The Real You?

This isn't so much a book review as a review review - my review of Anna Katharina Schaffner's review of Tara Isabella Burton's Self-Made: creating our identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement's 27 October 2023 issue. I believe the issue of identity is so  central to contemporary personal and political emotional struggle that it is vitally important for Christians to think through their responses. We have powerful insights to offer, on the self as God's beloved, made in His image, the object of His loving redemption: but also the self deracinated from God and trying to piece together an identity out of the rags of its alienation.

So I wrote to them, obviously hoping they might want to publish - but slipping it into this blog incase they don't...

Thanks to Anna Katharina Schaffner for her review of Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made (TLS 27 October), in particular for her stimulating insights into the divinisation of personal identity in a post-religious culture. Here are some personal responses to her stimulus.

What happens when discontent with one’s current self is the main driver for its reconstruction? Is it possible that feeding this dissatisfaction will only make the beast stronger? Won’t it then devour each new identity as it is formed? Are our quests for new identities therefore doomed to fail? Received or constructed, human identity is circumscribed by illness, age and death. How can we have a meaningful identity in view of our transience? Don’t selves constructed out of images, and therefore out of the perceptions of others, particularly carry the seeds of their own destruction? 

So isn’t our striving for a better identity more likely to be the outcome of our alienation than a bold effort at self-deification? Schaffner provocatively cites Lucifer as an example of a downfall brought on by self-engineering: perhaps he is a good metaphor for the spiritual death that may ensue. Has our culture then been too hasty in rejecting the wisdom of its long Christian heritage? The Gospel saying, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose them,” proposes that our deepest identity is to be found in that which transcends the self to become part of a larger whole. If “God is love” then the fulfilled self is that which is learning to love and to be loved.