I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep and my sheep know me–as the Father knows me and I know the Father–and I lay down my life for the sheep.1
St Augustine was fascinated by the question of self-knowledge, aware no doubt of how hard he had worked to gain it himself:
A person must first be restored to himself, that making of himself as it were a stepping-stone, he may rise thence to God.2
In his Confessions St Augustine was the first Western writer to define the sense of personal identity as intimately interior, self-conversing, seeking and anxious. He initiated the autobiographical narrative style that we take for granted as the way we think and talk about ourselves. Describing his search for himself as a search for God was not a mere literary device. His self-concern was given meaning because it pointed towards an ultimate self-transcendence. By self-analysis and writing he advanced towards self-knowledge in the telling (and invention) of his story and by the sharing of his hidden personality. This seems all quite familiar to us today, in the culture of the television chat show, as a means of understanding who we are. Yet there is a difference in motivation. However self-centred his autobiographical self-awareness might appear at times, it was led by a consuming passion to know God. This was the God he said was closer to him than he was to himself and who knew him better than he could know himself. He could therefore pray that he would come to know himself so that he could know God. It was a sublime kind of egotism waiting for an ecstatic release from the ego.
Augustine’s self-description is a particular example of a universal Christian theme. Throughout its tradition Christian mysticism has acknowledged the connection between self-knowledge, pointing towards self-transcendence, and the knowledge of God. It has been the consistent testimony of the great masters. For St Bernard self-knowledge is a process that begins by discovering how difficult it is to be human:
When someone first discovers that he is in difficulty, he will cry out to the Lord who will hear him and say ‘I will deliver you and you shall glorify me.’ In this way your self-knowledge will be a step to the knowledge of God; God will become visible to you according as God’s image is being restored within you . . .3
St Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century stubbornly remained outside the cloister but cajoled popes and emperors with an authority born of her self-knowledge in God. Her ‘cell’, she claimed, was self-knowledge. In the beautiful flowering of the English mystical tradition in the turbulent fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing stresses self-knowledge as the necessary pre-condition for all spiritual progress. It is the true meaning of humility, the Cloud says, distinguishing it from the many counterfeit forms which religious people are adept at confecting. Meister Eckhart in the same century preached on self-knowledge as the means for experiencing the divine likeness of the human person that is the truest reality of Selfhood.
Augustine, Catherine, the author of the Cloud, Eckhart are among the Christian teachers who affirm the spiritual significance of knowing oneself. Each person knows himself uniquely and so uniquely expresses his insight into the nondual, simple, nature of God and the Self. Union transfigures but does not destroy personal identity. A transformation of what we think we are, which at times however does feel like total annihilation, must take place in what St John of the Cross calls a dark night.
It is as if God is saying: You will never become humble while you are wearing your ornaments. When you see yourself naked you will learn who you are . . . Now that the soul is dressed in working clothes–dryness and the abandonment of human desires–and now that its previous enlightenment is dimmed into darkness, it has better lights in the form of self-knowledge. . . . From this arid type of clothing comes not only the source of self-knowledge, which we have already described, but also all the benefits which we shall now describe . . .4
It is this same insight gained in self-knowledge that illuminates the way we listen to his question and know Jesus. Self-knowledge introduces us into that quality of spiritual consciousness where knower and known are known (by whom?) to be one. By self-knowledge and in the Spirit, Jesus and we meet and know each other. We are changed by the meeting. And, while becoming more and more uniquely ourselves, we also become increasingly like him as this process unfolds.
What we shall be has not yet been disclosed, but we know that when it is disclosed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.5
People in close relationship often grow to resemble each other, in the way they speak, their idiosyncrasies and mannerisms and attitudes, even in physical appearance. Just by living together union perceptibly happens even though it may be resisted and denied. In marriage or religious communities it can be amusing, mysterious, inspiring, sometimes slightly scary to see the signs of union at the level of personality. Spouses sometimes panic at the idea that they have merged or are losing their identity in marriage. All this simply shows that every healthy relationship entails a death of the ego. Co-dependence, domination or absorption by a stronger personality have quite different signs. What unites people is faithful love growing ever stronger through the recurrent deaths of the ego. Then human communion evolves into the vision of God. Two people can become one while each remains who they are as individuals. Perhaps this helps to understand the theology that describes the human and divine natures: united and yet distinct in Jesus. Light, quantum physics tells us, is neither wave nor particle but both. It depends how you look at it. Similarly, it depends how we look at Jesus. Who he is and who we are become, for the disciple, two intertwining experiences of self-knowledge. They are intertwined in time, the medium in which human relationship achieves full awareness. We can measure time. But there is also the dimension of spirit, the immeasurable medium in which time is transcended. The best way to see this in relation to Jesus is to situate it in the context of what happened in the early morning on the first day of the week after Jesus had been executed.
A lot happened on Easter Sunday.
As the day is described in the gospels, it seems more than could possibly have happened on one day. If the question of Jesus reveals the connection between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God, his Resurrection awakens us to the relationship of time and eternity. How long did Easter Sunday last? One day or all the days that have ever happened, before and since? In what way is the Jesus who died on the Cross the same person we encounter in the abyss of our self-knowledge today? What happened, the gospel suggests, is an absorption of space-time and matter into spirit. Historians, theologians and scripture scholars will not end their research and polemics about the Resurrection before we discover what that means. The attempt to understand it has value, however, because it sends us back to reread the gospel story and so to listen to the question the gospels contextualise for us.
Mary of Magdala had no doubts about the Resurrection she experienced. For her it was a reality in which she knew herself known:
So the disciples went home again; but Mary stood at the tomb outside, weeping. As she wept, she peered into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. They said to her, ‘Why are you weeping?’ She answered. ‘They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ With these words, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but did not recognise him. Jesus said to her, ‘Why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking it was the gardener, she said, ‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She turned to him and said ‘Rabbuni!’ (which is Hebrew for ‘My Master’). Jesus said, ‘Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am now ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary of Magdala went to the disciples with her news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ she said, and gave them his message.6
These words are so densely charged with meaning they constitute a supreme example, perhaps the greatest, of the form of poetry we call sacred scripture. Its level of reality can hardly be compared with the language of