That Stranger is Me
In the Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus commanded the newly liberated Hebrews to treat strangers in a particular way. It is not simply a command to be kind to strangers, but a command to “treat them as you would the native born” (Lev 19:33), as if they occupied a place among the Hebrews themselves. The commandment then goes onto say why, for the place of the stranger was once occupied by those of the Hebrews (Lev 19:34).
This Old Testament commandment spoke not only of a moral duty, but also about an existential reality which German philosophers have summarised with the term Mittsein, literally translated as “with-being” or “being with”. One does not simply exist as a hermetically sealed and self-sufficient category; one exists in relation to another person. This is also the reason why we have Christian theological notion of the self only finding oneself as a gift to another person. It is not simply because it is a moral duty to love another person, but that it is only in loving in this way that we are able to come to a true knowledge of our very selves.
We are here as selves, in other words, insofar as we inhere with others.
I was reminded of this when reading a fascinating essay on, of all things, heart transplants by Barbara Newman. Her essay began with very telling case studies of heart transplant recipients not only receiving a new organ, but also memories of the hearts’ donors, even though one was a complete stranger to another. These case studies range from the tragic (in which a recipient committed suicide in the same way as the donor) to the mysteriously beautiful (in which a child recipient spotted the donor’s father amongst a sea of strangers and cried “daddy”). In such cases, heart transplants are not simply a switch of organs. As seats of the whole person (as Pope Francis highlighted in his encyclical Dilexit Nos), some recipients seem to undergo an exchange of personhood as well.
As Newman points out later in the essay, these medical cases, though not widespread, nonetheless externalise a hidden and uncomfortable truth about self-hood as Mittsein. Christians might also feel uncomfortable about the implications of such a self-hood, although Newman indicates that this would be fully in keeping with Christian theology on the conception of the Triune God. The claim that we are Tri-theists only make sense if the persons in the Godhead are self-sufficient and sealed off from one another, but as Newman points out, the Gospels and some of the Pauline epistles indicate a sense of personhood in which one person indwells with another reciprocally, a “being-within-one-another”. In Newman’s words:
As Jesus in the Gospel of John declares, “I am in the Father and the Father in me” (John 14:11). This divine coinherence extends to the redeemed: “You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). As a theory of selfhood, coinherence asserts the porousness of human persons on the model of the divine.
And in another place:
On this model, the essence of personhood is the capacity to be permeated by other selves, other persons, without being fractured by them. A “person” in this sense has little to do with either the self-sufficient Enlightenment self or the decentered, fragmented postmodern self. Rather, the personal is, by definition, the interpersonal. One cannot be a person by oneself but only with, through, and in other persons. Or in St. Paul’s words, “We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom. 12:5).
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