Since time immemorial, pilgrims have been travelling to islands to meet holy men and women, and so it was that I found myself heading for Quarr Abbey, home to a Benedictine community within the Solesmes Congregation, to meet Dom Luke Bell. His latest book, The Mystery of Identity, was published last spring by Angelico Press. As the ferry neared the Isle of Wight, I could see the abbey church, its Moorish-Byzantine style lending a distinctly exotic twist to a cold and damp English winter day.
Before Fr Luke became a monk he taught Shakespeare in Morocco, and so his current home in a monastery with a North African flavour seems appropriate. The temperature, however, was certainly not North African as I walked into Quarr Abbey. High energy prices and a loss of revenue caused by Covid meant the heating had not been switched on.
The guestmaster was philosophical: “We are not as cold as they are in Ukraine.” Once I had found Fr Luke, we adjourned to a small parlour. He was dressed in his Benedictine habit, combined with a very un-Benedictine jumper. The Community at Quarr Abbey is rooted in silence. There was little small talk.
The starting point for Fr Luke’s interest in identity was etymological, rather than sociological. He has no interest in the current culture wars. Reflecting on the word “identity” (which is related to the medieval Latin word idemptitas and also to idem, which means “the same”), Fr Luke had observed that “identity” is also used to mean what is different – as in the phrase “unique identity”. So, right at the heart of our very understanding of the word “identity”, there is a paradox. We wish to be the same, and yet we also wish to be different.
There is, says Fr Luke, only one way in which this paradox can be resolved, and that is through a journey into God, who is transcendent and different while also being immanent and universal. The idea that the quest for our identity is also a quest for God is, of course, an old one. The Byzantines subordinated every aspect of their life – political, economic and spiritual – to the quest for deification.
Fr Luke argues that it is through our participation in the mysterious life of Christ that we receive the gift of who we really are. His approach to the quest for identity is rooted in the idea of growth of the inner life – the development of being – rather than through concepts and reasoning.
This reminded me of a conversation I once had with some Russian monks, for whom the essential problem with modern life was that, like Pontius Pilate, people ask the wrong question. Rather than: “What is truth?”, we should be asking: “Who is truth?” Like Pilate, we fail to see (because we have forgotten how to see) that truth is encountered in the depths of silence and stillness: “But [Jesus] gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed.” In his book, Fr Luke quotes Meister Eckhart’s words “Nothing is so like God as silence”, and comments: “Silence is the mystery of the identity of God.”
True identity, Fr Luke says, “is openness to the infinite (an identification with all that is): it is the image of God, infinite and mysterious, immanent and transcendent.” Fr Luke recounts how in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha falls to the ground and kisses the earth, following Fr Zosima’s injunction to “water the earth with the tears of your joy”. Alyosha has reached his mature identity – Christ has touched him.
Before we can receive the gift of Christ, however, we must go into the wilderness of the desert, where we will be told who he is. It is in the desert, a place of bewilderment, that one is forced to confront what lies in the depths of one’s heart. This is no easy task. As St Isaac the Syrian said: “He who knows himself is greater than he who raises the dead.”
Fr Luke emphasises that we can only receive our identity in Christ when we are nothing. It is often through illness that we overcome the illusion that we are our body, our ego, our thoughts and desires. This reminded me of what I had read about the life of the Abbé Huvelin, a 19th-century French spiritual director whose greatness lay in the fact that his life was lived in a desert.
Huvelin had occupied an unpaid post in a Paris parish, where “suffering from gout in the eyes and brain, and usually lying prone in a darkened room, he served souls with the supreme authority of self-oblivious love, and brought light and purity and peace to countless troubled, sorrowing, or sinful souls.”
Among Huvelin’s papers, the name Huvelin is written out on sheets of paper time and again, against which is written “Huv il était”, and a little lower down “J’étais Huvelin” with a long backward flourish which swerves back and encloses “tu étais, il était”, Elsewhere, there is written “il n’est.” Huvelin had a desire for annihilation, a desire to go beyond himself. This is the apophatic way – the way of the desert.
Those who receive and accept their identity in Christ are the ones who conquer. They receive a “new name” written on a “white stone” which “no one knows except the one who receives it”. This is the name which Christ gives to the one who conquers.
Our age is obsessed by identity because people fail to seek that identity in the one place where it can be found – which is in Christ, the seeds of whom lie in the depths of every human heart. The culture wars are a consequence of man’s search for his identity in the illusory and his loss of a sense of his true sameness and difference, which is in God.
We cannot construct our identity because it is something that we receive. It is a gift from Christ and it takes a lifetime to make ourselves fit to receive it. Fr Luke quotes Dostoevsky again: “Man is an enigma and if you spend all your life at it, don’t say you have wasted your time; I occupy myself with this enigma because I wish to be a man.”
The mystery of identity is the mystery of love. “God hides so that we may appear; He empties Himself so that we may be full; He loves so that we may be. That love is His bliss; we are His bliss; our bliss is His bliss in us, our identity.” The Holy Trinity, Fr Luke says, is the mystery of unity and diversity, the mystery of identity, and he points to Shakespeare’s poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, which also presents love within terms that have distinction, but not division:
So they loved as love in twain
Had the essence but in one,
Two distinct, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Fr Luke says that those who love are the same and distinct: “They are one and two: they are the death of counting. Quality replaces quantity.” The reasoning mind, however, is dependent on differentiation and identification – and so it finds it hard to love. Our reasoning mind must learn to be humble in the face of love, however, because it is through the mystery of love, says Fr Luke, that we receive our true identity. This, he says, “is the eternal life that the phoenix, with its legendary ability to be reborn from its ashes, symbolises. It is the life of Christ risen from the dead. That is our life and our mystery.”
Dom Luke Bell’s The Mystery of Identity (Angelico Press, £15) is out now
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