Outside of academia and other sites of rebellious conformity, most people have experienced the trans phenomenon as unprecedentedly weird. Almost on a dime, we were asked to turn from viewing the sexual binary as a basic reality to viewing it as a pernicious lie perpetuated to defend positions of power. The fact that the two sexes were an accepted part of human reality until the day before yesterday was waved off by the ideologues. Dissent would not be tolerated. Many of us were left shaking our heads and asking, “How on earth did we get here?”
Cultural critics have pointed to various incubators: liberal feminism, civil-rights law, and HR departments turned irrationally inclusive; “cultural Marxism” (understood often vaguely); leftist political traditions co-opted by post-modernism; the sexual revolution, especially the Pill, and its fallout; and so forth. Many of these analyses are helpful, and sometimes they are incisively brilliant. They tend to make transgenderism a recent development—which, in fact, it is. But, as one book puts it, “The gender cult begins and ends with identity.”
Our modern identity problems didn’t begin yesterday, or a few years ago, or even with the sexual revolution. The truth is, philosophers and theologians have grappled with the thorny question of identity since the earliest days of recorded human reflection.
In this essay, I’ll explain how I—a philosophically trained theologian—came to spend the last decade researching the intellectual history of identity and, in particular, its connection to the body. That history is much longer and stranger than you might expect.
What I learned was so surprising that it inspired me to write a book, which was recently released by Notre Dame Press. Perhaps the most surprising discovery has to do with the role of Christianity. Although we may think of “identity politics” as being a secular, progressive phenomenon, historically speaking, Christianity has, in fact, been the biggest disrupter to identity. In a very real sense, Christianity caused our contemporary identity crisis. Yet, paradoxically, Christianity also provides the antidote to all of this suffering and confusion—the only sure foundation on which to build our sense of self.
The Body Expresses the Person
I was already researching the body’s meaning in philosophy and theology when the trans-wave broke. One my central conclusions is synthesized in the deceptively simple statement by Pope John Paul II: “The body expresses the person.” This simple sentence expresses the body’s anthropological purpose. In the body-soul complex that is each human individual, the body’s anthropological work is to express the person, who is her body but also more than her body. Unlike angels, human beings have bodies: bodies that visibly reveal their spiritual core and are mysteriously bound up with it.
Somewhat to my annoyance, I realized that this meant that the body could not be studied on its own terms without reference to the person that the body is and expresses. Some post-modern theorists, such as Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, had already realized this. In Spivak’s words, “If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it.” Gender theorist Judith Butler used this quotation as the epigraph to her book Bodies That Matter, in which she relayed how difficult she found it to think about the body. The truth that they both grasped inchoately is that the body does not make sense without thinking about the person that the body expresses.
Unlike Spivak and Butler, however, I am not inclined to throw up my hands and despair about theorizing the body. (Arguably, Butler didn’t either, given how very many words she has dedicated to bodies and genders before and since she wrote that book.) I believe that we can say something definite about the human person and therefore also its liminal edge, the body.
Indeed, if the body expresses the person, the crises we experience as body crises are often not about the body at all. Of course, there are legitimate body crises—cancer, for example. But what about eating disorders? Or gender dysphoria? Do the problems a bulimic experience really concern her body, or are they actually about her self, her identity? To repeat: gender as a problem begins and ends with identity. This insight—that the body is not really the problem in such cases—is reiterated by gender-critical feminists.
Because so many of our body problems are actually identity problems, before I could develop a positive vision of embodied identity, I needed to explore the longer history of “identity” as a concept. My hunch was that pre-modern thinkers said a lot more about it than we have appreciated—and that we can only understand modern identity if we understand that against which it is rebelling.
This would take a chapter, I figured. Maybe two.
Imagine, dear reader, my despair in realizing that the history of identity is long, complicated, and resistant to compression. It dates back, in recorded history, to the fifth century BC. It was developed through philosophical, theological, and literary musings. It swerved unexpectedly when thinkers known for other things proved to be decisive on the identity-question—the Neo-Platonists, for example, or John Locke.
