Until the eighteenth century, there was a broad consensus about the nature of the self. The view of the self around which this consensus developed was originated by Plato and redefined by Descartes. The self was regarded as an inner, nonmaterial entity, accessible only to introspective consciousness, different from the material body and the material world. Unlike the changing body and the world, the self was fixed in the permanency of an unchanging and immortal substance, i.e., in a soul.
        This view of the self was challenged by the newly emerged and scientifically inspired empiricist outlook in philosophy. The locus classicus of the critique of the traditional view of the self is found in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (I,iv,6). Hume's criticism is generally recognized as a watershed in the development of the western approach to the self.
        Hume raised what is still a serious objection to the view of the self as an inner entity which can be approached only through introspective consciousness. With deceptive simplicity, he points out that conscious reflection on the self reveals not a substantial and permanent inner self, but only a series of fleeting mental perceptions. At best, the self revealed by consciousness can be construed only as "a bundle of perceptions." The existence of the soul cannot be verified by introspection. Hume calls it "a fiction."
        If selfhood is located in a soul which persists from moment to moment, then it is a simple matter to account for the continuity of the self. However, once the soul is regarded as a "fiction," the continuity of the self becomes problematic, i.e., Hume leaves us with the challenge of explaining how the present self is the same as the self which existed yesterday or ten years ago.
        During the last two hundred years, increasingly sophisticated accounts of the self, mostly materialistic, have emerged in response to Hume's challenge. Initially, the self/soul identification was replaced by a crude self/body identification. The theory evolved into a self/brain identification which maintains that our conscious states are essentially neural firings in the brain. Any attempt to give an account of the self which treats the self as a nonphysical entity outside the sphere of the causal laws discovered by science is rejected. However, such an identification of the self with the brain shares with the traditional view the implicit assumption that the self can be reified and objectified, though it substitutes an inner material entity—the brain—for an inner nonmaterial entity—the soul.
        Like the self/soul identification, the self/brain identification is open to criticism. Philosophers have invented puzzle cases to point up the paradoxical situations which can result from the self/brain identification. For example: What should we make of a person whose brain is split or divided into its two hemispheres, each operating independently of the other? Are we dealing with two selves or one?
        I mention this criticism—and many others can be adduced—not as a propaedeutic to a reinstatement of the traditional view of the self, but to suggest that both views suffer from similar problems. They account, for the continuity of the self over time by implicitly treating the self as kind of thing. The reification and objectification of the self offer only a lifeless and mechanical account of the evanescence which characterizes the self.
        Recently a promising alternative approach to the self has emerged which views the self not as a thing but as a narrative activity. One of the first disciplines to evince this shift is theology, specifically what has been termed "narrative theology."
        Narrative theology develops out of the recognition that religion depends upon sacred books or sacred oral traditions which contain paradigmatic stories. This historical fact about religion is quickly generalized into a characterization of the human condition. Narrative  theologians maintain that all human beings are born into stories which shape how they view the world, others, and themselves, and that these stories supply narrative accounts which impose pattern on experience.
        Eventually, we tell our own stories, but before we can be tellers of tales we must be listeners. We are born into the ongoing stories of our community. Just as a scientific theory makes intelligible what were before seemingly disparate facts, so these stories impose an order on events and experiences which appear unconnected when taken in isolation. These stories do not merely illustrate or symbolize the self; they embody the self; they are the self.
        If the self is a story, or better, an intersection of stories, a disturbing question arises: How can the self get the necessary purchase to understand itself and to make judgments about itself?   For many narrative theologians, autobiographical reflection and writing provide the best way of identifying and evaluating the stories which are the self.
        A story of any kind is a literary reality and must be regarded from a literary point of view. This means that we must attend to the narrative techniques such as the use of plot devices and the manipulation of point of view as well as to the content of the stories. These techniques have exigencies of their own and allow a story to have an impact distinct from its content.
        When dealing with explicitly fictional literature like novels, this is not troubling.  A fictional work is supposed to be inventive and imaginative.  Factual truth is not a relevant standard by which to judge the characters and events of novels. However, when we deal with nonfictional works like autobiographies, the situation is dramatically altered.
