2    What am I?

I do not know how to write this chapter, I really do not know.

It seems strange, but the fact is that scientists, at the moment, know more about the most distant recesses of space and time than they know about what it is to be a human being. Some of this is a simple question of scale. There is a story about an astronomer opening a public lecture with a flourish: ‘Basically’, he announced, ‘stars are quite dull.’ A voice from the audience called out ‘You’d look dull too from 25 light years away’. We might well find we knew less about stars than we think if we were able to see them close up. However the point remains: although we can describe the first few moments of the creation we cannot satisfactorily describe what makes us interested in the first few moments of creation. We do not have a working description of personality, of consciousness.

It is difficult to grasp and still more difficult to live with the enormous wild cosmos that I described in the previous chapter. We do not want a God of risk and chance. How many of us prefer, at least some of the time, a bossy nanny God who will order our every movement and keep us infantilized but safe? Despite the intellectual and emotional difficulties this kind of creation can be theologically acceptable to us. The Big Bang fits surprisingly easily into the structure of our older creation myth: ‘God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.’ God created the universe in a single radical act; a word spoken, a cosmic explosion, an ejaculation of power. Except for those people who need, for psychological reasons of their own, to read the Genesis account of creation as a scientific thesis instead of a poetic and theological narrative, the activities of God-out-there are not too threatening to our sense of self-esteem. But this security depends on us excluding ourselves from the large and alarmingly unregulated picture. We can accept indeterminacy, probability, complementarity and all those mind-boggling events and descriptions so long as we can believe that we, or at least our consciousness, are different – are unique, pure, special. We are observers of the show. We are just passing through. Matter is a temporary business; our true selves are spiritual. We don’t really belong here, we belong in heaven – our true home – and therefore what goes on in this material universe is interesting but not important.

This is comforting, but untrue. Unfortunately it is no longer really possible to hold to this essentialist view of personhood. Or rather it is all too possible, but the price, including the denial of the evidence, is getting higher and higher. Paying that price requires of ordinary people a level of intellectual fraudulence. More unfortunately still, although the old view of the ‘spiritual’ soul locked into a material body is collapsing, it is not yet clear quite how to describe the situation that now appears to be the case. The problem of the self, of what it is to be a human individual, is proving somewhat intractable – both from the scientific and philosophic point of view.

I will try to put the problem simply. There is a perfectly common, normal feeling of integrity: I am the same person as I was when I was twenty, and when I was two. There is some continuity called me, Sara Maitland. To have no sense of this continuity is to be seriously ill. Yet it is undeniable that there is no material continuity or integrity – almost all the cells of my body have changed since then. Nor is there any clear intellectual continuity: I cannot think of a single idea in my head that I would articulate in the same way as I did 23 years ago. Even where I can at least partially observe the paths of change and development, there is something mysterious in the whole process. Obviously memory has something important to contribute to this debate, but this gives us a new set of questions: What is memory? How does it work? Where is it located? How can something so chancy and erratic as memory stabilize the whole of myself?

There are two general answers. There is the old dualist one: the ‘real’ self resides in the immortal soul, which takes up residence in a body for some purpose of God’s and after it has finished with that body it will move on to the next thing, probably developed for good or bad but nonetheless essentially untouched by matter. Alternatively: the soul does not exist, materialism is all; our sense of there being something else simply demonstrates the sophistication of our neural hardware (or our genetic make-up, or our chemical flux). The trouble is that neither of these two descriptions is adequate. The ‘story’ of the self that they offer is not convincing; we need not only a better knowledge of the facts, but also a better myth, a more satisfying story.

The question of personhood, often called the mind/brain question, must now be the next major field of both scientific and philosophical inquiry. Already, pushed in part by biological advances in the understanding and mapping of our genetic inheritance and brain function on the one hand and by the capacity of computers to replicate intelligence on the other, new questions and new paradigms are being presented to us. AI – artificial intelligence – and virtual realities, quite apart from their delightful, provocative and speculative science fiction elements, undeniably force on us all questions about what it is to be a human person.

This brings me to Alan Turing, mathematical scientist, most famous for his wartime work on code breaking. He was part of the team which cracked the Enigma Code, the most important German secret communication method. Turing was also a remarkably original thinker. He is frequently credited with having invented the computer; he did not actually do so, but—just as Leonardo Da Vinci imagined a flying machine—Turing imagined, envisioned, how a universal computing machine would work. Turing was more fascinated by underlying questions than by technologies. One of the questions that he addressed was ‘What does it mean to say that a machine “thinks”?’ In 1950, in an article entitled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ he outlined a method for testing whether a machine could reasonably be said to think. This has become known as the Turing Test and is still broadly accepted as a working definition. In a Turing Test an observer cross-questions a machine and a reasonably intelligent human being, neither of which can be seen. The observers are not limited to asking computation questions but can and should range across the whole conversational landscape, including asking nonsense questions and emotional questions. Both the machine and the human being are ‘programmed’ to try and persuade the observer that they are the human being. If the observer consistently cannot distinguish between the person and machine, the machine is judged as ‘thinking’, and is deemed to have passed its Turing Test.

So far no machine has passed the Turing Test. However, many scientists believe this a technological problem rather than an ontological one. Such scientists believe that ‘personhood’ is the sum of the material parts. The brain, with its sophisticated neural network, is the place of personality and when we understand more how it works we will be able to make a computer that can do the same things. Other scientists however do not believe that any machine will ever pass a Turing Test. Roger Penrose,1 the Cambridge physicist, for instance, argues that there is something going on in human beings that cannot be reduced to mechanics, even the most advanced kinds; that human personality is more than its material parts. The brain is not all: there is something usually called mind which distinguishes human beings, and even animals, from the most advanced machine possible. He is not arguing that such a machine has not yet been made, but that one cannot be made because of the nature of mathematics and the nature of human beings.

As yet then there are no very satisfactory answers to this question. The responses offered by the various parties in this debate fail to satisfy. Neither the dualistic notions of the soul lodging temporarily in a body nor the pure scientific materialism of the electronic wizards seem to describe what we experience as our selves.

This may be because of a profound arrogance: our desire to be special, to be the most important thing in the universe – indeed to have the universe made for us, for our benefit. Human pride is undoubtedly one of the most serious problems the universe has to deal with, but a false humility, a denial of any subjectivity is no better. It is fair to test the scientific stories as we test the older theological and mythical stories. Frankly, the stories of the neuro-fundamentalists and other biological narrators are no better than the stories of the biblical fundamentalists. There is something absent from them which makes them not merely unsatisfactory but actually untrue.

Take a very tiny example: the neural circuits in our brains start to reverberate; chemical and electrical impulses, thus triggered, pass rapidly into our bodies. Inter alia they stimulate the pituitary gland, which releases a sharp flow of hormones into the bloodstream. The body temperature rises half a degree on average, pulse and blood pressure increase, arteries and thoracic muscles contract, the vocal chords quiver, the lower jaw becomes suddenly uncontrollable and the spasms in lung and throat cause us suddenly to emit breath at approximately 70 miles an hour.

This is what happens when we laugh. It is a description of laughter, but it is not an explanation. It is not even an adequate account.

