Wondering Fair

A story is told that one night Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth century influential philosopher, sat alone in a park in Germany. Thinking he was a tramp, a security guard approached him and asked roughly, “Who are you?” Schopenhauer then replied, “I wish to God I knew”.

What a difficult question to answer, don’t you think? But whether we
intentionally reflect on this question or not, the pursuit of its answer is intrinsic to human nature. I think there are at least three common ways most of us naturally try to answer the question “who am I?”

Firstly, many of us define ourselves by how much we have. In a society that gives more value to those who have more, we find ourselves constantly pressured to relentlessly acquire more and better things.  We easily intertwine our identity with our possessions. As Tracy Chapman would sing:

Consume more than you need
This is the dream
Make you pauper
Or make you queen
I won’t die lonely
I’ll have it all prearranged
A grave that’s deep and wide enough
For me and all my mountains o’ things[1]

Secondly, for some of us our accomplishments (or lack of them) become the  anchor of our identity. I am the post I have at work. I am the degrees I have obtained. I am my level of intellectualism or I am the number of goals achieved.

Nowadays we are also increasingly describing ourselves by the number and the profile of the people we are connected to. The number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter can determine how valued or important we feel we are. The level of popularity or acceptance we perceive to have in a particular circle of people easily becomes the foundation of our self-esteem.

Nevertheless, Christians believe that our answer to the question “who am I?” ought to originate from another source: the unconditional love of God for us, which is ultimately demonstrated in Jesus. Brennan Manning wisely advises, “define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”[2] He also asserts, “If I must seek an identity outside of myself, then the accumulation of wealth, power, and honors allures me. Or I may find my center of gravity in interpersonal relationships. [...] when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.”[3]

From which well are we drinking in our journey to define who we are? Possessions, accomplishments or connections undoubtedly have their places in our lives. Yet, I believe, they cannot become substitutes for the only true axis of the identity we were created to have.

“Who am I?” asked Thomas Merton, and he answered, “I am one loved by Christ.”[4] What would our response be?

“I don’t know how it is, my brothers and sisters, but the spirit of the person who actually hands something to a poor man experiences a kind of sympathy with common humanity and infirmity, when the hand of the one who has it actually placed in the hand of the one who is in need. Although the one is giving, the other receiving, the one being attended to and the one attending are being joined in a real relationship.” (from Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 259.5)

The word charity has accumulated connotations over years past such that today doubts swirl around its use: Can we really give to another selflessly? Is charity really just a superficial way to ease my conscience and in the end enable someone else’s self-destructive habits? Given some of these doubts I’ve heard it said many times that we must accept that humans are driven towards self-maintenance and shape our good intentions around this reality.

Like many discussions in modern moral philosophy, this one ends up being circular. As long as you start with the conviction that we are creatures primarily driven by survival instincts, then it is reasonable to conclude that we must organise our societies and communities around the protection of mutual self-interest. As Augustine suggests in the quote I’ve opened with, however, we need not begin with this conviction. This is precisely the legacy of the long history of Christian moral philosophy, which is driven by another starting conviction – that we are made to give and receive love. It is no accident that the Latin word for “love,”  ”caritas”… is the same root that gave us “charity”.

We cannot rehabilitate this way of talking about how people might live together while relying on a soporific version of love, however. What is required here is something more robust, a sort of loving that, as Augustine points out is inherently reciprocal and self-involving. Giving in love requires that we enter into another person’s experience in empathy. If we do not allow ourselves the chance to feel the suffering (and joy!) of our neighbour, then we may not actually be experiencing “true love.” The long-term consequence of this love is a mutual relationship.

For Augustine and other Christians reflecting in this tradition, it must be noted, this way of approaching our conduct did not apply exclusively to one’s personal life. This same sort of mutually involving Love could be expected to drive the interaction between societies as well. As we have seen over past decades, efficient calculations of mutual self-interest do not necessarily lead to more healthy societies or offer us the tools to truly confront the defining moral issues of our time – including the environmental crisis in which we now find ourselves. An ethic of love provides us a starting point which pursues not mere survival but a principle of self-giving which can seek to help across borders and across generations. This is surely a complicated matter, but it is nonetheless crucial to affirm a starting point by which we can expect to reliably guide our interactions, and the Christian tradition offers us exactly that.

Jeremy Kidwell

One afternoon, I came home on the 492, the bus line that crosses Rome like an undecided serpent. I caught it at Piazza Cavour, in front of a purse store for ladies who arrive with drivers and an old café with chauvinist jokes hanging on the wall. The 492 crosses Rome at its center, almost like a cheap tourist bus.  If one looks out the windows, there are glimpses of the fountains of Piazza Navona, the long stairs of Piazza di Spagna, and the Egyptian obelisk brought by Caesar Augustus at Piazza del Popolo. More discrete treasures also catch the eye, like the long line of trees by the river, and an internal garden surrounded with arches, if one is lucky to catch the door to the street open for a moment.

But what allured me that afternoon came before those treats, and also before the house where Stendhal sojourned in Rome and the café where Goethe hanged out. There was a bus stop at a narrow street, and in front of it there was a bookstore. There was no sign above it or on the glass, nor any wall visible, just a pure view of books covering everything from top to bottom. Old books, bound collections. The floor was of wood and the lightning was warm, and there was a passage from the first room to the second through the books – no door, just a passage with books to the left, to the right, and above one’s head. For the glimpse of a second, that image seemed to me like a portal to another world, the closest resemblance to an entrance into the endless stories of old that sprang if one only opened one of those brown hardcovers, smelled its age, and dived into its yellowed pages.

I left the bus by impulse, and entered the bookstore. I began running my fingers through the covers, feeling the texture of leather jackets and imprints in gold, while the floor cracked as I walked around. The editions were luxurious, and some of the books seemed to be a few centuries old. I opened a few and absorbed their smell: yellowed paper, finger imprints, the dust from the street, the humid air coming from the river nearby. The whole place felt like a time capsule, going ever backwards – there were the complete works of Freud, the campaigns of Napoleon, the drama of Shakespeare, an illustrated edition of the Bible in Latin, histories of ancient peoples.

An older gentleman asked me what I was looking for. I picked a book at random from the shelf – I didn’t have the courage to admit that I wanted just to savor the place – and asked how much it was. He showed me one of the back pages, and there were numbers written in delicate pencil: eight, zero, zero.

“Eight euros, then,” asked I.

“Eight hundred.” He could not hide a boyish smile, measuring me from top to bottom, knowing that I was not a collector of 800 euros books.

“Oh, I see…” I thanked his attention, stole a last glimpse of the walls of books, and stepped outside, laughing at myself.

The 492 takes me home, and I start writing an article for Wondering Fair. It celebrates one year of life this week – thank you everyone! – and for me WF has been a bit like that visit to the bookstore. A surprise. A time capsule. A crossing of space. An atmosphere of community and dialogue. A side stop which enriches the rest of the journey. Our posts may not come in brown covers, nor cost 800 euros, but hey, we’re savoring life, and engaging with it, and stealing glimpses of beauty, and showing how the news of Christ relates to all of reality. We’re having a good time, and let’s keep on enjoying these little moments before the bus takes us home.

René Breuel