Memory is Personality
A reflection on the formation of faith in the young by Mr. Vanderlip.
Do dogs ask “Who am I?” That seems a distinctly human question. A child may ask of a quadruped, shaggy creature that is so affectionate toward her, what it is, but she wouldn’t ask who it is. That’s because once the child has come to know that it is a dog, the child has come to know the creature. But not so for humans. The child might ask of a bi-ped, slightly hairy creature what it is, but when she understands that it is a human, the question yet remains: “Who?” It’s a distinctly human question. I fully understand a dog by knowing it’s a dog; I do not fully understand a person by knowing it’s a human. The “who” remains and is not eclipsed by the “what”. “Who we are is not simply interchangeable with what we are,” wrote one philosopher. Or as one theologian put it: “The person transcends the world of nature.”
“Who am I?” is a question near to the heart of childhood, though perhaps we have forgotten this as we have grown up. In subtle ways, the question shifts as we age from “Who am I?” to “What am I going to do?” or “What is my life about?” (if we even bother to ask those questions at all). It is rather that the greater part of our life is designed to distract us from the question – our work and our moments of rest exist under the star of what we will do, but everywhere we are distracted from the question of who we are. This is all the more curious given that the question of identity is everything in our time. The furiousness of transgenderism, for example, is precisely in the desire to have an identity but the inability to know oneself. Proponents of transgenderism, to their credit, seem to intuit that what we are doesn’t entirely answer who we are, but the question “who am I?” is stifled in their project of self-making, and the stifled question takes its revenge in the form of sacrificed bodies, for whose inchoate yearnings our hearts should bleed.
But consider the child: the child’s work is to play pretend. To adult eyes it may look like the child is simply acting, playing at doing something – but to pretend is first to pretend to be someone. In older forms, for example, a “pretender to the throne” isn’t someone who is simply acting, but someone who is making a claim about who he is – the rightful heir. “Let’s pretend,” say children, not because the child explicitly articulates the question “who am I?” but because the unadulterated drive of childhood is that I am a person: Who am I?
There is a stillness to this question. It is not a question of doing or activity – it is not a question of self-making; it is a question of being. Therefore all doing, all activity, all self-making must cease for the question to be raised. “Men’s miseries,” wrote Pascal, “derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” That is precisely why the question is near to the heart of childhood – not that children can sit quietly but because they are present to themselves in ways we have forgotten or neglected to be. The child is closest to the mystery of his own existence – without doing, he finds that he simply exists, and the great welter of future possibilities, which no doubt register to him, are secondary to the actuality of his being. His unknown origin and his unknown ending are simply present to the actuality of his being and even his play, as we said above, isn’t so much an act as it is a kind of revelling in pure existence.
Too easily we might slip into clichés here – live in the moment, seize the day, etc. – but these miss the point. The point is exactly not the momentary. The importance of this disposition of a child to be present to himself is in the capacity to retain and remain constant to things of greatest worth deep within oneself. Memories from our childhood tend to be so much more vivid precisely because we received them from this vantage of being present to ourselves, we receive them deep within ourselves. Indeed, all we are speaking of here is memory – the deep dwelling of things beyond fleeting impressions. The man who flits from one impression to another, retaining nothing, is not capable of an interior life, but to the child who remembers, the things he remembers are drawn together and are present to him – he remains constant to them with a faithfulness that, even through fluctuation, forms an interior unity that can be called personality.
Memory is personality. To answer the question “Who am I?”, we must remember. And more than simply our experiences, we must remember what is true. We must remember even what we have forgotten, including where we came from and where we are going. And that is where we must transcend what is strictly in ourselves. Paradoxically, as we look inward to ourselves, our gaze must go beyond ourselves and the fullest memory of who we are is found in the source and destination of our existence: God.
“You were more inward than my most inward part,” St Augustine confesses to God. That knowledge came from looking inward – “Who am I?”. And though the question is natural to childhood, it is the supernatural work of the Church to help our children come into the memory of God in whom we transcend what we are and in whom we find our true selves, our true personality. The Spirit will lead us into all truth; that scriptural word for “truth” (aletheia) means something like “not forgetting” (a=not; lethe=forgetting). He makes us cease to forget and in the Church we come into memories of which we had no recollection but which alone dwell deep within us and make sense of our existence: that we are made by God, made anew and greater in Christ, and when we awake, we will be satisfied with His likeness.
Steven Vanderlip