Identification vs. Identity
More on love, knowledge, and power
“I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” - St. Paul[1]
In our cynical age, I think we hear St. Paul’s willingness to become all things to all people as a mark of inauthenticity – the chameleon-like slipperiness of a con man or a smooth politician who tells the people whatever they want to hear. I want to suggest another – more charitable – way to interpret this statement. I think it is an expression of St. Paul’s capacity to identify with people who are quite different from himself – to walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak – and attempt to understand their perspective so that he can enter into deeper communion with them.
To put it as simply as possible, St. Paul comes to know them by loving them. And it is this union of knowledge with love the creates the possibility for his relationship with them to be a healing experience for them, and a blessing for him. This is what power exercised through the union of knowledge and love does: it heals and blesses.
We are skeptical of this. We moderns have internalized the belief that each person is an island unto themselves, a fortress that cannot be breached. We cannot enter into the inner life or consciousness of another. In a sense, we can never know them. We relate to them through identification rather than identity.
Identification consists in mapping the markers by which we distinguish an individual from others. I am a gay, male of European descent, born in Gary, Indiana in 1967. I’m married to Andrew and father of Nehemiah. Jesus was a first century Jew living in occupied Palestine, who had a brief public ministry before being executed by the Roman Empire when Pontius Pilate was the governor. Through identification, we make it clear whom we are talking about. But does such identification constitute real knowledge of the person? Does it reveal their self-consciousness and value?
Raimon Panikkar argues that “Identification is not identity. In order to approach someone’s identity, we must appeal to another type of approach that goes above and beyond the first. We need a knowledge impregnated with love; otherwise, we touch no more than the what and not the who of the person.”[2] We make the mistake of believing that an understanding of what another person is – black, white, Asian, male, female, nonbinary, Republican, Democrat, Independent - is the same thing as understanding who they are. Such knowledge, without love, reduces the other person to an object to be described rather than a knowing subject.
Love brings an entirely different kind of knowledge. As Panikkar describes it, “love is a nondualistic experience . . . Love is neither equality nor otherness, neither one nor two. Love requires differentiation without separation; it is a ‘going’ toward ‘the other’ that rebounds in a genuine ‘entering’ into oneself by accepting the other within one’s bosom.”[3]
Through love, we come to know the other and ourselves in an entirely new way: as a web or relations, as a communion of subjects. This is true of our coming to love a person, or an animal, or a place. When we love someone or something we enter into the subjectivity of the other and they enter into ours; or, rather, we recognize a relationship that was already there. We are all constituted by each other, and come to know our selves through each other. Love reveals a community of living subjects, rather than dead objects.
This kind of knowing is intuitive. We know each other from the inside, out, as it were. If you have experienced a good marriage or a deep friendship or an intimate relationship with a landscape, you will get what I am talking about immediately. We cannot know what we do not love; not even ourselves. It is through the loving regard of another that we are given back to ourselves. This is the source of our ecstasy – or capacity to stand outside of ourselves and truly see ourselves – and the source of our vulnerability. It is those whom we really know, whom we can wound most deeply.
But the knowledge gained through love is also a powerful source for healing. This is what we see again and again in the ministry of Jesus. He attains an immediate intimacy with those who reciprocate his love, and this allows for the healing of physical and spiritual suffering that previously kept the beloved in bondage to their wounds and in isolation from community. Jesus’ loving regard restores the communion of subjects. Jesus identifies with those he heals.
This is why his love not only heals, but it also empowers. Jesus raises up Peter’s mother-in-law – that same words in Greek refer to Jesus’ resurrection.[4] She is restored to life, to vitality, and to her own power to love and serve. She is restored to the dignity of her giftedness. She becomes a subject again, and not an object of pity or scorn. She shares the subjectivity of Jesus as God’s beloved child.
We can know each other through love – not perfectly or completely, but really and truly. We can identify with each other through empathy, compassion, respect, and reverence for one another. I’m not saying this is easy. Jesus doesn’t set a low bar to follow him, he sets a high bar. He does so because he loves us, and knows what we are capable of doing. He trusts that we can identify with the source of Love itself, with the God who meets us in Jesus so that we can really be known by God as we come to love God.
Jesus, we are told, went off to pray alone.[5] He rested in communion with the Source of love, so that he could bear the knowledge of the woundedness of those he loved, and invite them into deeper communion with love’s healing power. Our knowledge of each other – wounds and gifts and all – is too much to bear if it is not grounded in the infinite capacity of God’s love to restore us to wholeness. Jesus returned to the Source again and again, to drink deeply from the well of love and share the divine subjectivity that is our true identity, uniting all with the All without in any way diminishing the beauty of each and every one.
We are invited to drink from that well, the living water that gushes up into eternal life, as we identify with Jesus.[6] And having been satiated, we are sent back out into the world as God’s lovers, to share the good news of love’s knowledge and love’s power. That is what Jesus was sent out to do. And so are we.
[1] I Corinthians 9:23.
[2] Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2004), p. 57.
[3] Panikkar, p. 57.
[4] Mark 1:29-34.
[5] Mark 1:35.
[6] John 4:14.