Many of the stories about the self offered by some geneticists and neurologists fall into the same category. We can accept their descriptions as ‘correct’ – certainly we should not be offering a definitive narrative that does not incorporate their descriptions fully and seriously – but we can still say that their explanations are inadequate; so inadequate that, although they may be correct, they are not true.

It seems to me that theology now has an opportunity to reclaim her ancient rôle as Queen of the sciences: that is, as the moderator and interpreter of these conflicting narratives. Theology, which has no particular axe to grind in this area, would seem to be well-placed to perform, for once, a useful rôle in a current intellectual debate. This is partly because the nature of the central claim of Christianity – that in Christ, God became fully human – has meant that the Christian community has spent a great deal of its intellectual energy over the last 2,000 years examining the question of what that humanity might be, what a normative humanity is. It is also because we, as Christians, have nothing to lose. We know, with a strange sort of confidence, that we draw our humanity from the God who created us. The more complex that humanity, that personhood, turns out to be, the more interesting our God becomes for us – the more marvellous and unpredictable. Even if the hardline brain-only materialists turn out to be right, and personality and individuality and all our feelings of passion and desire and love are ‘just’ the workings of our neural networks triggered by electrical impulses, we can stand confidently in the world our God has made, delighting in the brilliance of such an electrical engineer. Even if we can eventually make machines which do pass their Turing Test, and can think and feel just like human beings, we will have one more thing to thank God for – that we are made so intelligently and are allowed to participate so creatively in God’s work. As in the strange world of subatomic particles and quantum thought, so here in the questions of the self, it is ‘both our duty and our joy’ to explore the parameters of personhood, with very little emotional investment in the result since any result will be to the glory of God.

However in order to deepen our joy and faith, and in order to be able to contribute to this debate within contemporary society at large, we will need to discipline ourselves. Much of the debate about the nature of the self is highly critical of Christian anthropology and philosophy. In particular, many secular intellectuals are fiercely opposed to Christian Neoplatonism and to the various dualistic or over-spiritualized models of personhood that have been on offer. Much Christian thinking on this issue has been crudely consolatory or tediously abstract. We need to take up a stance which is neither defensive nor aggressive, but genuinely open-minded. We need to practise what can perhaps best be described as a radical orthodoxy: this is, to hold firm to the deposit of truth, and hold as light as possible to the expression of it.

I am always surprised, to be honest, when I am accused of being theologically radical. This usually comes the other way round: people are surprised by my failure to be as radical as they expected. ‘How could a radical like you become a Roman Catholic?’ I have been asked so many times in the last year. When I reply I never was a radical, people tend to feel cheated. I think of myself, and always have since my conversion to Christianity nearly a quarter of a century ago, as deeply orthodox in the catholic tradition. Unless the mere thought of a lay woman thinking, writing and talking theologically is per se ‘radical’, I cannot think of anything I have ever said or done to make anyone think otherwise. If this is the case, it is a very new error given that Mary Magdalen was the first person we know of charged with proclaiming the resurrection. I have never found the deposit of faith deficient at the metaphysical level. Where I do have difficulties is in the ethical and practical working out of that deposit. This is nearly always because I find many of these workings-out unorthodox: they do not flow from traditional ‘sound doctrine’.

Take, for example, the vexed question of appropriate pronouns for God. Traditional, orthodox doctrine, for once arm in arm with common sense, teaches us that God is without qualities. Gender is, by any definition, a ‘quality’ in the classical sense: therefore God doesn’t have it. Gender is also a feature of biology and God doesn’t have any of that either, I might add. The only ways you can express gender-free personhood in contemporary English are by (1) eliminating all pronouns altogether – this is perfectly possible, but grammatically very hard work; or (2) by constantly – in all sentences – saying both, which is both tedious and ugly; or (3) by playing with the concepts. As a matter of fact I have never met a Christian feminist who wants to deny the Fatherhood of God; only those who want to extend our range of images and metaphors in the joyful but constantly doomed struggle to measure up to our Big-Enough God. Indeed one cannot help but wonder what is going on in the mind of someone who objects to female (that is, personalist) language for God, but does not protest about descriptions of the Second Person of the Trinity as a fruit-bearing plant (the vine) or a geological formation (a rock), to use more ancient and authoritative instances. I proudly claim both orthodoxy and tradition here, over those who wish to assign to God biological qualities.

Anyway this apparent diversion in defence of my own theological orthodoxy is really because I am proposing that, in the struggle to understand personhood in the light of the contemporary state-of-the-art sciences, the fundamental expressions of rigid orthodoxy are helpful. Christianity has two particularly helpful ideas here, and with peculiar perversity they are two that modern liberal theology apparently most wants to dispose of: the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. I believe that if the Church could take on board a proper, theologically thought-out understanding of what scientists and sociologists have ‘discovered’ about the human condition in the last hundred years, we wouldn’t have this bashful embarrassment about these two most useful and profound articles of our faith. Moreover in the light of such a theology we would be able not merely to nourish our own hope and faith, but also help those who are beleaguered by biologism and desperately seeking a wider, more convincing, story of their own selves.

In the previous chapter I wrote at length about how the mathematical and physical sciences were offering us a new view of how the cosmos – the created order at large – might be perceived: not as a clockwork toy wound up by a technician God, but as a living art work, with risk and creativity built in, laid on, inherent to the project. Far from the deity being forced into a limited rôle as primum mobile (like the Princess of Wales switching on the Oxford Street Christmas lights to open up an orgy of materialism) or being reduced to a God-of-the-Gaps, slowly reasoned out of existence as the frontiers of science are rolled back; God is present in that dynamic process of chance, throwing dice with delight so to speak. God is not the ghost in the machine, as a nineteenth-century scientist put it, ‘not because there is no ghost but because there is no machine’.2

Now I want to take this idea a stage further. What the so-called hard sciences have done for the cosmos, the soft sciences – both the life sciences (biology and chemistry) and the social sciences (psychology, sociology, geography and so forth) – have done for the human sense of identity. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, in one way this is more frightening.

In another sense it is easier. We have to take on trust the data that the astrological and the subatomic scientists offer us. I cannot do the maths and I have no access to radio telescopes nor particle accelerators. Moveover the data that they provide us with imply a reality which is in total contradiction to that common sense, against which I, like most people, was brought up to test proposals. I do in fact believe what the scientists are telling us – mainly because I cannot imagine what interest they would have in a vast collective conspiracy to lie to me; and because they monitor each other so strictly. When it comes to the human sciences it is in one sense much easier to check out the scientists. We ourselves are the data, the experimental material and the objects to be investigated. There is therefore a direct way in which I can inspect and test the conclusions that they come to. Does this make sense? Does this satisfy? Does this accord with my own experience of myself?

At the beginning of her immensely amusing and helpful book The Descent of Woman,3 Elaine Morgan challenged the then fashionable evolutionists who argued human behaviour from animal origins, like Ardrey and Morris. Among other things she urged her readers to apply their sweeping generalizations to specific examples. ‘Man is the most sophisticated predator known to the universe, who uses killing as the primary way of settling disputes’ has a magnificent and persuasive ring to it. However it sounds totally different when you apply it – ‘My grocer is the most sophisticated predator known to the universe’; ‘My child’s primary teacher uses killing as her primary way of settling disputes.’ Morgan suggested fairly convincingly that there was a great deal of (male) wish-fulfilment going on in such books: people liked the idea of themselves as ferocious predators, driven by needs deeper and more authentic than the need to co-operate. Her underlying point – that one can test ideas or claims about the self against the primary example of one’s own self – remains valid, whatever those claims may be. Of course, we too may indulge ourselves in fantasy and be unwilling to look clearly at the facts – and those of us who believe in God will naturally be accused of just this by more determined materialists. This works in reverse too – I catch myself wondering what pride or infantile arrogance so limits the vision of rigidly materialist thinkers. Nonetheless in looking at personhood there is a real way in which what is claimed must correspond somewhere, at some level, to what is our own sense of ourselves.

