Being an Authentic Person

Anyone who remembers reading Shakespeare in high school knows the cast of characters in every play was called the "Dramatis Personae".  The word "person" comes from the Latin meaning a mask or a character in a play.  It was only in the Christian era when the term "persona" came to mean a person in our modern understanding of a human being.  This evolution came from the attempt to understand Jesus and the various members of the Trinity. 

In our own times, the idea of being a person is also intimately linked to the modern idea of authenticity.  This term, unfortunately, has been devalued to refer to a subjectivistic and relativistic understanding of being a human being.  An authentic person is often identified as someone who is true to themselves, free, autonomous, and individual.  Modern thinkers believe that to be authentic means to be free of ouside demands and restrictions placed upon the individual.  However, as Charles Taylor has pointed out, "Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands."  (The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 41)  To be an authentic human being is to be true to the nature that we are given and the vocation to which we are called as a human person. 

The authentic person recognizes that he or she has obligations to other persons, obligations that flow from belonging to something larger than oneself.  These obligations are not to be understood as imposed laws external to our nature, but rather as part of the very fabric of being human.  It is the recognition that we need one another and that we belong to a community.  As Taylor puts it, "If authenticity is being true to ourselves, is recovering our own 'sentiment de l'existence,' then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole."  (The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 91)

Rather than condemning the modern era, however, and its notion of authenticity, we should seek to recover its real meaning by engaging in dialogue to recover the kernel of truth found in the idea and demonstrate to the world how rich is the meaning of authenticity.  As Taylor states:

It suggest that we undertake a work of retrieval, that we identify and articulate the higher ideal behind the more or less debased practices, and then criticize these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal.  In other words, instead of dismissing the culture altogether, or just endorsing it as it is, we ought to attempt to raise its practice by making more palpable to its participants what the ethic they subscribe to really involves...What we ought to be doing is fighting over the meaning of authenticity, and from the standpoint developed here, we ought to be trying to persuade people that self-fulfillment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form.  The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning.  We ought to be trying to lift the culture back up, closer to its motivating ideal.  (The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 72-73)

This task first of all begins with a radical conversion in our own selves.  Each of us create masks behind which we hide and perform for others.  Ultimately we hide from ourselves what we do not want to acknowledge about ourselves and the wider reality of the world.  We discover our path to authenticity first and foremost in the depths of our conscience.  As Thomas Merton states:

It is in the depths of conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open up inside and look into those depths, we also refuse to confront the invisible God who is present within us.  This refusal is a practical admission that we do not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be our true selves.  Just as we have a superficial, external mask which we put together with words and actions that do not fully represent all that is in us, so we believers deal with a God who is made up of words, feelings, reassuring slogans, and this is less the God of faith than the product of religious and social routine.  (Love and Living, p. 41-42)

Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven" captures well the person's attempt to escape from God and his own true self.  At the end of the day, such an escape is a futile attempt.  We cannot run away from God, and we cannot run away from our true natures.  In the Christian tradition we overcome our masks and escapes by dying to self and surrendering completely to God in imitation of Jesus the Lord.  As Thomas Merton again points out, "The death by which we enter into life is not an escape from reality but a complete gift of ourselves which involves a total commitment to reality.  It begins by renouncing the illusory reality which created things acquire when they are seen only in their relation to our own selfish interests."  (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 17)

At the end of the day, the masks we create for ourselves that are designed to fool others, fool ourselves, and fool God must all be left behind in order to achieve our authentic selves.  To be authentic also means to be connected to a greater whole, recognizing the responsibilities we have for one another that exist not by external command but by our very nature.  Finally, as Karl Rahner so often said, to be an authentic person is to fulfill the vocation that each person has in relation to God and one another in following the loving way of the Lord Jesus.  Let Merton's prayer be our own as we seek our authentic selves:  "For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self You have wanted for me, only the self I wanted for myself.  And I no longer want this false self."  (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 72)