As we think about Easter and the resurrection we are forced to think not only about what happened to Jesus but also about what will happen to us. As soon as we begin to think about our own future beyond death, however, we are forced to think about who we are, about our identity and who and what it is that might survive death. Traditionally the word ‘soul’ has been used to encapsulate this surviving identity but what we mean by ‘the soul’ is problematic. The same questions apply in relation to soul as to self; is it an identifiable bit of me located somewhere in the body, or is it the whole of what I am from the beginning to the end of my life? Do I have an essence which is distinctive to me, something by which I know myself and others know me or am I a bundle of experiences, memories, thoughts and emotions which I may be able to construct into some sort of narrative as I go along? Given the fact that my physical body is constantly renewing itself so that materially speaking no part of me is the same at 50 as it was at 5 years old, what makes me ‘me’?
These questions were to some extent addressed in the programme ‘Start the Week’ yesterday by the philosopher Julian Baggini who has just written a book called ‘The Ego Trick’. He suggested we try an experiment to find ourselves by sitting down quietly and trying to focus on the self. He then, however, rather pre-empted the answer by saying that when he (and the philosopher David Hume) tried to do this all they came up with were random thoughts, feelings and memories, hence the self must only be a bundle of these things, and the sense of self must be a kind of ‘ego trick’ which nevertheless works for us.(I’ve not read this book yet and there is certainly more in it than this!)
This is a problem which of course has a history and the way in which the problem affects us has changed as our experience of ourselves as social beings has changed. The crisis of the modern self gets under way at the time of the Reformation and what is often referred to as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. In pre modern societies (speaking at least in European terms) people knew themselves to be part of a local family net work, part of a particular grouping within a social hierarchy, part of a distinct and often unchanging geographical locality, part of a trade or profession; they sensed themselves also as part of a numinous and sacramental world, part of nature which was itself ordered in a kind of hierarchy. Society was held together by patterns of myth and ritual, implicit and shared understandings, a marriage of thought and feeling, symbol and reality.
From the 16th century onwards society changed as a result of changes in religion, in social and economic relations and class structure, in transport and the opportunity to travel around a world where Capital and Progress are the twin gods. And within this changing society men and women gradually began to experience themselves as more solitary individuals, answerable to no-one but themselves, dependent on what their own experience and intuition taught them, able to go where they liked, aspire to what they chose. It isn’t surprising therefore that the novel becomes one of the new and central art forms in such a society where people begin to construct their own narratives to tell themselves who they are. And at the same time artists and writers begin to reflect a society in which people doubt who they are, and wonder whether they have any identity, or whether they have the strength and confidence to forge an identity for themselves. Faced with a society within which so much choice is becoming available to more and more people, such choice begins to feel crippling – do we have the courage to choose and what difference do our choices really make? The self becomes ‘an abstract possibility and exhausts itself floundering about in possibility’. (Kierkegaard)
Again it is not surprising that alongside all the rapidly developing material sciences, and the extraordinary discoveries about the world made by physics and astronomy, psychology emerges as a science (or is it an art?) to deal with the wreckage of the self left by the fragmentation of the personal world.
Christianity has not of course remained unchanging in the midst of all this social and intellectual change – it’s own self understanding has been affected and developed to respond to the world in which it now finds itself. So how are we to respond as Christians to all the questions about soul and self with which I began?
We might go back to the experiment which Baggini and Hume found so difficult, the search for the core self in silence. We might want to suggest that they misunderstood what they were trying to do, which sounds suspiciously like Descartes stripping down of his identity to the thinking self (Cogito ergo sum). They might instead have tried the even more difficult and threatening experiment of not thinking or feeling or remembering but rather giving themselves up to the silence – dying to the self as well as the search for the self. Those who have risked this trial in a regular and disciplined way and even those of us who may try it more sporadically may know something of that self which seems to be given back in the silence – not a self which the mind can identify but a self which seems to be held by a responsiveness which comes from the silence – a sense of being held or sustained or cherished. The search for the self as something to be known only by the mind is a doomed search for something only half formed. We will only ‘know’ ourselves in a different way, which perhaps transcends knowing in that it enables us to be an active, creative, loving self which does not need to be self conscious because it is held by the regard of the other, whether human or something transcendent.
And that then leads us back to the identity of the resurrected self. Memory and narrative provide the basis for the partial constructions we make to give ourselves a sense of identity. And yet Jesus says that we must die to self if we are to live, we are to give up relying on such narratives. In the end then the resurrected self will be the ‘surer self’ which God re-members, with an identity held, sustained and cherished by God. In the distant past, writers used to refer to heavenly experience as ‘the beatific vision’; to the modern mind that came to seem boring because perhaps our minds could sustain their sense of self only on the basis of a fragmented round of constant stimulus. But this perhaps leads to a misunderstanding of that beatific vision; in fact what we shall ‘see’ is that which alone can sustain us – the loving and reciprocal gaze of God which will fill us with all the evidence we need abundantly to know that we are alive with eternal life.
With my love and prayers
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker