Dying to the God Who Is Me: Everyman’s Identity Crisis

Who owns us is what makes us important.

In an advertisement for a humane society in a recent issue of an English magazine there is a photograph of a dog and a cat lying side by side in unaccustomed harmony, the dog showing the whites of his eyes as he glances warily toward his companion, the cat lying serenely at ease, forepaws demurely turned inward. The legend over their heads calls them “A Couple of VIP’s—Very Important Pets.” And the next line declares: “What makes them important is who owns them.”

And thus, with throwaway casualness, a nameless ad-writer has resolved the major problem of contemporary sensibility. I allude, of course, to the question of personal identity and self-worth. Or as a student of mine once quaintly asked me: “How do I find out how I stack up worth-wise?” (He was reading Milton at the time, and was having a hard time understanding how so well-educated a poet could believe in the cosmic significance of the actions of a couple of human beings, a species now known to be an accidental eruption of a hundred or two pounds of warm meat and bones walking about on a negligible planet and bearing a terminal disease called Life.)

As the truism has it, “the problem of the nineteenth century was the death of God; that of the twentieth century is the death of man.” Oddly enough, the inevitability of the second following from the first seems not to have been apparent to those of the nineteenth century who so joyously discovered man’s godhood. Nietzsche’s famous exhortation had a fine ring to it: “Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth.” It was equally heartening to hear the words of George Bernard Shaw (who once declared in an interview that he had solved every major problem of his time): “We must replace the man by the superman.”

And so, with God declared to be no longer a “necessary hypothesis,” the search for the only true deity, Self, began. And a merry chase it has been for close to a hundred years. Almost the whole of modern psychology stems from it. (If this seems too strong, read Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, by Paul C. Vitz of New York University, published by Eerdmans.) One layer after another of the man-onion has been unpeeled in the search for the innermost Seed, the Divine Essence, the Me who is god. For a long time it was as much fun as opening Christmas presents. There seemed to be no end to the boxes within boxes. Now, however, the fear seems to be growing that the last wrapping has been removed, the last peel unpeeled—and there’s nothing inside. A sort of psychological equivalent to the “black hole” of the astronomer. The silence of Beckett. The soundless scream of Munch. The man-god, at last self-known, curls into a fetal position and waits. For Nothing.

Enter the guru, for there is nothing like one or another of the currently popular “oriental” cults for dealing with Nothingness. They are, as you might say, grounded on it. Most of them deny the permanent reality of individual self-consciousness, and for many young people Nirvana (even when they don’t know that, delectably, it means “blowing out”) is just the homeopathic dose the doctor ordered. Defeat the pain by embracing it; avoid defeat by instant surrender; abash the poisoner by an immunizing sampling of all his killing store (as did Housman’s long-lived Mithridates); rename angst and call it Life. In short, with an earlier personage caught in the same predicament, cry, “Evil, be thou my good!” Rejoice in the knowledge that to be in a universe of nonbeing is to be utterly free. (“Sibyl,” cried the jeering boys at Cumae, “what do you want?” And the Sibyl answered, “I want to die.”)

Actually, few victims of the modern identity crisis try to diagnose the dis-ease very deeply. Some would not know that they have it if it had not become fashionable to talk about it, and if the topic were not so prevalent in modern literature and art. For them it is a kind of twentieth-century version of that eighteenth-century malady called “the vapors,” a term deriving from the happy days when all one had to worry about, psychologically or physiologically, was deftly to balance his four “humors.” Others simply use the “in” jargon for their own purposes—like the students who protest low grades because they “erode personhood and the sense of self-worth.”

For all that, the malady is real and deep-rooted. It is also peculiarly prevalent in our age, as compared to earlier periods in the world’s history. This assertion cannot be proved, I suppose, for the cry “Who am I?” surely has regularly arisen from this planet ever since the primal disaster in Eden; but one simply does not find the query permeating the literature, art, and philosophy of earlier ages as it does ours. Importantly, no doubt, this difference is owing to the fact that personal identity is most readily established and stabilized through relationships, and ours is a time when irrelevance is preached not only as a fact but as essential to individual liberty. A relationship implies duties and restraints; the circle that impinges on another has lost some of its “wholeness.” In earlier ages, a person (even the pagan) related himself to the divine, the supernatural, the transcendant, and it was more self-identifying even to consider yourself the plaything of malign deities than to see yourself as an accidental, irrelevant speck of an aberration called “self-consciousness.” If the gods hate us, at least we must be there. Much better, of course, and much more conducive to a sense of identity, was to be surrounded by the age-old household gods, lares and penates (the Old Testament terraphim), even if the higher gods seemed far off and uncaring. The sight of the sacred, household snake, slithering benignly about the atrium, sipping from his cream bowl, probably helped. Citizenship (how identifying to say, “I am a Roman!”), vocation, and even class distinctions provided the environment in which each individual could see himself as a part of a greater whole, to the enhancement of identity and self-respect.