Despite this, I admit to finding it hard to grasp really and finally that, if there is a show going on, we are not the audience. We cannot be the audience, and there is no place ‘outside’ where we can take a seat and settle down to watch. The risky and changing nature of the universe, its slow history and its internal creativity, goes on in me, in us all, as much as in the furthest star. Indeed the two are not so separate or different, for the stuff of which I am made and the far-flung stars are made is the same stuff.

One question worth asking is why it should feel so difficult to accept the idea that we are dumped on the stage, part of the show, ‘our bones the bones of the old red stars’,4 animated star dust in the process of becoming something else. Why do we instinctively prefer the idea that we are outside the rest of the world of matter, superior to it, dominating and controlling it? Why do we need to believe that the whole thing is somehow all laid on for our express benefit? Why are we apparently able to accept a more random view of the world order so long as we are exempted from it? Let the scientists have their fun; we don’t mind and nor does God, but do not let them touch our own anthropocentricity.

‘God made the universe in seven days’ or ‘In the beginning there was a Big Bang…’ It does not really matter which; either will do because we still hang on to the second half of the mediaeval world-view: that it was all made, by whatever means, for ME. Humanity is the end and purpose of the whole thing. All the world is a stage, and we are the audience.

This leads to certain quite particular, and rather dangerous, conceits. For example, just as the world was made to be nurse and mother to God’s favourite offspring; so Man, like God, could lay his seed – made in his image, the complete little child – in the womb of a mother, where it would be nurtured, protected and grown to fullness. Although most people have abandoned this particular biological model, many do not seem to be able to give up the psychological egocentrism that the biology allowed. Male human beings still often seem to act as though they were gods, and as though women were the field of their labours.

Of course it is hard to give it up, this comforting model. One of the reasons it is hard is that we still cling tenaciously to a profound dualism which neither theology nor any of the other sciences seems able to extirpate.

The attempt to express the central mystery of the Incarnation which is ‘folly to the Jews and a scandal to the Greeks’, in formal terms acceptable to both, has left us with a dualistic heritage which is both hidden and irradicable. It keeps turning up to haunt us. We want to say that Jesus is fully human and fully God without saying he is sort of bits of each. However the language of classical philosophy simply cannot express it. An eternal, immutable, necessary God and a contingent, transient, mortal human being: this is a two-into-one-won’t-go situation. The early Church ‘saw off Christological heresy after Christological heresy – Arianism, Nestorianism, Docetism, Adoptianism, and many others – in an attempt to get this equation right. Yet even the elaborations of the Athanasian Creed sound weak and floundering when they come to Christology.

Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly in the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds, and Man of the substance of his mother, born in the world. Perfect God and perfect Man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching his Godhead and inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Who although he be God and Man, yet he is not two but one Christ.5

As though all this was not complicated and tricky enough in itself, at the same time the early Christian intellectuals were wrestling with another set of heresies which were dualist in a more absolute sense – they were anti matter, anti the body. Manichaeism and Gnosticism in all its forms argued that matter was Bad, was negative in itself. Spirit, manifested in the pure immortal soul was Good, was real, was perfect, but – woe and alas – it had got stuck inside these tiresome, disagreeable, malevolent things called bodies, which were – to mis-context a quotation – ‘mean, nasty, brutish and short’.

This idea of the person coming in two bits as it were, the soul (good) and the body (bad), is deeply embedded in our thought and language patterns, in our self-understanding and in our identity. The dangers of such dualistic thinking have been, of late, repeatedly pointed out, particularly though not exclusively by feminist theologians, who link the injustices against and diminishment of women closely to dualistic mindsets: the pattern of God, men and soul on one side and nature, women and body on the other, and the assumed superiority of the former.6 This insistence on a return to a more proper and orthodox unitive model, which is necessary to make any sense of the Incarnation as a theological event, is perhaps one of the most important contributions that feminist theology has made.

There has, however, turned out to be an unexpected problem with this body of feminist theology, especially from the USA. Having diagnosed and attempted to cure the dualistic disease it promptly contracted another form of it – by taking an idealist, or essentialist, view of ‘experience’ which deftly replaced the concept of ‘the soul’, while something called ‘conditioning’ replaced the concept of the body. ‘Experience’ now is Good – pure, true, real – while ‘conditioning’ is always Bad – ‘false’, temporary, imposed. It afflicts the pure self from outside. Experience, in feminist theology, now functions exactly as the soul did in the theologies that are being criticized.

This is not an easy idea to understand, but it is an important one, I think. The error is certainly not confined to feminist theologians although it is rather clearly expressed in our work.

What is necessary is a critical appraisal of the notion of ‘women’s experience’ which plays a central rôle in these forms of theology and spirituality. There is a discernible tendency to use experience as an essentialist notion – that is, to imply that deep down in every woman, under all the layers of false conditioning there is a pure nugget of unique personal experience: the function of ‘true religion’ or ‘feminism’ or whatever is then to reveal this new self in all its pristine glory. It is an attitude which refuses in the last analysis to see experience as that which is constructed in ideology and therefore falls into the ideological trap.7

Watch it! West is saying here, even feminists are not immune to the evil virus of dualism. If you buy even a small chunk of this sort of essentialist thinking there are consequences. One of the consequences is that you will not be able to tell the truth. Frankly, the idea of the pure, additive-free, suitable for vegans, proven ‘soul’ or ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ that exists outside the time—space—matter continuum is heretical, and wrong-headed. The idea that ‘something’ comes to lodge or be imprisoned in that temporary cage called the body or history or society, which it will later shuck off and dispose of, and that this uneasy and inherently unstable amalgam is what it is to be a human person, a self, is dualist. It is also not what the evidence from the social sciences bears witness to. It may be like that for angels, for extra-terrestrials and for the characters of late bourgeois fiction, but it is not so for us.

Regrettably or otherwise, what it is to be a person is to have a body and everything that goes with that. To have a body is to have also a gender, a class, a time, a history, an education, a psychology, a cultural location, a genetic inheritance and a bit of blind luck. It is to have all those things that are traditionally called ‘qualities’, precisely the things that we are taught that God does not have. This is why the ‘made in her image’ language is so difficult. If there are no images of God, how can we be made in them?

We do not know how God’s personhood exists, although we live in the hope and faith that it does exist. Meanwhile for ourselves we have to acknowledge that personhood is constructed out of all these messy material things. Personhood isn’t a given, an eternal flash of genius from the mind of the maker. It is the consequence of a long hard haul: out of the Big Bang; in from the coagulating cosmic dust; up from the hot seas 500 million years ago; down from the trees on the edge of the grassy plain; out through the vagina of the women who bore us; across the treacherous terrains of childhood; into consciousness. We cannot do it alone either; so much of the work of making us was done before we were even thought of. A chic word in social and ecclesial theology at the moment is koinonia: what it is to be a person is to be an individual-in-community; just as what it is to be a biological organ is to be in a body within an interplay of organs, a unit of a whole. What it is to be a meaningful word is to be part of a sentence; what it is to be a number is to be part of a coherent sequence. None of these images denies the integrity of the individual unit, they just put it in its place.

So it is with the self. Rowan Williams in his book Resurrection puts it thus:

The self at any given moment is a made self – it is not a solid independent machine for deciding and acting efficiently or rationally in response to stimuli, but is itself a process, fluid and elusive, whose present range of possible responses is part of a developing story. The self is – one might say – what the past is doing now. It is continuity and so it is necessarily memory – continuity seen as the shape of a unique story, my story, which I own, acknowledge as mine. To be a self is to own such a story; to act as a self is to act out of the awareness of this resource of a particular past.8

In the abundance and ebullience of God’s creative energy we co-create our own personhood. What perhaps this snippet from Williams’s profound (and beautiful) meditation on the self does not quite make clear is how communal, how social this process necessarily is. We co-create ourselves in community. We co-create ourselves in community with the astral bodies that lie beyond the space horizon; and we co-create ourselves in community with our neighbours. It is all these communities that also, simultaneously, co-create the parameters within which this construction of personhood, this making of the self, can happen. This is the ‘cosmic dance’, and you cannot ‘tell the dancer from the dance’.9

This co-creation is chancy, risky, random even, and too often doomed, but it is not lawless. The laws that govern the chancy, random behaviour of matter at the subatomic level, which I discussed in the previous chapter, have been discovered only in the last century or so. The same is true of the laws which we currently believe to govern, or control, this chancy random construction of the self. I believe that in fact the two cannot be separated.

These new scientific rules, these parameters, are complex – and the relationships between them are still more complex. However we are supposed to enjoy complexity and intricacy and paradoxical relationships, so do not be afraid.

I am no more an expert in the social sciences than I am in the physical sciences or the theological sciences: as I said at the very beginning I am an amateur – a lover – and a lay person. Nonetheless I am, boldly, going to give you a short guided tour of a few of the ‘laws’ which govern the co-creative construction of human personhood. I should perhaps add at this point that, on the same terms, we cannot set up any of the ‘laws’ I am about to outline as absolutes, as gods in the older sense. They too exist as parts, fluid parts, of the whole. I would like, without diverting to study this in any detail, to point out

Raymond Williams’ argument that social structures are constantly in the process of constitution. Structures identified by analysis such as ideology, language, power, the State, the relations of production, sexuality and so forth exist only in solution, they are not absolutely prior to the subject [the self] but themselves always in the process of formation.10

This is too often forgotten, I feel, by many scientists, who seem to want to believe that their discourse, unlike anyone else’s, is objective. Their own methodologies are free, untainted by the subjectivity of the observer and existing completely independently. I suggested in the previous chapter that mathematics, because of its subject matter, might be able to make this claim, but the life sciences most certainly cannot – less so now than ever.

Nonetheless, with all these caveats in place, I would like, briefly, to look at a list of more or less contemporary ideas which over the last two centuries have undermined the essentialist understanding of the human soul as pre-existent and immutable.

(1)   Evolution   When Darwin published his The Origin of Species in 1859, he achieved a rare accolade: the profound importance of a work of ideas was recognized immediately. The book sold out before publication. It created an intellectual ferment that is hard to understand now. From pulpits to cartoons in Punch the responses were immediate and impassioned. The controversy that the book generated was instant and violent: we live still in the ripples of that impact. The Origin of Species enshrined not so much a brand new idea, but an explanation of, a plausible mechanism for a concept that was already hovering in the wings.

In the decades before The Origin of Species was published there had been a steady undermining of confidence in the Genesis account of creation. The increased numbers of, and the desire to understand, fossil remains; the researches of historians and anthropologists and particularly archaeologists; the sense of being at home in a world so much larger than that of the biblical or classical societies; the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Western society; and other factors, had already threatened the literal interpretation of the biblical narratives. By the middle of the nineteenth century many people were prepared for the notion that the Genesis stories of the creation and the flood were not a fully adequate account of the earliest history of humanity or even the planet. Contrary to what I was taught in primary school, by 1859 lots of people already knew that we were not simply plonked down in Eden ready-made, except for sartorial taste. Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, for example, had already proposed a model for evolution. He believed in the inheritance of learned characteristics, so that skills learned by experience in one generation were handed down to the next; so that a giraffe that had stretched its neck reaching up for higher leaves would pass a longer neck on to its offspring. Lamarck also wrote about evolution by desire: that a species striving for a higher form of life could develop one.

The shock impact of The Origin of Species came not from the idea that life forms evolved, but from the demonstration of how this could happen randomly, through mutation. Not merely was Homo sapiens descended from monkeys – to put it a great deal too crudely – but they had so developed by chance, by random mutation and aggressive adaptation: neither directed nor ethical. This seemed, to worthy Victorian theologians, bizarrely too risky for the sort of God they were expecting to find: a God of Newtonian physics and imperial expansion. The social application of Darwinism was surprisingly quickly evident to conservative theologians. It did not sit easily with cheerful beliefs like:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate;

God made them high and lowly

And ordered their estate.

(a verse which has mercifully been removed from most contemporary hymn books, even if not from the subconsciouses of too many contemporary Christians).

Despite a desperate rearguard action – which began among educated divines and is still continued by some biblical fundamentalists – Darwinian evolution won swift acceptance and consent. It has proved an immensely successful scientific theory: it has broad applicability and excellent predictive powers. It also appears to strike satisfying emotional chords; even the Church has managed to come to terms with it.

The basic concepts of Darwinism have hardly been challenged since. The only problem with the theory was how the mechanism of mutation might work. Darwin was himself aware of this flaw and did not know what to do about it. The discovery of DNA a century later answered the problem. DNA and the genetic sciences confirmed Darwinism. It demonstrated that genes were the necessary ‘something’ to do the mutating, and that the genetic code was laid down at the moment of conception.11

Since the discovery of the double helix and how it transmits qualities from one generation to the next, our understanding of inheritance has grown very fast. A great number of human characteristics are now believed to have a genetic origin. Recently it has become possible to envisage a time when every part of the gene will be understood (we will know what each tiny bit is for). A worldwide research project, called the Human Genome Map, has been initiated to track down the details of the genetic code. This international co-operation has caused a widespread deep ethical concern, but little sense of adventurous excitement. Although the concern is real and necessary, particularly as it becomes increasingly possible to test the genetic make-up and alter the genetic code of unborn children, we should also recognize the extraordinary knowledge about ourselves that this project will give us. It will inevitably lay open the way that our personhood is structured in the couplings that lead to our conceptions. The interest aroused by the very small-scale and somewhat dubious research published in 1993, which suggested that there was a genetic predisposition to male homosexual behaviour, was also accompanied by wild speculation about what evolutionary advantage this could give individuals or social groups. The idea that genes are ‘the answer’ to questions about our humanity and individuality has grown into our consciousness extremely quickly.

