In You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Alan Noble has an insightful passage in which he discusses differences between the sense of crisis produced by the modern sense of identity, and the spiritual crises of people of the past, who were not enslaved to a need to produce their own sense of identity. Dante's Divine Comedy shows us this contrast with the modern sense of identity.
Adults in the West have the relatively common experience of waking up one day and concluding the roles, relationships, obligations, and lifestyles that once defined their identity are no longer fulfilling. And in that moment, a modern person can come to feel that it would be immoral not to follow this new, truer identity---even if it hurts many people around them. Of course, if we really are responsible for discovering and expressing our identity, the moral pressure to be true to yourself regardless of how it affects others makes perfect sense.
People haven't always experienced identity crises as normal. In fact, where modern people suffer from identity crises, earlier societies suffered spiritual crises. The best example of this is Dante's The Divine Comedy, which famously begins: "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost." One reason these lines have resonated with readers for centuries is that the poet is describing a common human experience: waking up halfway into life only to discover you are lost. Perhaps you wake up one morning questioning whether your life is worth living. Or you might wake up wondering who you are. Regardless, the image of suddenly discovering that you are off the "right road" and lost in the "dark woods" is a resonate one. But the "right road" meant something different to Dante than it does to us today. Dante has not lost his identity; he is not confused about who he is. He has lost his spiritual vision.
Soon after he finds himself in the dark woods, Dante sees the sun rise over a mountain. He desperately tries to climb the mountain and get closer to the sun (which represents the Son of God and divine illumination), but he is stopped by three animals representing his sins. At this point the poet Virgil appears and leads Dante through Hell and Purgatory and up to Paradise. For Dante in the fourteenth century, the question was not "Who am I?" but "Who is God?" and "How can I grow in Christlikeness?" The Divine Comedy describes one man's efforts to know God, but it is also the poet's way of describing the spiritual journey that everyone must take. In the process of knowing God, Dante learns more and more about himself, about his sins, and the ways God has blessed him. But self-knowledge is a byproduct of knowing God; it is not the goal. The goal is to know God and become like him.
If The Divine Comedy were written today, I think it would be the story of one man's efforts to know and express himself--that's the life journey that every modern person must take. The "right road" would not represent the way of Christ, but a process of self-revelation and actualization. The "dark woods" would represent an identity crisis, and the beasts blocking the way to self-actualization would be cultural expectations and self-doubt instead of sins. A modern Divine Comedy might still include religion or God, but only insofar as they help the protagonist discover their real, true self--a complete reversal of the Italian poet's original vision. From Dante's spiritual crisis to our modern identity crisis, the search moves from external to internal sources. One way to understand that shift is to recognize that unlike the fourteenth-century poet, contemporary people tend to believe that they are their own and belong to themselves, and as a result, their identities are in question. We can lose our "self" in ways that wouldn't have made much sense to Dante.