Unfortunately, previous scholarly treatments of the concept have been focused on one particular philosophy or time period, or else they had inexcusable gaps. Charles Taylor, for example, has done admirable work on the history of the self. But he does not seem to be aware of how decisive the theological debates between the fourth and seventh centuries were in forming an understanding of the person and identity. Indeed, no one-volume history of the question going back to antiquity and up to the present had been written. If I wanted a treatment of “identity” that would help in understanding the contemporary nexus between the body and identity, I would have to write it myself. So I did.
Liquid Bodies, Empty Selves
In my new book, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self, I begin by describing the contemporary scene as one of liquid bodies and empty selves.
Twenty-five years ago, Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe the post-modern world. Before the modern era, Bauman argues, the world emphasized “solids” such as class, nation, and family. In liquid modernity, by contrast, these solids are liquified in the name of freedom. The advantage of liquidity is its flexibility, the ability to say “maybe” rather than “yes” or “no”: cohabitation rather than marriage, the temporary port of call rather than the long commitment. When people say “freedom,” they often mean the liquidity of having many options and no pressure to choose any one of them. The problem with this terminal open-endedness is that we become paralyzed by the options and by the explicit rejection (explicit at least in early modernity) of any criterion for what is a good choice. “You do you” is quintessentially liquid and modern, while “this, but not that, is good for you” is the pre-modern opposite.
Post-moderns such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler applied this liquidity to the body. Their goal was to release the body from the constraints that ordered its desires or pleasures or even sexes toward universally accepted goods, instead allowing desire and the body to flow toward … whatever. “The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’” Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari write. “Desire makes its entry with the general collapse of the question ‘What does it mean?’” Desire is literally meaning-less. If so, then it is also trivial and ultimately directionless. Without beginnings and ends, nothing means anything. There are, Foucault said, only “bodies and pleasures” in forcefields of power.
The liquidity of the body aligns with the emptiness of the self. On a societal scale, this leads to what Christopher Lasch memorably called “a culture of narcissism.” Though this may initially sound paradoxical, narcissistic selves are hollow selves. In fact, this is the key truth that explains why narcissists act the way that they do. Narcissists do not have a stable personal core out of which they think about themselves and act, so they are continually preoccupied with the presentation of themselves to the world. People who have a strong sense of self, by contrast, do not spend much time convincing others of it. Lasch’s diagnosis makes sense of the post-modern self—or the lack thereof—made famous by the “death of the subject.” For Deleuze, for example, the self is the residue of desire, the ephemeral and ultimately false pretense of being a self. Ironically, what the post-moderns theorized and promoted was exactly what Lasch was already describing and critiquing in the 1970s as a fact: namely, the narcissist-ification of an entire culture.
So how did we get there, long before transgenderism was a cultural force? It is at this point that we need to look at the history of “identity.”
The Long and Winding History of “Identity”
The first step is to be clearer on what we mean by the contemporary term “identity.” Then we can trace the ideas, if not the exact term, through their history.
I have identified three meanings of “identity”: endurance through time (Identity1); the “true self,” as the Neo-Platonists called it (Identity2); and my sense, consciousness, thinking, and/or feelings about myself (Identity3). Identity1 is the most basic, Identity2 is the most central, and Identity3 is the most accessible.
Understood in these terms, we can see clearly that human beings have been theorizing about what we now call “identity” as long as they have been writing down their thoughts. Body and Identity traces these pre-modern developments and how thinkers agreed and disagreed.
An incredibly important milestone was the philosophical development of language to talk about the existing person that was instigated by Christianity in the fourth through sixth centuries. Most histories, written by philosophers without theological training, neglect this crucial moment in the history of identity. Because Christians needed language to talk about the persons of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ, how we endure through time (Identity1) was given a metaphysical grounding that it did not have previously.
