Who Am I? Who Am I?

If one were vouchsafed in a dream to listen in on two voices, and he heard the following fragments—“Who am I?” “… my self-concept,” “… identity crisis,” “… self-awareness”—uttered repeatedly, and then were asked to guess from this little scrap of data, what century he was listening in on, he would not have much trouble deciding. It will probably not have been Aeschylus and Herodotus talking, nor Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, nor even Alexander Pope and Dr. Arbuthnot. His first guess would be, “Those were voices from the twentieth century.”

How can he tell? Why would he not guess fifth century B.C. Athens, or thirteenth century Paris, or eighteenth century London? Because, he would tell us, he was assuming that the voices were typical of their era, and those remarks belong to the twentieth century.

And he will have been correct, of course. No other century or culture of which we have any records has ever been so galvanized by the particular notion that underlies those remarks. No Icelandic saga, no Hebrew psalm, no Navajo legend, no Latin georgic, no Russian novel, has anyone talking quite like that.

The point here is, those fragments are straws in an enormous wind. You can tell a great deal about what is occupying people in a given era by listening to what they say. And you do not have to read very far in the annals or poetry, say, of Greece, or the Middle Ages, or the Enlightenment, before you pick up some notions as to what big questions were at work in their imaginations. If you find people consulting oracles you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to find out what the gods wanted them to do. Again, if you find them confessing their sins to a priest, you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to behave themselves in a way that would bear the scrutiny of some divine tribunal. Or again, if you find them briskly dismantling erstwhile superstitions in the name of Reason, you may safely infer that they trust this faculty.

Our own time is especially marked by the tormented pursuit of the question Who Am I? To say “especially marked” is to understate it: say rather hag-ridden, or bedevilled. We seek the answer earnestly, assiduously, nay desperately. There is hardly a single exchange of cocktail-party chat which in its own blithe way does not assume this vast, laborious quest as being the natural occupation of us all. “My dear, my shrink told me.…” “Oh, she’s very insecure.” “I have this thing about my self-image.” “He’s going to take a year off from seminary to try and find himself.”

But it is not only in random chat that we hear the news of this pursuit. The whole enterprise of art in our century bears loud witness to it. The sole burden of poetry, theater, cinema, painting, and fiction in our time is that somewhere in there we lost ourselves and hence must grope pathetically for any straw of affirmation that may float by in the dark. From Eliot’s The Waste Land, through the theater of Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett, and Albee, the films of Bunuel, Truffaut, Robbe-Grillet, and Bergman, the painting of the Dadaists, the Bauhaus, the surrealists, and the ilk of Warhol, to the novels of Faulkner, Camus, Vonnegut, and Saul Bellow, we have sent up flares signaling “Help! What are we?” (We hesitate even to make the cautious affirmation implicit in the question “who are we?”)

What does it all spring from? From two assumptions, really: first, that it is in fact our business to look into this question of our identity; and second, that somewhere in there the quarry has got lost.

To take the second one first: everyone’s identity has got lost somewhere. That is the assumption. Who am I? we ask, and can find neither an answer nor any sage who can tell us where to look. To be sure, we attempt it: you can stop at a thousand roadside palmists in Florida and find solace; or you can consult the stars in the afternoon paper in the hope that the Archer or the Crab will help; or you can sign in with a guru of one sort or another, or join a group that will nudge you along towards an answer by getting you to sit in a circle with them, or breathe with them, or take off your clothes, or dance with them, or work through your hang-ups with them. People used to be told to go on an ocean voyage when they were at the end of their tether, the notion being not so much that they find out who they were as that they simmer down and let the salt and the spray and the breeze freshen them up. There was a more remote time when people turned for help to soothsayers, priests, or sibyls, since these practitioners are adept at peering into the darkness where the god lurks and it was the god who knew the answer they wanted. Now we turn to other practitioners who are adept at peering into the darkness where our identity lurks, since that is what we seek rather than the god.

Where was it lost, this thing that we pursue with such zeal? Is it not a naked contradiction for us to be asserting that such a thing as our identity can even be in doubt? Surely (a visitor from another planet might protest) you can’t mean what you are saying—that you aren’t sure who you are? You’re you, clearly. What is it you want to know?

Ah, yes, we would have to explain wearily, but there’s more to it than that. These shells by means of which we present ourselves to you are mere carapaces. You think this is what we are, but if you were to poke into us a bit you would find that what is in there has only a very tenuous connection with what you see. In fact, we are almost afraid to raise the question, but a horrible doubt flits by now and again as to whether there is anything in there at all. We’ve tried poking, and whatever it is in there feels more and more like less and less. Most disquieting.

But how, our interlocutor might pursue, did this state of affairs come about? I have never yet met creatures who weren’t sure who they were. Most creatures aren’t especially interested, much less puzzled, by the fact that they are, leave alone who they are. Dogs appear to have no problems on this level, and nothing we hear of angels indicates anything like it. But here you all are, paralyzed by the question. How did it all come about?