Thus evolution, and within it biological inheritance, provides the first parameter in the process of self-creation – not just at the macro level, but at the, so to speak, domestic level as well. We carry this deep ‘memory’ in our cells, and we carry too the genetic inheritance within the species. It should also be remembered that our personhood is structured by the personal habits of our parents and the care, or otherwise, we all take of our environment. Radioactive irradiation, for example, is now known to affect the DNA, causing mutations which can change what sort of person a yet unborn human being will be.

The acceptance of evolution, of genetic mutation and inherited characteristics, is so general that we often fail to notice how much it undercuts ideas of autonomy and independence, and therefore how profoundly it ties us to each other and to the whole of cosmic history. I am who I am because of the ecological and other circumstances that randomly happened to be going on, not just at one magical moment called ‘creation’, but over and over and over again throughout the period that there has been organic life on this planet. We are not just talking about the colour of our eyes or the length of our legs. There are close connections between physical and mental characteristics. It is not just that certain personality traits are probably genetic in origin and therefore inherited. We are rapidly becoming aware that the sort of body and brain that you are born with affect the development of those characteristics which are learned rather than inherited. The human person, we are learning somewhat uncomfortably, simply does not exist outside the chancy entwinings of the double helix.

(2)   Class   Less than a decade after Darwin had shown us how the long slow making of our contemporary selfhood was worked on by the blind mating habits of therapsids, Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital and showed us another facet, another dimension of the process of the co-creating of persons. Economics, hard materialism – ‘class’ he called it – did not just make people rich or poor, it made people.

It is interesting that while Darwinism very rapidly became acceptable, Marxist theory never has. This would seem to be because it superficially carries with it a great deal of moral baggage, although Marx himself did not mean it to – which is why it was called scientific socialism. Unlike the utopian or idealistic socialisms that preceded it, Marxism offered not a project for the future but an analysis of the present – more like the prophets of the Scriptures than like the Delphic Sibyl. Capitalism would fall into terminal crisis and from that crisis would evolve either the socialist revolution or what Marx called barbarism. As it happens capitalism has proved much more resilient than Marx allowed for – for one thing international capitalism has recognized its shared interests, and limited the amount and extent of market competition between nations. Nonetheless Marx’s claim that economics is the base – the fundamental determinate of who we as individuals are – and that everything else is secondary superstructure, remains deeply persuasive. Everyone’s ‘experience’ of life, and therefore their consciousness of self and other, is radically affected by their relation to the means of production. So profoundly are we created within this particular system that it is hard to see how it works in practice, beyond the crudest levels. For instance, if one is born in one set of economic circumstances one will probably be dead before one has a chance to achieve consciousness at all!

The conspicuous failure of political structures to deliver a cure for this disease of class, far from negating Marx’s point about personhood, actually underlines it. The apparently intractable boundaries that history and the individual’s economic and class location within it imposes on personality have been accepted, for instance, by liberal relativism in relation to ethics and judgement, even where no open credence would be given to Marxist ideology. The whole thrust of liberation theology, and indeed large parts of all Christian struggle for justice, is motivated by the belief that personhood is distorted, is affected and altered by economic and other material realities.

Dialectic materialism and Christianity have declared war on each other, but this may be a mistaken enterprise. In Chapter 1 I noted that the two ideologies both viewed time with a real seriousness: in that context ‘time’ was an enormous and abstract concept. Here it is a much smaller and more precise one: both view history with a real seriousness, with a real commitment to discerning the signs of the times and acknowledging ‘the fullness of time’.

In Greek there are two different words to express two different senses in which we use the single word ‘time’. Chronos means the measured passing of the minutes, time as a fixed and regular event: as in chronology, chronicle. Kairos means time in the sense of a significant moment. Marxism and Christianity share a sense of kairos, a belief that what can and should happen at one moment in chronological time cannot (or should not) happen at another, because the circumstances of the time, of the historical particularity, are part of what create the possibility. The mediaeval world-view, the perceptions of the apostolic age, the time of the apocalypse are all discrete because they are made moments: they are constructed by events created by made persons, made selfs, in whom history, time, class and relationships have been at work. They are not transferable.

Self is a product of history and class relationships and economics, which are all themselves constructions of past or present selves. There is reciprocity and creativity but no absolute freedom. Battered and discredited though Marxist ideas may be, the boundaries of freedom and autonomy that Marx laid down do seem to hold.

(3)   Gender   I am cooking the books a little to enter gender here. Moreover I can hear the ‘what about race?’ question being raised already, and rightly so. Nonetheless I am going to talk about gender for a number of reasons, some of which I will quickly try to explain.

(a)  It is how I got to think about all these issues in the first place. The demands that the women’s liberation movement made of me in the early 1970s, just as I became an adult, were of such force and such intoxicating delight that they triggered in me an interest in all the ideas that I am writing about in this book, including God.

(b)  It is in the light of my relation to questions of gender that I get to publish this book at all. Feminism has allowed and encouraged those women who have engaged with it to transgress across the traditional boundaries of intellectual disciplines – it has authorized amateurs to speak. If I am a theologian at all I am a ‘feminist theologian’. In one sense I believe this to be a false category – since any theology that is not related to justice and truth is not theological, and any truth claim that leaves out 52 per cent of the people in the world is really most unlikely to be very competent. Nonetheless I am a feminist before I am a theologian: feminism is what I do and what I am known for doing.

(c)  The period of time which I am looking at in this list of ideas which have dethroned the idea of an eternal, stable and fixed self – the Western nineteenth and twentieth centuries – is so precisely the period of the women’s movement that it is impossible not to see some connection. I think there is a very close connection. A central intellectual claim of the women’s movement is that things do not have to be as things always have been; that femininity, for example, is not ‘natural’ in the sense of immutable or transcendent, but is socially constructed. More, feminism has argued consistently that the social construction of gender changes both in time and in place; and that it can be deconstructed (a process most popularly known as revolution, but within Christianity more comfortably called transformation). This reflects so limpidly the claims of post-Einsteinian physics (that the position of the observer affects the phenomenon observed), of evolutionary theory (that things are not now as they always were), and of theories of class (that the social and economic circumstances affect personhood) that it would be preposterous not at least to note the coincidence.

(d)  The Christian Church has proved stubbornly resistant to recognizing the significance of gender in the construction of the subject self. Most official theology clings to a preposterous self-contradiction. The immortal soul, being as it were a spark of the divine, is without gender, as God is; but God must always be grammar-ed (if such a participle exists) as male, and discrimination against souls which happen to be lurking about in female bodies is not only legitimate, but is the will of God. It does not seem too difficult to see that this is at best incoherent, and rather more probably nonsensical.

I do not for one moment want to acquit the religiously powerful of the charges of racism and class bias. However at the theoretical level at least Christianity has taught that in God’s eyes black and white people; rich and poor people; capitalists, artisans, intelligentsia, the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat are equal. There may even, it is tentatively argued, be an actual bias towards the oppressed in God’s plan. When it comes to gender, however, the Church has never spoken clearly and has always justified discrimination on theological grounds. In one sense this is lucky because it leaves open a chink in the armour of the nonsensical idea that the body has nothing to do with the real core of a human being. Christian theology since the Pauline writings – that is, for as long as we have any record of its content – has stumbled over gender, and in that stumbling revealed at the very centre a deep confusion about what it is to be a human person.

