then when attending to yours I must be serving your selfishness, as you would be serving mine. Thus you would think yourself bound to reject my offers because it would be selfish to accept them, and I yours for the same reason. The result would be that neither of us do could anything good, except by doing good things for those who are really selfish and would have no scruple about accepting them, while we would soon die of thirst, starvation, hypothermia, and all the other ills that flesh is heir to! Egoism, in contrast, is at least possible to some extent because others' good could be served if it would serve mine and vice-versa, as in do ut das. Hence, on these premises egoism would be morally better than altruism!
But, of course, there are deeper questions. In a Christian context it is the relationship of agapé and eros, self-giving and self-serving love in the sense that it primarily wants possession of the other in some way or other. In his Agape and Eros1 Anders Nygren strongly opposed them and made them incompatible. The book was widely influential for some years, and although Nédoncelle does not mention it in his it seems to be what he is writing against.2
Maurice Nédoncelle (1905-76) was a priest taught philosophy at Albert-de-Mun and courses in the Catholic faculty at Lille from 1930 to 1945, when he went to the University of Strassburg and taught human sciences and became the head of theology in 1956 until 1965. He published many philosophical, theological and devotional books and articles. Unlike Mounier, he was apolitical and thoroughly an 'intellectual', so much so that he asserted that personalism, i.e. that of Mounier and his followers and their journal, L'Esprit, had abandoned serious thinking and that personalism had become only a slogan for a social movement. The book that concerns us now is Love and the Person.3
Nédoncelle's account of how eros and agape are mutually involved and of how self-giving love "implies the desire to be loved, and in a certain sense, the fact of being loved."4
First how agape involves eros. Rightly, Nédoncelle takes the love of one person for another as its full form and other forms, as for animals and things, as incomplete5—for one thing, there is either limited or no reciprocity and sharing in the lesser forms: a dog can find its fulfilment in total devotion to its master, as did Gelert and Greyfriars Bobby, but his master has much more about him than what his dog can fulfil for him. Rejecting Scheler's understanding of love as contemplation of its object without an essential will towards it, Nédoncelle states that the I that loves "wills above all the existence of the thou"; subsequently it wills the autonomous development of the thou; and finally it wills that the latter be, if possible, in harmony with "the value that the I anticipates for the thou."6 That means that the I does not impose its own scheme upon the thou but discerns, or tries to discern, the individual and unique value of the other and would seek to help the other the better to be what he, and he alone, can and should be.
Yet love can obviously be disappointed, and that in two ways: by being thwarted (as by rejection and indifference) and by discovering the moral mediocrity of the other. Nevertheless this reveals the eros in the agape of one who loves, not imperfectly (as if eros were to infect agape) but perfectly. Such a person experiences both forms of disappointment as one: "'My satisfaction is your value; my sorrow is your refusal to fulfil the value that was in you and that my love wants to help you to realise'." The eros in agape is this desire to find one's soul in losing it, and it is erroneous to assume that eros is a will only to monopolise and use. On the contrary, a sincere eros finds that its vocation is generosity. It finds its own fulfilment in the fulfilment of the other for his own sake.7
And as for how love implies in some way being already loved, it seeks a full reciprocity between lover and beloved. At the minimum, says Nédoncelle, the other person has, in a sense, begun to love me (even unwittingly) by allowing me to glimpse the loveliness that he is (actually or potentially) and which I love, and so has advanced and enriched me. In the simple fact of the other's existence and growth is my reward. At the next level, my loving intention remains in the other's presence as an ideal of his self, both if he is aware of it and even if he either is unaware whose intention it is or does know it but rejects it. Fuller reciprocity is achieved when he ratifies that intention and makes variations upon the theme offered to him (perhaps, better, revealed to him). Finally, it is fully achieved when the beloved also wills the existence and advancement of the other. In this way, wanting to help another to be himself, the lover also wants to complete the circuit of love, that is, if the attitude of the other and circumstances are favourable. Therefore to love another is to give myself, to will that he love me in turn and especially that in me what makes me able and willing to love him. For me to belong to him is for me to tell him to depend upon me for his own sake. It is also to tell him that I depend on something in him to help me so that I can become worthy of him and helpful to him, and thus that I can put myself in his hands and receive a greater value from him. Far from a desire merely to possess, love is an esteem for the other that tells him to leave me if he loves me and duty calls him away.8 Therefore in the gift of oneself the I enhances the thou, an agape; and the I is enhanced by the thou, an eros. "A sincere eros leads to agape, and a sincere agape brings us back to eros." The love of self is not only not necessarily egoism but should culminate in readiness for self-sacrifice.9
Of course this is an idealisation, and Nédoncelle follows the above with a section on the all too actual diseases of love. Nevertheless it answers to what we at moments do experience and presents itself as that to which should aspire. And it shows that what we ought to be and what is truly satisfying are one and the same. But certainly in this life and this world, even the love of the rightly ordered heart can be frustrated by such circumstances as poverty, illness, isolation, and especially coldness and hostility on the part of others, all of which may prevent us from finding at least some of the right objects to love, from having the means and opportunities to express our love, and from being able to be united with whom and what we love. And love itself can bring sorrow when we see its objects decaying, defaced, defamed, disgraced and destroyed. Distinguishable in conception, love and its complete fulfilment can be, and often are, also separated in this life.

Notes
1. Trans. Philip S Watson. London, SPCK, 1953.
2. Recently I have read on an on-line list that C.S. Lewis also read it, and, if he did, he effectively answered it in The Four Loves and also without mentioning it. But Nédoncelle goes yet deeper .
3. Love and the Person, trans. R. Adelaide, New York, Sheed and Ward, 1966. What follows is taken from my Ethics as Scales of Forms, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2014, pp. 169-71.
4. Love and the Person vii.
5. Love and the Person, 8.
6. Love and the Person, 13.
7. Love and the Person, 18-9.
8. Here Nédoncelle refers to Lovelace's poem To Lucasta: On Going to the Wars, and the lines:

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more,

which still imply some degree of conflict between the two loves and not what Nédoncelle intends.
9. Love and the Person, 19-24.