Identity

We used to know ourselves by looking to what was most familiar—to our bodies, families, customs, and traditions. Who we were was tied to place, a community of relations whose bearings remained fixed and stable. Today, such embeddedness is intolerable. Identity is something we create, something we express while compelling the recognition of others. Yet, our new “fluid” selves have yielded only homelessness, an existence without roots in either place or person. This three-part series begins with a closer examination of the concept of identity, its historical transformation and fragility in a modern age. The second issue in the series takes up the theme of tradition (and Tradition) and is followed by a final issue on man’s political nature, with an emphasis on both the common good and questions of religious freedom.

I Identify As...

We used to know ourselves by looking to what was most familiar—to our bodies, families, customs, and traditions. Who we were was tied to place, a community of relations whose bearings remained fixed and stable. Today, such embeddedness is intolerable. Identity is something we create, something we express while compelling the recognition of others. Yet, our new “fluid” selves have yielded only homelessness, an existence without roots in either place or person. We live under the specter of there being nothing our own. From where does our permanence derive? Surprisingly, it might be accepting ourselves as beholden to others—as ineluctably given—by which we regain our sense of who we really are.

Tradition

We talk incessantly now about identities. But built as they are upon the ruins of our actual selves, the ones embedded in given natural (and supernatural) bonds, we have ceased to have any identity at all. Living in the tiny crawl spaces of our own wills, shut off from anything outside their artificial boundaries, our individuality is wiped out. But if we are still alive and kicking it is because we subsist on the remnant vapors of Tradition with a capital “T,” that heritage of truth that originates in God’s creative Word. It is also because that same Word, mercifully handed over to us in the flesh of the Church, invites us back to our very selves.

I Am a Political Animal

Since I am a political animal, my identity is inseparable from the polity to which I belong. But in which city do I live? The City of Man or the City of God? The choice is not between a visible and an invisible city, but between an unreal and a real one. The unreal city is the one most familiar to us, the one composed of fictional individuals bound to each other and to God by choice. It is the city that “secures our rights and freedoms” and keeps us “safe,” but only through an ever-increasing tyranny. The real city is the one populated by flesh-and-blood citizens: men, women, and children embedded in the prevenient natural order, bound by the common good, their innate restlessness for the real God ever incarnating in a form of common life for the sake of the world.