(e)  Gender itself, as a biological phenomenon, is not dilutable or even dispensable. That difference is immutable. The interpretation of its meaning is of course transformable and has been transformed repeatedly, but the actual solid fact that human beings come in one of two kinds – male or female – is simply a given of the species. It is possible to imagine that there could be a society in which class differences had ceased to exist; or in which social development had so mixed the genetic pool that racial origin was no longer traceable. It is not possible to imagine a society in which maleness and femaleness had been bred out or socially eliminated. In this sense gender is a creator of personhood which stands outside of historical development – it is a difference that is as elementary as life itself. It demonstrates that the differences between human beings, the sorts of persons that we can be, really are determined, at least in part, by our very existence. Race or class may be a consequence of sin; they may not exist in God’s original scheme, in God’s perfect will. Gender is not like that: it is an absolute necessary human condition, a sine qua non.

It would be nice to think that this apologetic diversion has been unnecessary.

However, to return to the matter at hand: Almost all sociological studies suggest that gender is a fixed parameter in the development of personhood. The ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate continues unabated, but the differences between female human beings and male human beings are there. It does not matter here what meaning one ascribes to those differences.12 What does matter is that the sort of person one is is fundamentally affected by which of the two sorts of available bodies one happens to be. Virginia Woolf and many of her contemporaries who held on to ideas of a dream-place androgyny were denying a reality in which they experienced that difference. The element of wishful thinking is painfully clear in a simultaneous reading of Orlando and A Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas.

The slow discovery of how much difference gender makes is in a sense the history of the women’s movement. Mary Wollstonecraft argued in her Vindication of the Rights of Women that with equality of education alone the differences between the genders would evaporate. She has been disproved. We have learned how deep the difference goes. Some feminists now believe that women are simply a superior sort of human being – innately predisposed towards peace, unitive succouring and green good sense. (It is perhaps fair to mention here that I myself incline to a more-nurture-than-nature position and am unable, in my more honest moments, to believe myself less capable of sin than my male neighbour.) However they understood the difference, feminists and their opponents have never questioned that gender constructed the person; that the self was unquestionably formed within biological and social frameworks which were not androgynous and not identical.

This idea of radical and unchangeable difference emerged in the nineteenth century mainly because it had not forced itself as a question before then. It is interesting for example that there does not seem to have been any theological discussion about why Jesus was a male human being rather than a female human being before the nineteenth century. The matter was not discussed because it does not seem to have occurred to anyone to question the ‘obvious’ choice of representative humanity being male. The realization of how profoundly self is created within the definitions of gender is a modern understanding. It is one that could only have arisen, I suspect, within the social context of the post-Enlightenment and ideas of inalienable and ‘self-evident’ ‘human rights’. The newness of the idea however does nothing to make it more or less true; the idea that gender is somehow new and therefore trivial is as absurd as the idea that evolution is insignificant because it was not discovered in the prehistorical era.

(4)   Psychoanalysis   Having put in place these three de-stabilizers of the ‘pure-soul’ – the whole person formed in heaven by God, draped in a rather trendy outfit called the body and shrunk small enough to fit into a uterus – the nineteenth century clearly felt that it had done its bit. Freud did not publish The Interpretation of Dreams until 1900. For any dualistic view of human personhood psychoanalytical theory is the One Big One. Christian theology still has not entered into any sort of relationship with psychoanalytical theory, although it uses – often appallingly badly – psychotherapeutic techniques and jargons.

Interestingly, theology’s attitudes towards a great deal of post-Freudian work closely resembles its attitudes towards Galileo 250 years earlier – ‘Try and shut him up, and if that fails ignore the whole thing’. Now this is not really surprising because there are real and close parallels between the theological import of both men’s work. They both dethrone the supposed ‘special relationship’ between God and Man (and I use this latter word advisedly).

Galileo made impossible the view of ourselves as the centre, the purpose and the climax of the universe; where we can stand at peace in a small still place – perfect, eternal, immutable, designer-made for our convenience – and all the planets, all the great powers, dance around us and their dance is edifying and delightful. Wrong, said Galileo: Eppur si muove, he said, it does move. Forced, eventually, to abandon its anthropocentric universe, Christianity privatized itself, but it never changed the model. Now inside each individual was a small, still place – perfect, eternal, immutable, designer-made – called the self or the soul, and around it the body danced for its edification though rather less, alas, for its delight (astral bodies being less into sex than human bodies they were more permitted to be delightful). The image is more of a gym training session for the soul: if, without getting too involved, too moved, the soul could get the body to behave well it could move on, unchanged, to higher things.

Then Freud said the equivalent of Eppur si muove. He said personhood is forged in the act of living; self grows and develops through experience – and worse still through forgetting experience, or through reconverting experience. He insisted that a person is not a machine that can be made to behave by the soul programming the body to ‘act virtuously’. He made clear that the movements of the subconscious are as real as the acts of the conscious, of the will. Just as Galileo offered a mechanism to explain the celestial phenomena, Freud offered a mechanism to explain Paul’s tragic lament against the plight of the human condition: ‘That which I would I do not; and I do even that which I would not.’

Some of Freud’s specific theories have been disproven and abandoned, but the impact that psychoanalysis has had on our understanding of personhood is extraordinary. It affects us at every level—in cultural production, and language and theories of education. From his basic ideas spring coils of complexity and intricacy and co-responsibility; opening whole areas of human life to new understanding and new expression. Childhood for instance, and with it the duties of parents and education, is changed for ever: innocence is banished, but potential is increased. It is still hard to integrate this knowledge with the older one: the virulence of the public response when young children are convicted of violent crimes shows how little we desire an adult view. In good sense it should be less horrible that ten-year-olds should kill than that adults should: traditionally the business of growing up is the business of learning control. However the mean violence of outraged sensibility spoke to our deep desire to keep children innocent, of our weakness in the face of this threat to our peace of mind, despite nearly a hundred years of knowing ‘better’.

No one is arguing that it is more comfortable to accept corporate, social responsibility for the personhood, the self, of each individual within the community. I joke that I abandoned Freud the day my first child was born. As long as I was only a daughter the idea that it was ‘all the mother’s fault’ was extremely attractive. The day I became a mother the idea seemed intolerable and painful. It is of course, much cosier, much easier to dump all the blame on God; but God, it seems to me, revealed in the way the world actually is (as opposed to the dualistic way we would like it to be), goes on patiently handing the responsibility back to us. God calls on us to be grown-ups, and fellow workers, offering us a difficult but exciting task – creating one another’s humanity. Freud speaks to this understanding: the language we use, the bodies we have and the ways we act, especially towards children but continuously towards each other, is mutually self-creating. It matters what we do. Persons, selves, are continually coming into becoming in our every act. It is a responsibility too big to be endured were it not for the fact of that co-creation being shared by God, and potentially absolved in the passion of Christ.

