The Mystery of Identity
Luke Bell
Angelico Press, 246 PP, £15)
Tablet bookshop price £13.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064
We live in an age obsessed with identities – of gender, of race, of nationality. But alongside our preoccupations with these various generic identities, each of us feels the pull of a deeper and more elusive quest – the search to realise our true self, the self we are meant to be. Some thinkers, to be sure, have denied the very existence of the self. The atheist philosopher David Hume reported that whenever he looked within, all he found was a succession of constantly changing thoughts and feelings, never any enduring identity. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta, or “no-self”, says something similar.
But the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always attached vital importance to selfhood. In the Hebrew Bible, God often calls individuals by name, assigning them, as in the case of Abraham, or Moses, or Samuel, a unique role that it is their special charge to fulfil. And in Luke’s gospel, Jesus asks what good it is for someone to gain the whole world if they forfeit their very self. The corresponding passages in Mark and Matthew instead of “self” have “soul”, underlining the momentous spiritual significance of each individual’s identity.
