We Must Know Ourselves To Give of Ourselves

What is man that thou are mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? (Psalm 8)

It has long been a commonplace in the Christian life—scriptural sanction for which can be found in 1 John 4:20—that unless we love the neighbor we see everywhere, it will not be possible to love the God we see nowhere. For unlike the neighbor whom we cannot escape, indeed, we find him at every turn, God is easily evaded owing to His being pure spirit. While free to appear in the time/space continuum in which the rest of us live, God will not ordinarily show up there, the fact of His omnipresence not usually manifested in obvious and material ways.   

Nevertheless, in the Christian life, the demands of virtue still require that we do our best to integrate the two loves, an undertaking for which grace will be necessary to complete the job. The problem, however, is that in order to love both the God we do not see and the neighbor whom we do see, we must first love ourselves, which for not a few people these days has become a barrier they cannot seem to overcome, a hurdle they cannot clear. Not in the post-human world that appears to be taking shape all around us, even as it assumes ever more toxic and anti-human form.  

Why is that? The answer is obvious. If you can only love what you know, then not knowing who you are prevents your either knowing or loving anyone else. The unexamined life may not be worth living, Socrates tells us; but in order to be examined at all, the self must first know and love itself. Which appears to be increasingly impossible for people who have had no real experience of ever being a self. If we define genuine personhood as self-possession for the sake of self-giving, what happens with people so shorn of a sense of self that there is simply no self to give? Such is the nature of the identity crisis we are facing today.

This is ever more the case when the brightest bulbs on the subject cast all the darkness, when nihilism is on the march. How dismayingly true this is among the so-called academic superstars. Take Judith Butler, for instance, leading gender theorist on the planet, for whom essentialism is the enemy. In other words, there can be no whatness to either men or women, both categories being entirely a function of what she is pleased to call “performativity,” and not anything that we are but only what we do.  

If gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender itself is a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.  

If you find that description heavy going, don’t imagine that it’s because you failed to get into Harvard. Even her fans acknowledge the sheer impenetrability of her prose. It is what endears her to them. In fact, she has long been the flavor of the month. Why, just last month she was featured in The New Yorker (May 6, 2024), where the starstruck author lavishes seven laudatory pages of gushing approval upon her, despite the fact that her work contains the most convoluted nonsense this side of a loony bin.  

Right down to her choice of pronouns, by the way. The usual she/her designation, she insists, is no longer being permitted. In fact, she would have me strike the word she. Only they/them will do. As in the following example, culled from a dozen or more found in the article: “Back in Berkeley, where Butler lives and teaches, I heard them [emphasis added] tell the story to a few different people…” Causing this poor reader to ask just how many different people does she inhabit? And why must the author go along with so preposterous a set of personae?   

With books like Who’s Afraid of Gender? becoming an instant bestseller, one wonders just how widespread the fallout has become? Of course, we have no exact figures on the matter, nor are we likely to get any—inasmuch as those who suffer from the loss of self are obviously unable even to know what they’ve lost. And, for what it’s worth, Professor Butler will not be telling them. But however incalculable the results, they will surely prove ruinous in the long run. To lose one’s identity is tantamount to consigning oneself to a kind of hell, a condition from which there is neither escape nor even the least mitigation of misery.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel of St. Mark (12:31). There was a time when doing so might not have seemed an act of high heroism. I mean, what’s not to love about oneself? It seems perfectly natural to do so, right? Ah, but that was the Age of Innocence, a time when people quaintly supposed they actually knew who they were, where they began, where they left off. Before nature got cancelled and matter ceased to matter. Now it seems no one is supposed to be at home in his/her/their body.  

What a mess we’ve made of things. And until we recover an authentic sense of self, returning to the world Before Butler, a world wherein the order of reality actually made sense because the design came from God Himself, we won’t be much good in loving other people at all. Without the certainty of self-acceptance being in place, there can be no possibility of any self going out of itself in order to love another self. 

Because for that to happen, the self has got to somehow see itself as a gift from Another, from One for whom we are most fearfully made. And made in a way that is not like an article of clothing one returns to the store if it doesn’t fit. It always fits. That is because God is its maker and He does not—unlike the Ford Motor Company—ever turn out an Edsel.

Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,
All day long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow.     
—Gerard Manley Hopkins