There is one note of caution I would like to strike here. There is a danger that if we take the idea of a ‘processed self too simplisticly we may deny selfhood to those who are disabled from process – the very young child, the severely brain-damaged or the comatose, for example. The dangers of dehumanizing, depersonalizing any group of human beings must stand as part of the ‘common sense’ that I suggested at the beginning of this chapter we could use to monitor theories of the self. If this idea of the co-creation of human persons ends by depersonalizing anyone then the idea itself must be fundamentally wrong. However, I think this concept of the made self, constructed personhood, only endangers the already marginalized when it is understood too simplisticly. If this process of co-creation is understood truly corporately, as it should be, things become more complicated but more hopeful. For just as the mother creates the child’s self, the child creates the mother; a woman is not, cannot be, mother without the child. Of course she does not become mother to the obliteration of other personae and characteristics, but there is no such thing as being abstractly ‘mother’: mother is the experience of mothering a particular person. Thus by its very existence the child creates, with the mother, an aspect of who the mother is, the mother’s self.13

The same is true of all relationships, even reluctant or refusing ones: a ‘carer’ like a lover exists because they care for someone; a murderer comes into being by murdering somebody. The person in need of care, the object of the murderer’s lethal activities are co-creating that particular and differentiated self. Therefore it seems impossible to be so far outside the human community that one does not participate in the work of the co-creation of selves, of self. Simply what it is to have personhood, to be a self, is not only to act but to be acted upon. This is not passive, in the traditionally understood sense, because to be acted upon by another is to act upon that other – by the nature of our humanity, by the nature of our koinonia.

*   *   *

As we move into the twentieth century, the list of parameters within which we do co-create personhood expands into a multiplicity of disciplines – psycholinguistics, for instance, and semiotics, both of which suggest once again but particularly strongly that identity does not come as a given lump but is made by and within culture. Some newer theories of the imagination, particularly ideas about the Zeitgeist and the collective unconscious, elaborate the ways in which past selves participate in the making of new selves. There are whole areas of sociology and even geography and topography that reveal the same message. ‘Alone with none but thee my God / I journey on my way’ is simply not true – there is no ‘I’ alone. We are bound to each other not just as an ethical prescription, but as a fact of our existence.

This is not a recipe either for chaos or for determinism. It is not chaotic because all these things are available for inspection, criticism and analysis. Just as the laws of physics really do produce meaningful predictions so the ‘laws’ of human-ness, of personhood, do the same, at least in the quantum sense of offering probabilities. It is not deterministic because intricacy and creativity are genuinely built in. I am not saying that it is too complicated for us to be able to predict what sort of self we will create by what sort of acts: this would be merely a version of the God-of-the-Gaps for the social sciences. I am saying that the randomness – and therefore the genuinely creative possibility – in the interrelationship of the factors in human selfhood, just as in mathematics, is there.

So within the process of our own personhood, just as with the cosmic laws, we have a chance to see the creativity and generosity of God. These are God-created parameters – they are themselves grace and love as well as the means for grace and love and the revelation of grace and love. Of course this is where theologies of personhood, of the nature of the self, diverge radically from theologies of cosmology – because God who is not a star, nor a tree nor a poem, is a human self, a person, in Christ through the Incarnation.

If Jesus is a self, has personhood as I have tried to describe it, then Jesus has a psychology, a culture, a genetic make-up, gender, a class, a process of becoming – his self too was, to return to Williams’s quote, ‘a made self’, a past acting now. To put it bluntly, the eternal Logos, whose glory we beheld and from whom we have received grace upon grace, was potty-trained – and presumably rather well potty-trained since he did not grow up seeking consolation by conquest, affirming his masculinity over the mother’s ownership of his bodily production by despising women, nor having a cringing fear of those in authority. In a sense this may have been one of the things the Lucan narrator was struggling to express in the Annunciation story – Mary’s informed consent is necessary because of the social activity that self-becoming necessarily is. The dogma of May’s immaculate conception, at least as it is commonly understood, weakens this thrust of the story, though of course being a good story it has complex webs of readings and meanings.

The point about all this, is that this view of personhood – this co-creative, deeply social, integrative view – makes much better sense of the Incarnation than a dualist or essentialist one. Firstly it underlines the generosity of God, who really genuinely strips off ‘deity’ – outsideness, transcendence, necessity – and enters into chance and contingency and risk. Although I actually love the Christmas hymn which begins ‘Behold a great creator makes himself a house of clay’, I know that in truth it expresses a dangerous heresy. There is no still place in the middle of the human being, where the God bit can lurk untouched and uncontaminated.

Such a view of the human person also helps us to understand what is meant by ‘incorporation in Christ’. In his becoming a human being Jesus and the rest of us are necessarily incorporated into each other through all the mechanisms I have suggested, and doubtless some others.

Once again, God is not diminished, and indeed cannot be diminished, by an honest investigation into his work as creator. I take this really as axiomatic, but it still seems to need repeating. Actually our real fear is not, and historically never was, that God will be diminished, but that our self-esteem will. Whenever anyone tells you that God is ‘endangered’ or put at risk by something they are always really talking about their own power-base. A God so frail that she has to be protected from the thoughts that minds created by her come up with is not worth the bother, and I think we all know that. These concepts of personhood may be wrong or right, but either way they will not damage God.

What they may endanger is our arrogant belief in our proper place in the cosmic order. When it comes to personhood, to concepts of the self, to what it means to be a human being, we are all guilty. Homo sapiens has spent an inordinate amount of intellectual energy trying to answer the question ‘What makes me (and if absolutely necessary, my fellow human beings) special?’ Tools were favoured until it turned out that chimpanzees used them; so was speech, and then dolphins posed some delicate questions. And so it goes on. Many of the opponents of artificial intelligence, of the idea that computers might be able not merely to reason as we do but to have consciousness as we do, seem to be motivated by this desire to keep something (sensitivity here) as unique to human beings.

Of course it may be that there is something unique about us and that consciousness is what it is; but we won’t find this out – if it matters anyway – by holding on to it as a necessity, rather than looking at it with open-hearted delight. If it transpires that human beings are clever enough to create other beings (mechanical, electronic or whatever) that can think and feel and communicate as well as we already can, that says a great deal about our intelligence. Anything that reflects well on our intelligence says some exceptionally interesting things about a creator God clever enough to create that level of intelligence and generous enough to give to her creation the extraordinary power and imagination that she herself already has.

As I will elaborate in the next chapter, I think that the creation story which is recorded in Genesis, and the ways we like to think about our origins which grow out of that myth, is particularly nourishing for art and for other creative endeavours. However before I massage my own ego, and I hope yours, by delighting in our creative imaginations, it is important to stress that however good it may be for art, the myth has been demonstrably, singularly bad for people (which may well be why so many artists are conspicuously dislikeable and immoral human beings). This creation story makes human beings both special and powerful – made in God’s image, having creative power over nature and so on; in addition, unlike pandas and chickens, we are going to get this pure nugget of ‘spirituality’, this ‘soul’ which is as eternal as God and is the Real Me, tucked into our hearts or stomachs or brains or wherever it is kept.

It is a naïve idea but I suggest the real answer, in the light of the knowledge we have before us from the created order, to the question ‘What makes human beings special’? may very well be ‘Nothing, and so what?’ We exist by grace and for delight, while we become what we will be. So, it is true that during this century we have learned, or we ought to have learned, that we are not who we thought we were. We are very special but we are not special in the ways that we might choose. This ought not to upset us too much really since narcissism, as we all know, is the way to get drowned.

