Contrasting the Epicurean and Christian Narratives of the Self
In his essay, “How the Bible Reads the Modern World,” theologian Tom Wright argues that the rise of modern Epicureanism in the 18th century coincided with three factors: theological revolt, political revolution, and scientific and technological advances.
Each of these phenomena involved a revolt against authority. The Reformation was a revolt against Ecclesial authority and sometimes the established church; the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th century across Europe, such as the French Revolution, were a revolt against the ancien régime; and the rise of contemporary science involved philosophical and cultural changes such as the introduction of the Corpuscular cosmos. In each case, Wright explains, “the underlying pattern was the same: we don’t want the stuff that is being handed down to us; we will make the world work in our own way and on our own terms” (132). While Wright focuses this overall Epicureanism (i.e. that the divine has no effect in this world and we may shape the world in our own image and likeness) in the cultural narratives of modernity, one can see it easily translatable to western popular culture’s love of self-identification or “Expressive Individualism.”
One example of this Expressive Individualism is a recent interview of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt with The Daily Beast. Gordon-Levitt was asked about how he calls himself a “male feminist” when some notable movie stars have dropped the label. Gordon-Levitt described what he meant by his use of the term:
You don’t let your gender define who you are—you can be who you want to be, whether you’re a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, whatever. However you want to define yourself, you can do that and should be able to do that, and no category ever really describes a person because every person is unique. That, to me, is what “feminism” means.
This interview is culturally revealing, not in that Gordon-Levitt identifies with the term “feminist,” but how he identifies with it. The ideological view known as feminism, for him, is in fact a genderless ideology—it means not that women ought to ‘be all you can be,’ rather for anyone ‘be however you want to define yourself since no category ever really describes a person because every person is unique.’ He was praised by Time as giving an “Incredible Definition of Feminism.” The praise for taking a term the object of which is particular in its makeup and universalizing its object to include everyone shows a very peculiar aspect of the modern narrative of what the self is: to paraphrase Wright, we will make ourselves in our own way and on our own terms—in Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s case, on our own terms literally.
This universalizing of particular labels is akin to what French historian Pierre Manent in his book The Metamorphoses of the City (2013) calls the ‘politics of empire’: empirical universality among people that is internally diverse. Commenting on a passage by Cicero—in which the Roman philosopher distinguished our common or universal nature (“contra universam naturam”) from our individual or proper nature (“propriam nostrum sequamur”)—Manent writes that beginning with Cicero, “the rule of human action henceforth derives from individual nature more than from common nature” (140). That is, how I ought to act and what I value derives more from me and my particular nature more than from what I hold in my nature in common with the rest of humanity. The politics of empire is to universalize, as the Roman Empire did by granting citizenship to all the men of its conquered land—thus losing its particular character as the city of Rome.
But it is a universalizing of individual nature. One can then see the contemporary modern narrative when one translates this wild and wasted virtue of universalizing individual negative freedom and rule of action derived from individual nature to the contemporary fusion of individuality as universal for all people: we can all be particulars. Or as Giles Fraser recounts how the crowd replies to Brian in the Monty Python film, Life of Brian, when he says “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’re all individuals.” “Yes,” the crowd replies in perfect unison, “we are all individuals.”
The result of this Epicureanism is the abolishment of the self as previously understood. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his dialogue with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, writes that in the absence of openness to the transcendent, “Man becomes a product, and this entails a total alteration of man’s relationship to his own self. He is no longer a gift of nature or of the Creator God; he is his own product. Man has descended into the very well-springs of power, to the sources of his own existence” (65). The great contrast with this Epicurean self-identification is of course the Christian view of the self. The “Biblical Narrative,” as Tom Wright likes to calls it, involves a view of the self that not only informs what we are prior to our beliefs about ourselves—i.e. that we are fallen creatures made in God’s image and likeness, not to mention either male or female—but what we are called to be. We are called not by authentically expressing how we feel about ourselves deep down, but what we are called to be is precisely defined but what we are called to do: die to ourselves. Dante had to leave Virgil to go back down Mount Purgatorio that the self-styled pilgrim might climb the 7 heavens to attain salvation; likewise the Christian must leave his worldly self so that he is sanctified and only then can the self be resurrected.
For example, the French philosopher Michel Foucault 6 months before he died gave an interview, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” that included an insightful commentary on the Christian view of the self. While the title is already revealing about our modern culture, Foucault made an interesting point about what concern for the self in Christianity means. He articulates that at “a certain point, being concerned with oneself was readily denounced as a form of self-love, a form of selfishness or self-interest in contradiction with the interest to be shown in others or the self-sacrifice required” (116). Foucault notes that all “this happened during Christianity.” [St. Augustine’s contrast in The City of God between the love of self and the love of God testifies somewhat to this change.] However, Foucault gives an almost accurate reading of the Christian narrative of the self: “with Christianity, achieving one’s salvation is also a way of caring for oneself. But in Christianity, salvation is attained through the renunciation of self. There is a paradox in the care of the self in Christianity … to seek one’s salvation definitely means to take care of oneself. But the condition required for attaining salvation is precisely renunciation” (120).
The postmodernist Foucault sees all too well that the actual care for the self in Christianity is the renunciation of the self. What appears to us as the death of the self is really the salvation of the person—my “I” is restored into harmony from the “I am” who donated its being to me, and thus my “I” is my participation in the life of “I am that I am.” But in order to restore a harmony of order to myself, I must first do what appears as the abandonment of the self and thereby begin to understand that my life, as everyone’s, is a gift, something far deeper than what any modern Epicureanism can dream up.