         One view of autobiography sees it as a mode of historical writing.  This view emphasizes the events of a person's life and gives little attention to the person's inner responses to those events. It leaves the reader the task of verifying, first, that the events related took place and, second, that they took place in the fashion that the autobiographer said they did. Such verification is often difficult and, in the case of much older autobiographies—records of events being totally lacking—often is impossible. But it is important to note that this view maintains a distinction between the self presented in the autobiography, the writing or narrating self, and the lived self, the self being written about or narrated.
         A variant of this view emphasizes not so much the events of a person's life as the feelings and motives which prompted the autobiographer to act as he did. The assumption is that the author has privileged access to his inner life and is in the unique position of being able to convey it to others. While the author's account of his feelings and motives cannot be directly verified—only the autobiographer has access to his inner life—indirect verification is possible: looking to other writings of the author such as diaries, or to accounts of the author written by contemporaries.
         Recently, interest in the problem of verifying the assertions of the autobiographer has faded and has been replaced by a radically altered understanding of the relationship between the writing self and the lived self which regards the self as an autobiographical invention and autobiography as synonymous with self-invention. It is only a short step from this contention to the deconstructionist conclusion that there is no self beyond the autobiographical text. Paul de Man, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, puts the deconstructionist position clearly and succinctly: "We assume that life produces the autobiography as act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?" As Oscar Wilde reversed the relation between art and life—life imitates art, not the other way around—de Man reverses the relation between self and text. The self does not produce the autobiography; the autobiography produces the self. For deconstructionists like de Man, the self outside the text, the lived self, disappears as an object of critical concern. The self with which the critic is concerned is identical with the autobiographical text. The author of the autobiography has no privileged access to his text or to his self. Since the self is equivalent to the text, it is open to interpretation and explication by all its readers, no one of whom possesses the definitive interpretation or explication.
        For the deconstructionists, literature ceases to be a vehicle of insight into the human condition and instead becomes another mode of reifying and objectifying the self so that it becomes permanently alienated from itself, subject to the manipulation of others. The self becomes a cadaver suffering endless autopsies.
          Many scholars and critics have shared the unease of the "common reader" when confronted with the extraordinary claims of the deconstructionists. These critics recognize, in however attenuated a form, an authorial self beyond the text. However, the nature of the self beyond the text apparently defies full-blooded characterization or description. These critics refer to this self as "incommunicable," "not finally knowable," "a mysterious reality."
          Clearly the reason for this impasse is a reluctance to return to the language and concepts which describe the self as an inner entity. And this reluctance is easily accounted for. The criticisms of such a position still remain. If one were to return to the inner self position, one would have to confront the criticisms made of that position. The problem, as I see it, then, is to accept the insights offered by the new narrative and literary approach to the self while rejecting the extreme conclusion which deconstructionists draw. While this is a task beyond the limits of an article, I will offer some suggestions as to how this can be done which emerge from reflections on the first autobiographer, St. Augustine.
          Time and change are the stuff of selfhood. They are best captured narratively rather than analytically. This is precisely what Augustine undertakes in his Confessions. For Augustine, the self is a reality which cannot be adequately treated in a philosophical treatise. He invents a new genre—autobiography—in order to convey not only what he tends to say about his life, but also about the self which lives that life. Augustine, like his philosophical and theological contemporaries, uses traditional "soul language"; unlike them, he tends to be somewhat uncomfortable with it. In his Creation of the Soul, Augustine worries about how the soul can be said to grow and develop, and how time can be said to enter into the soul. For Augustine, a timeless, remote and isolated soul as the carrier of self-identity is unrealistic.
        To develop a conceptual underpinning for his autobiographical undertaking in the Confessions, Augustine turns to the central story of his culture—the Bible. The key biblical text he uses is Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our own image and likeness." This text reveals human beings not only as images of God—thus representing an alternative to regarding them as essentially souls—but as creatures. Plotinus who influenced Augustine in significant ways, saw the soul or inner self as a piece of the divine, an identification which Augustine could not accept. For Augustine, the self is first of all a creature, irrevocably different in kind from its Creator. But the self also betrays the fundamental and inexpungable relationship which existed between the human creature as an image of God and its Creator (IV,9).