In the face of these sorts of revelations it has become an intellectual commonplace in some circles, notably but not exclusively theological ones, to announce that our primary feeling or experience as twentieth-century human selves is of ‘loss and mourning’. We have had to face a whole lot of uncomfortable facts. There is literally no place on which we can stand outside time and matter and observe the show. It is impossible to argue logically how a transcendent God can go on Being in a cosmos that is so profoundly contingent and yet without boundaries or limits. There is no plausible way that we can think of ourselves as necessary, transcendent, immutable, eternal nuggets of personality, wrapped up in some temporal, non-essential, decay-oriented stuff called flesh. Taken all together these facts can be summed up in the most unpalatable fact of all: God is dead. Or at the very least so contingent as not to be worth bothering about. We are left alone like children screaming unanswered through the night.

Now frankly I can only say that is not my experience, not what I feel. Having begun with a critique of pure experience it is distinctly dodgy to return to it as a test of the validity of my theology – as Engels made clear, you do not have to feel alienation in order to be alienated. Indeed the not-feeling of alienation, of loss and mourning, may be the actual and serious consequence of a very profound alienation. This mechanism of denial is one we are all acquainted with, particularly in relation to death, where people who cannot accept their bereavement and mourn their loss are actually in the most serious emotional predicament. Likewise as a feminist I am aware how much many women do not feel or do deny their very proper anger. So I am constantly struggling to submit my failure to feel much ‘loss and mourning’ for an older, superficially safer world-view to a rigorous analysis, both theological and psychological. At the same time I have to inspect my profound sense of joy, liberation and hope with a caustic eye. Even having done all that I remain a bit dubious about the need for grief in the face of what we have learned. So, analytically, let me try to ask what it is we are supposed to be mourning; what it is we are supposed to have lost by being forced, kicking and complaining, into a twentieth-century world-view.

We have lost an infantile sense of passivity; we have lost the splendid conviction that the whole universe is a cot in which we are tucked safely and rocked tenderly. While we may scream with hunger and cold it doesn’t really matter because the Good Mummy ‘out there’ (whom for complex reasons of our own we will insist on calling ‘the God Daddy’) is really looking after us. She has an excellent, indeed perfect, baby manual – and her ‘schedule’ of meals, playtimes and disciplines will in the long run be good for us.

We have lost both Platonic and Cartesian dualisms – which have allowed us, directly and indirectly, to mess up the planet perhaps terminally and exploit almost everyone on it who does not happen to be white, middle-class and male, or at least good at acting as though they were.

We have lost the romantic and arrogant notion of ourselves as solitary travellers in an alien land, the Great White Hunter, the Nimrod of the cosmos, who eventually, hung with trophies, will go home to heaven and patronize the angels. We have lost hero status – the product of bourgeois individualism – which made us feel powerful and made us feel lonely.

We have lost a mechanical saviour doll, who craftily pretended to be just like us while in fact keeping a tight grip on the few privileges of God-ness, of divinity, that we had not already managed to claim for ourselves. He was sent down from heaven by his father to act out the rôle of the suffering servant and make us all feel very guilty. Those of us who felt guilty enough would then be rescued by this deus ex machina intervention; be relieved of our troublesome flesh, and allowed to escape from a world whose beauties were but a snare and a delusion. As well as being rather tasteless this was also quite unnecessary, since God was all-powerful and could have redeemed us even more cheaply if he had wanted to.

Of course these are losses – but they hardly seem to call for mourning. Of course this is much easier for a woman to say than a man, because we got to enjoy fewer of the benefits than men did. However even those who did quite well out of the previous arrangement seem to have little to regret, especially in the light of what we have gained on the deal, and at virtually no cost to ourselves.

Firstly, we gain solidarity, incorporation, love. We need never be lonely again. We are not only ‘bound round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees’, we are also bound to each other. In reality we are indeed committed to the ‘creating of each other’s humanity’. We step effortlessly, if we can dare to give up our ‘splendid isolation’, into the world-view of the Magnificat – where our own vindication necessarily becomes the vindication of all those in need of vindication (the oppressed) and vice versa. I do not stand alone, ever or anywhere.

Secondly, we gain adolescence at least and the hope of adulthood. In the hands of our redeeming saviour God we are of course all children – dependent on grace, on love, on mercy. At the same time, however, within the complexity and generosity of our God, we are also in the hands of this creator; and so we are responsible adults too, co-creators, colleagues, friends. Out of this tension is born the pure excitement of adolescence, which is indeed ‘very heaven’. I was speaking the other day to a friend of mine who is a schoolteacher and he was lamenting the conflict between the primary school concept of ‘child-centred education’ that is experimental, exploratory, experiential education, and the demands of the secondary curriculum. He felt that the so-called necessary examination system meant, in effect, that between the ages of eleven and twenty all the students’ experiments were bogus. They had to learn only to come up with the ‘right’ answers, rather than the true results of their experiments. It made me think of our new understanding of randomness and co-responsibility. Our creator God has cancelled the exams; our experiments are for real.

Thirdly, we have gained a possibility of a new and better expression of the mystery of the Incarnation. Our not-aloneness takes on a new dimension: our incorporation – by the actual nature of what it is to be a person – becomes total. God is committed to the project.

Fourthly, we have restored to us the resurrection of the body, which, if you can bring yourself to like bodies as much as God clearly does, is nothing but good news. If there is no way of being a self, if there is no personhood without material reality (i.e. a body)—with all the elements and parameters and constructions I have suggested and more—then there is no resurrection without the body, because there is nothing to resurrect. The resurrection of the body, as Paul makes clear, is the ground of our hope and love and joy. It is also a radical demand; or as liberation theologian José Miranda puts it:

The negation of the resurrection of the dead is an ideology of the status quo. It is the silencing of the sense of justice that history objectively stirs up. It is to kill the nerve of the real hope of changing the world. The authentically dialectic Marxist and the Christian who remains faithful to the Bible are the last who will be able to renounce the resurrection of the dead.14

The Christian tradition has always known and taught this: that the resurrection is of the body or not at all. The apostolic generation laboured to express it – not just in the peculiar detailing of Thomas probing about in Jesus’ wounds, and the repeated insistence that their resurrected Lord ate with them, and the reiteration of the empty tomb; but throughout the gospel narratives taken as a whole. In the story of the raising of Lazarus Jesus says to Martha ‘Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead?’ and she replies ‘I believe they will rise at the last day’. ‘No’, he says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life; can you believe this?’ and she makes what – under the circumstances – appears to be a very peculiar reply. She says ‘I believe you are the Christ; the one who is come into the world’. The resurrection, for her, has shifted from a jam-tomorrow spiritual tea party to a present, daily personal relationship, an engagement with the world, with the flesh, with the body. Lazarus stank; his body was real and beloved. Resurrection did not mean for him or for Martha something spiritual, it meant resurrection of the body.15

The iconography of the tradition is explicit and sounder than the dubious individualist ‘scientisms’ of liberal modernism: the resurrected, ascended, glorified Christ, carries, reveals, proclaims always the history-inflicted physical wounds of the passion. He has branded us on the palms of his hands.16

We have, I maintain, lost nothing worth mourning in embracing this century’s intellectual explorations into the nature of self, of personhood. We have gained a God who is not only cleverer and more subtle than we thought, but also more generous. We can also, if we want to, regain the God of the Old Testament prophets, the powerful and passionate creator God of the pre-Enlightenment. Finally, we have gained for ourselves solidarity, liberation, responsibility and the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.