We are not merely a nature individualized; we are not captured completely by what is universal about us, that is, our humanity. We are also individuals with a unique metaphysical status that is not exhausted by our common nature. Christian theology drove this point home.
Christianity and Modernity
Christianity bequeathed something else to modernity: liquid identity.
This truth is a surprise, because Christianity seems to be a deeply “solid” institution, dedicated to enduring truths, structured institutions with hierarchies, and so forth. And all of that is true. But Christianity is also committed to a person’s identity ultimately being not a matter of “solid” structures like family, nation, or class—although these remain important—as it was for the pagans, but instead a matter of God’s call to the individual. Paul calls himself “the apostle to the Gentiles,” focusing on God’s bestowal of his identity upon him, and he rejects his previous history as a devout Pharisee as being ultimately determinative of who he is. Likewise, Thomas Aquinas rejects his class and family in order to become a mendicant. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
This means that a dissolving element operates within Christianity that relativizes realities assumed to be ultimate in non-Christian societies. Created reality is good, but it is not ultimate. A missionary priest who worked in China told me that this dissolving element is precisely what Chinese officials feared about Christianity, that it would make people believe in something—God—that was greater than society and the state.
Modernity inherits this liquidity but rejects the theological framework in which such identity liquidity made ultimate sense. Modern philosophers push liquidity further by rejecting Identity1 (endurance through time) and even Identity2 (the “true self”) as important features of the self, leaving only Identity3 (one’s feelings about oneself).
This is seen clearly in Rousseau, for whom identity is a matter of felt “authenticity,” but an authenticity that was subject to no one else, and certainly not to God. Rousseau hollows out Identity2, which for the ancients referred to the highest, intellectual parts of oneself and for the Christians the person’s individual and God-given mission. Rather than the “true self” referring to what one receives from the divine, it becomes one’s own creation, with no norm but oneself. Whence comes this authenticity, then? It is, in the end, a matter of being subject to oneself. Rousseau leaves us with a tautology, an empty cipher, in which a person is authentically herself when she … feels authentically herself.
This is the modern empty self, which didn’t immediately become pathological because Western culture ran off the fumes of pre-modernity with its solid structures for a while. But by the time we get to the twentieth century, those fumes had evaporated. We are left with the narcissistic empty self with its liquid body.
Such a history is, I argue, the long origin story of recent phenomena such as transgenderism. We are all just trying to figure out our identities as we go, on the fly, without solid guardrails and without the theism that made Christian identity intelligible. We try on identities like clothes from the rack, now this identity, now that. But we lack the criteria to choose the one identity that should stick.
The Ultimate Answer
Where do we go from here? I present only a few conclusions in Body and Identity, leaving my full response for a forthcoming second volume. Suffice it to say, for now: the path forward is to embrace the good that we inchoately sense and love in modern phenomena such as liquidity, emptiness, and so on, while rejecting what is pernicious.
A return to a sounder metaphysical theology will be necessary. A person cannot be purely liquid, because each one of us experiences that we endure through time. When modern thinkers threw out an ontological basis for Identity1, they erected human activity as a solution—whether the memory of our conscious states (Locke), the free self-legislation of the good (Kant), or the historical transformation into free subjectivity (Hegel). These approaches replace being with doing, leaving the human person’s dignity subject to a calculus of how well they enact their identities. But we are human beings with intrinsic dignity, and we need a metaphysics that reflects this.
As important as that effort is, the most important piece of the identity puzzle is getting Identity2 right. What makes us the unique persons we all are? What makes me different from you? Here we need to move beyond philosophy to theology.
The ultimate answer to the question “Who am I?” does not come from what is universal to all human beings, as much as this nature is an intrinsic part of every person’s identity. What makes me me derives from my Creator and the plan he has for me. Every life is ordered toward this secret, the “white stone” (Rev 2:17) engraved with the mission God has for each one.
Without this “true self,” we will remain liquid bodies and empty selves, lost amidst an ocean of identity confusion.