What would we say? It would be extremely difficult to rake back through history and locate the spot where the question Who am I pushed its way to center stage. We could probably find it somewhere after the Renaissance—somewhere in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, no doubt—when, having exiled the gods, we had nothing left to contemplate but ourselves.

But whether Adam knew any such curiosity would be impossible to guess, although given the perfectly harmonious nature of Eden, it may be doubted whether any disjuncture at all had been introduced into the blissful wholeness of his being whereby he might have been disposed to ask who he was. A certain distance is necessary between the asker of any question and the thing asked about, so that when we find an entity (a man) asking about himself, we have found an entity with a fissure running through the fabric of his being. An “asking self” stands on one side and peers across the fissure at the “asked-about self.” One way of imagining the perfection and integrity of Adam’s being is to say that he enjoyed, like God in whose image he had been made, an undivided wholeness (the Persons of the Trinity aren’t divisions) totally free from any perplexing and paralyzing question about itself. It may further be wondered whether self-consciousness was not introduced at the Fall, when we made a grab for varieties of knowledge that turned out to be too much for us. (Perhaps it was one of the flies in Pandora’s box, too.) Whatever may be the truth here, it is most interesting to note that in the picture of Eden in the Bible, there is not one rag of suggestion that Adam’s consciousness was ever turned toward himself. Two things are presented to him, neither of them himself. There is the earth, and he is told to subdue it and fill it and rule it, and to receive its bounty. And there is Eve. She is brought to him and immediately his attention is focused on this other. His eyes look at her and he bears witness of her in his first recorded words. She is the form of humanity made for the eyes of the man to contemplate, and vice-versa. There were no mirrors in Eden, and the myth of Narcissus may suggest something frightening and important about that.

But of course all this is conjecture. We can only make of Eden what we can from the sparse narrative. It is perhaps worth wondering about.

If we look through ancient history, we find that the question Who art Thou is much more lively than the question Who am I. Men seem to be troubled by the gods, who keep addressing them and presenting themselves to them and asking things of them. The Old Testament bears witness to this, too. Who art Thou, Lord? Alas, I am undone, I have seen the Lord. Where shall I hide from Thy presence? I will not let thee go except thou bless me. The main thing seems to be to come to terms, not with oneself but with what is required of one. There is, before very long, a whole Law, imposed by fiat from outside, describing in effect exactly how things will be, and demanding acquiescence on pain of death. Here is what we are to give our attention to. No one is asked for input. No one’s convenience or comfort is considered. And there is not a syllable’s worth of recognition given to any problems someone might have over discovering who he is.

That makes it sound grim beyond belief, but if we step back and look at the human phenomenon and how salvation came to it, some such picture emerges. It is all very alien to our gentle ways of thinking, and much too peremptory. God ought to have begun on a much more conciliatory note. He ought to have sat down with us and listened to us. We could have rapped with him about our hang-ups. We could have worked through our problems.

But alas, there it all is, this daunting set of absolutes, imposed on us from the top, and not a whisper in there allowing me time or room to discover myself first.

Or is it quite so grim? Put that way, it is daunting indeed. But then it turns out that the giver of that high Law is no capricious and maleficent deity tormenting his creatures as wanton boys torment flies. He is Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, Jehovah-nissi, the God of Abraham, even, it turns out, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ who loved to call himself the Son of Man. One of us. Immanuel.

Ah. Now there is relief. The picture, surely, has changed. The demands will be relaxed. He knows our frame. He was in all points tempted as we are. He is afflicted in all our afflictions. Perhaps he will help us out of our dilemma. Perhaps, being the Word of God, he will speak comfort to us, and affirm us in our sorrowful quest for ourselves. What does he say?

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Deny yourself. Follow me. Be kind. Be faithful. Blessed are the pure in heart, and the merciful, and those who mourn, and the peacemakers …

Yes. Yes of course. All that. But is there a word about my self-image? Can you tell me how to come to terms with myself? After all, I must find out who I am before I can do anything else.

Must you? To him that overcometh will I give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Your identity, perhaps, is a great treasure, precious beyond your wildest imaginings, kept for you by the great Custodian of souls to be given to you at the Last Day when all things are made whole.