In the Christian era, the whole religious, social, and political hierarchy provided those definitions, duties, and relationships that fostered self-knowledge. Not to know yourself in relationship to them was to be clearly deficient as a person (Lear’s problem was that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself”), and to learn your place in the cosmic scheme was to gain wisdom. Granted all the imperfections and inequities of the older system of “cosmic order,” it was still better for your self-knowledge and self-esteem than present-day fragmentation and irrelevance. The dash for “total freedom” cannot stop until it tumbles into total formlessness, a universe of the absurd, which is without definable characteristics—including “worth,” “self,” or anything else. The great god Me brings the temple down on his own head.

To speak of this god in the singular is, of course, vastly to misconstrue the faith. It is not a religion of the corporate Human Self (as in Humanism), but of everyone’s own self. It is the ultimate debasement of human religion (using that term as utterly different from God’s revelation of himself in his Word), for it achieves the maximum proliferation of gods, a condition anthropologists usually equate with the most debased societies. No wonder its public worship services are indistinguishable from mob scenes, for each Me-god wants not only to speak but to dominate. Righteous indignation—the most comforting of all emotions in the bosom of one who doubts his own identity and worth—and a momentarily fused hatred of common enemies, real or imagined, may for a time give a facade of unity; but quickly and inevitably are restored (in Milton’s words) “… Tumult and Confusion all imbroiled,/And Discord with a thousand various mouths” (Paradise Lost, II, 966–7). Paradoxically, each Me-god cries for “communication.” “You’re not listening to Me!” they wail. On the contrary. I hear them. To paraphrase Goethe, “One understands their intention—and one is embarrassed.”

Less shattering than the public worship services, but equally pathetic, are the daily, solitary devotions of Me worshipers. “Role playing” is popular and is much encouraged by the psychological fraternity. So is “aggressiveness training” and much demanding of your “rights” (whence derived or by whom authoritatively administered is left a bit vague). “Role playing” is supposed to compensate for the lack of real sense of inner identity, and is given visible support by the wearing of costumes instead of clothing. Training in aggressiveness and in demanding your “rights” usually go together, notably in widely popular academic courses in such things as “Consciousness Raising and Aggressiveness Building.” (“Are you getting all that’s coming to you?” asks an advertising brochure for such a course. I hope that the ultimate answer, by the grace of God, will be No.) All of which fosters the frequent use of the two pronouns that the Me-god loves next to his own name: My and Mine.

liquid

He gathered me from inferno

rolled and pressed

the white hot mass—

smoothed me in sizzling water

stretched and sheared polished me in the flame;

shaped me

with Infinite care

hollowed me

with His breath

to house the Shekinah

and shed glimmerings

of His grace.

ANDREA HERLING

It might be noted in passing that the Me-god has succeeded an earlier and rather more admirable deity, the I-god. This latter at least identified himself with the nominative case, that which acts, and says, “I will not serve!” The other is content with the objective case, that which is merely acted upon, as a jelly fish rhythmically waves its translucent umbrella inward, ingesting whatever happens to be nearby, algae or garbage. To change the figure, the god Me is an empty house, swept and garnished, waiting for eight unwanted tenants to move in (Matt. 12:44–45).

But we have too long neglected our patient cat and dog—whose happy lot, we are told, is to have their identity, value, and security depend on one thing: who owns them.

The least percipient reader will need no help in seeing whither my concluding words will tend. No theme more permeates Scripture than the truth that God is the only creator and owner of the entire universe; and, more wonderfully, that the redeemed are the peculiar possession of God—foreknown, sought, bought, and paid for (“not with corruptible things, as silver and gold … but with the precious blood of Christ …” [1 Peter 1:18–19]). We exist because God thinks of us; we are of value because he loves us.

Even at the mundane level, people generally recognize that it is not self-consciousness which gives us our identity (we may think that we are Napoleon, or an isosceles triangle) but others’ consciousness of us. If we were to move about unseen, unheard, and unnoticed by others, we should doubt our own reality. And it is on the esteem of others that we base our self-esteem. At least we use the principle every time we try to enhance our importance. “I’m sure Mr. Bigboss will see me,” we coolly tell the officious receptionist; “I’m an old friend of his.” It is always more a matter of who knows us, and with what degree of esteem, than of how many know us. Not to be in the mind of anyone, not to be loved by anyone, is (like Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name) to be dead. “I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind,” laments David (Ps. 31:12).

To be in the mind of God is truly to exist. (The most terrible final fate of the lost is to come into the mind of God no more.) But to be loved by God, the sole arbiter of value, is to rise to heights of glory—to be “like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matt. 13:44); or like “one pearl of great price,” to purchase which the merchant “went and sold all that he had, and bought it” (Matt. 13:46)—this is to know a sense of worth as far transcending the wildest babblings of the great-god-Me clan as heaven is from hell.

Presumably, no final, cautionary note need be made at this point, but to be on the safe side it will be made anyway: To believe that God’s knowledge of us is the sole ground of our identity (and that some day we shall know as we are known), to believe that he loves us, and to accept the incalculable value he sets on us is utterly to exclude boasting and totally to abase human pride, not to swell it. The loss to the old Self, that which cried “Glory to Me in the highest” is of not less than everything, for it acknowledges that it has been judged, deemed worthy of death, and slain. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).

Happy little cat and dog; happy we. What makes us important is who owns us.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.