In Dorothy Sayers’s 1923 whodunit, Whose Body?, an unidentified dead body, naked but for a pince-nez, is mysteriously dropped off in the bathtub of a perfectly ordinary, respectable home. Who is Mr. Body? How did he get there—and by whose doing? And why? The questions turn out to be remarkably difficult to answer, and the results surprising and unpredictable. Because when it comes to our bodies, visible clues, while important, do not reveal everything. This is even more true of us when alive and real than when reduced to corpses in fictional murder-mystery bathtubs.
I was thinking of Whose Body?—and the mysteries the body in the novel hides then reluctantly yields—while reading Angela Franks’s new book, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self. Each body that has ever existed, after all, belongs to someone—really multiple someones, including at the most obvious level overlapping familial and societal structures that lay claim to us from before birth. Furthermore, if we want to get metaphysical (as well we should), each human body is also a creature with a soul, endowed with the qualities of its Creator and given the status of a treasured son or daughter. Finally, at the most basic level, we should also heed biological truths. Serena Sigillito articulated these well in her launching editorial for Fairer Disputations, where Franks herself is a featured author: “You can’t be a human being without a body, and every body is either male or female.”
For centuries, it seems, the question “Whose body?” simply did not need to be asked; the answers were perfectly axiomatic. In the pre-Christian Mediterranean and the ancient Near East, for instance, each person’s body clearly belonged to someone—at the most obvious level, slaves to their masters, women and children to the men of the household, and even men owed sufficient allegiance to someone else in the societal pyramid as to be able to identify such belonging. Plus, of course, every resident of a city-state belonged to that city-state—and this belonging involved costs and responsibilities, as well as benefits. Men served in the military and used their bodies to protect their city-state. This meant that they received citizenship rights in response—plus safety for their families, if they were successful in the defense of the city. The logic was obvious in such a system: Cities arose early in the history of human civilizations because protection against invaders was a good thing. And yet opportunity for abuse in such a world was rife, as respect for persons—or personhood—was simply not part of the Roman or ancient Near Eastern worldview.
With the rise of Christianity, we see a different way of answering the “Whose body?” question, as historian Kyle Harper shows in From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Christianity both complicated and simplified previous answers by stating that the body of every believer belongs to God. Yet conversations about the Church as a single body, beginning in the New Testament, remind us of the communal nature of bodies as well. Sin involving bodies is not individual but affects the entire community—the larger body. This means also that, for believers, every single body was now part of the Church’s body in a way that called everyone to holiness, not only individually but together.
But there is one commonality as we ricochet back to this thorny “Whose body?” question. Put simply, in the case of both the pre-Christian ancient world and the Western Christendom that followed, to answer the question “Whose body?” always involved the community and not just the individual. This is the answer modernity has challenged, however, as Carl Trueman argues in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. What might happen if the answer to “Whose body?” is just “Mine and mine alone”?
The answer, Trueman contests, is visible in the disorders of the post-Christian culture in which we are living right now. It manifests particularly clearly in the sexual revolution: “While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person. That is a profound claim that is arguably unprecedented in history.”
To claim ownership of one’s body without accepting the authority of anyone or anything else, including biology, could mean rejecting even the biological truths imprinted on one’s body since the womb. If you alone own your body, you can make it into anything you want—and you can do with it anything you want and with whomever you want. (The proviso, of course, is that you do not harm another person in so acting, but then what is the definition of “harm” anyway? Isn’t it also relative?) In this way, conversations about body and identity—whether gender identity or another sort—have become entangled in ways antithetical to human flourishing of both individuals and societies.
But there is more to this story, and Angela Franks is well equipped to tell it. The question “Whose body?” may be modern in the way we ask it, but the flawed modern answers, Franks is convinced, only point us back to timeless truths. This reality requires probing much further in history than we typically do. The result is a healthy theological approach that acknowledges that the history of humanity is inextricably connected to the history of God’s vision for the world from the beginning to its end—and as Augustine reminds us: We know how it ends. It’s the in-between space wherein we reside so uncomfortably right now that requires more explanation, especially when interacting with a culture that keeps trying to jettison God.