Some such picture as the above would seem to be indicated in the biblical emphasis. There is a curious lack of any suggestion that our business is to find out who we are. And, if we object that we have to work through our problems before we can set about disposing ourselves rightly vis-à-vis God and our neighbor, we find that the language of both testaments lacks what we might call any “problem-orientation.” We are not addressed, either by Yahweh from Sinai, or by the Son of Man from Olivet, as primarily creatures with problems. The cues given in the law and the prophets and the Gospel and the epistles seem, oddly enough for us men who live in the epoch of the quest for identity and self-realization, to point us right away from that focus, right away from much attention on ourselves as objects of our curiosity. Even the very injunctions to repent, or to keep our hearts with all diligence, or to examine ourselves, carry no suggestion that this self-examination is by way of discovering something there (myself) which will be the proper object for my attention. It is to be a clearing away of rubble and impediment so that I can get on with the business at hand, which is that I be delivered eventually from all forms of egoism, and that I learn that my real freedom and personhood will be discovered, lo and behold, not in looking for it, but in learning to love God and my neighbor. It takes the combined efforts of the Law, the prophets, the Gospel, and the epistles, to help me in this enterprise, but there it is.

There is an obvious objection to this hasty line of thought, of course. It would go something like this: surely you aren’t going to string together a few maxims from the Bible, and set them suddenly over against the entire, gargantuan preoccupation of our whole epoch? After all, this is the era of behavioral sciences. They are the sovereign disciplines in our century. Here we are, this late in history, only now uncovering the whole unhappy complex of things deep in our insides that poison the well for us, and you tell us to drop all that—the whole enterprise—and pick up a few scraps of Scripture and get on with it. That, surely, is bibliomancy. What about the whole burgeoning area of counselling? The industrialized, computerized, management-oriented, profit-obsessed, materialistic, rationalistic modern era has brutalized people; nay, worse, it has depersonalized them wholly, and is stamping them out in stereotypes like nuts and bolts from a press, when all the time their humanity cries out piteously for some recognition and attestation and liberation. And you want them to deny themselves. Fie.

This raises at once the question of the sense in which biblical categories are perennially valid. Do Christ’s words to us all need to be recast for this new age of ours, so remote from his early, simple world? Or again, should our understanding of his words be revised so that we hear in his apparently peremptory and harsh maxims some entirely fresh note, unheard by the Fathers, the Reformers, the Pietists, and the rest of our predecessors? Or again, is it a false problem altogether: is there no tension between these biblical suggestions that our great task is certainly not that of finding out who we are and our own earnest pursuit of this very thing?

Sooner or later it comes down, for any one of us, to how we understand these biblical cues for our own health, and how we are going to help the people who come to us struggling with what are called identity crises and other awful burdens laid on them by the cruelties of life. We can’t just quote “Deny yourself” at them and wave them away. How shall we bear faithful witness to the biblical vision of liberty and health and wholeness lying in a direction straight away from ourselves (for the motion of Charity is forever outwards) and at the same time patiently and mercifully help them along towards some capacity even to begin to perceive, then to grasp, this great and bracing and taxing self-forgetting bliss that they were made for?

It is a sticky question. For, as long as the Word of God lasts, there is no alternative vision of bliss possible, nor any new definition of freedom. We have no warrant to suggest alternatives. The saints are the ones who have won through to that glorious state of affairs—despite whatever frightful personal limitations they staggered along under—where giving equals receiving, and self-forgetfulness equals, lo, self-discovery. The white stone is given, not sought. If that name engraved on that stone is not our identity, then what is it?

Perhaps it is a question of our realizing two things: first, that like so many other thunderous achievements of modern civilization, this acute self-consciousness and self-scrutiny that has been laid on us by the sciences of the last 100 years may be a burden beyond our capacity to manage. Our ids may be there, so to speak, but they may be none of our business, just as the fruit in Eden was there but was not healthy for us to chew on.

Secondly, finding ourselves willy-nilly in such a situation, we may be obliged to use tools never before necessary in human history, the tools of psychological analysis and so forth, to help extricate us from the prison of our own building. But we shall have to remember that they are, precisely, tools, like forceps or scalpels, which may be called in to excise or gouge in order to relieve a terrible condition; but they are not part of the living thing itself; they are not bone and sinew and nerve. Or, to change the metaphor slightly, the scrutiny of ourselves may be like a drug or a purgative, swallowed not as food and nourishment, but in order to assist us as quickly as possible back to health, which is that state of affairs in which our own insides are working quietly and efficiently so that we can get on with the job. The Law and the Gospel may be like old prescriptions, stowed on a high shelf from earlier days. Perhaps the medicine they prescribe—confession (with its corollary of forgiveness), and obedience (with its corollary of freedom)—are more useful than we think. If a patient is so debilitated that he cannot swallow even these nostrums, then of course we must help him with all the secondary skills at our disposal. But sooner or later we will be wanting to get him to the point where he can take these, for then he will be en route to health.

But what of the original question, Who am I? The Christian vision would not be able to see it as the crucial question for us mortal men and women. We seem to have been obliged to affirm a paradox, namely that we get to Point A (real selfhood) by heading towards Point Z (self-forgetfulness—the sort of thing enjoined on us in the Law and the Gospels). Whoever we are, these identities of ours are in the keeping of a faithful and able Custodian, and they will be given to us one day. Our task now is to participate in the ripening of those identities by following the cues, not by pawing into the safe.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

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