The basic questions, as Franks explains at the outset, are quite simple and foundational: “Who am I? How is my body related to myself? Should I alter my body to better fit my identity? Is who I am determined by me or by something outside of me? Am I definable by my group membership—by my sex, race, nationality, or religion? Or is my identity independent of these affiliations?” In answering, Franks considers “the two poles that I believe summarize the status quo: liquid bodies and empty selves.” What does she mean by these?
The modern concept of liquid bodies—and modernity itself as fluid and liquid—is the culmination of the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Liquid concepts are constantly in flux and resist being nailed down. Materiality and its absolutes are the enemy, whereas striving for a different sort of body than what one has is the goal. No change is too big for this boldly unnatural dream into which current transhumanist obsessions feed quite naturally.
The concept of the empty self, on the other hand, is profoundly narcissistic yet requires an inner death of sorts. Using the metaphor of murder mystery here, but differently from Sayers, Franks in her discussion of the “empty self” relies on such conversation partners as Christopher Lasch, whose 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism “presents a diagnosis of the unselving of a culture.” Franks shows that, over the second half of the 20th century, a death indeed took place, leaving the empty self as a result. But it happened even earlier than we think: “Rather than a sudden murder, around 1980 or thereabouts, this death was actually described, using other language, by observers in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s who saw the empty selves of people on the ‘narcissistic spectrum.’” A good example of this phenomenon in action is Betty Friedan and her Feminine Mystique, which presents a portrait of Friedan’s own empty self.
The above framework is the focus of the first three chapters in this book. The fourth chapter provides the historical grounding in antiquity and Christianity, bringing into the conversation thought partners like Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine. I found particularly fascinating Franks’s argument of the Trinitarian debates as building on Aristotle: “Aristotle had argued that metaphysics is the study of being qua being, but the Greek mind remained most comfortable with formal and essential questions. What is it? remained a more central question than Is it? But Aristotle’s Categories presented a distinction between first and second substance, and it would prove to be the germ of the Christian distinction between subsistence and essence.” To think about the three persons of the Trinity, in other words, required thinking about the self as a person, too—a person immutable, ordained, fixed.
In the fifth chapter, Franks turns to the challenges to the Christian view of the self in early modernity, including Locke, Rousseau and his “doxic self” (the emphasis on appearance over fixed identity—a form of liquid self), and Kant’s “procedural self” (emphasis on the person as his own master). These ideas set the foundation for the empty selves that then appear everywhere in modern literature—the subject of chapter six. Vampires and zombies alike are apt literary examples—emptied of blood and humanity, they perform the same emptying on others. They are, in the process, the ultimate empty selves and liquid bodies. Concluding the book, chapters eight and nine turn to modern secularism and contemporary theories of identity. It’s grim out there, but we knew this already. Yet Franks notes that “liquid problems” do have potential solutions, which “must be found in a philosophical and theological anthropology that takes seriously both the liquidity and solidity of being as reflected in the embodied human person.” Mr. Body is not just a body but a human person, and this matters.
I have long admired Franks’s work, which I first encountered in Church Life Journal. Body and Identity, years in the making, pulls together ideas that she first mentioned in some of these essays, but the book as a whole is nothing short of masterful in both scope and depth. It shows why we desperately need public conversations about gender, sexuality, and culture to include trained academics. Indeed, very few academic researchers can dedicate years, perhaps decades, of intense research and reading to produce a comprehensive book like this one, which could never have come to fruition otherwise. Combining intellectual history and theology, cultural analysis and biology, psychology and literary reflections, Franks shows that how we think about our bodies is inextricably connected to questions of identity. This, as Trueman also argues, certainly involves how we think of our sexuality. But Franks also insists that sexuality is only one aspect of what is at stake—the discussion of liquid modernity and the empty self reaches much further than that.
To put it another way, at stake is the acknowledgement that traditions, authorities, and moral absolutes still have weight in our society—and the power to offer an antidote to the inevitable narcissism of the empty self.
It is important to note that the present book is the first volume of an anticipated two, the second of which will focus in greater detail on “missional approach to identity.” The flawed relationship of people to their bodies and identities that both Trueman and Franks study, after all, reveals first and foremost a theological crisis. And theological crises require constructive theological responses, which it sounds like this second volume will propose.
At the end, intellectual honesty repeatedly refutes the postmodern theorists and brings us right back to where we started—to our bodies, made for flourishing and a full life and for rightly ordered relationships with God and our fellow image-bearers.