        The contours of the lives of individuals are shaped by their status as images. We can but image God—properly or improperly. Perhaps it is more accurate to say—following Gerard Manley Hopkins's substitution of "selving" for "self"—that we are not so much images of God as “imagings” of God. In interpreting  self as an imaging of God, one makes contact with the narrative approaches to the self. The best way to depict and characterize a narrated and narrating self—which is the self of the Confessions—is as an imaging or selving. As an imaging the self takes on the characteristics of the lived self.
        The lived self is relational. That is, the self is not so much an inner thing as a nexus in a field of relations: family, community, culture, God. Augustine's insistence on our being images of God establishes relating as an essential feature of the self for two reasons. First, the God imaged by the self is a Trinitarian God, that is, a God who exemplifies relating. Second, for Augustine, the self can exist and can be understood only in terms of its sustaining relationship with that which it images. By contrast, Aquinas's depiction of the self in Aristotelian substance-language allows the self to be understood as an autonomous entity which can be analyzed apart from its relationship to its creator. Augustine would have none of this. Apart from the self's relational capacity to image God properly or improperly, no judgment or analysis of it can make any sense.
        The lived self is a protean reality, as Augustine recognizes (IV, 15). The self is a nexus of continually changing relationships. For Augustine, there is no untouched and immutable self standing behind the turmoil and trouble of life. The self is always becoming. Philosophical treatises using traditional soul language were inadequate in capturing this processive self. The genre of autobiography had to be invented because only autobiography is capable of portraying the becomingness of the self (X, 17).
        Finally, the lived self is beyond total understanding: it is continually changing, and it is subject to the exigencies of the relationships which constitute it. One cannot know the influences which those relationships have had and will have. For Augustine, this means specifically the effects of God's grace. Another reason why final understanding of the self is not possible grows out of Augustine's anticipation of Freud. Augustine recognizes that the conscious and intending self can convey only an aspect of the total, ongoing self. It is not that there is a hidden, inner self, but that the conscious self can capture only part of the overall narrative that is the self. Because of this, self-deception is a constant danger of which Augustine is constantly aware. The proper or improper imaging which is the self can be judged only by God. That is why Augustine is continually referring to God as his audience throughout the Confessions.
        But the key to understanding Augustine's approach to the self is its temporal milieu which makes possible, or, better, necessitates, its relational and changing nature and makes it prone to self-deception. Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind/Willing, notes that, for Augustine, a human being is "a creature that does not just live in time but is essentially temporal, is, as it were, time's essence."
        Augustine initiates his exploration of time in the Confessions by meditating on the problem of creation, specifically, the question often tauntingly asked by nonbelievers, "What was God doing before He created the world?" Resisting a countertaunt—creating Hell for those who ask such questions—Augustine goes on to distinguish between time and eternity, arguing that God exists in eternity and that time itself was created by God. After asking what time is, he offers the often quoted reply: "If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not" (XI,14). Fortunately, Augustine is not easily discouraged—even by himself. He does try to answer the question.
        Augustine first rejects the equation of time and motion which is given prominence by most of the illustrious Greek philosophers (XI, 24), because, he contends, motion is measured by time, not the other way around: a body standing still is measured by time as well as a body in motion. For Augustine, the key to understanding time is not to relate it to motion, but to the self. The self is distended or stretched because it is a creature of time. The self anticipates the future, attends to the present and remembers the past. Only in the self can time exist because only in the self can the passage of time be marked. Time is the very essence of the self, for the self—to be a self—must constantly change. A nonchanging self is a dead self—metaphysically as well as physically.
        In emphasizing the connection between self and change or becoming, one must confront the danger of chaos. Augustine recognizes that the self is a distentio. It is constantly on the brink of flying apart. The self is distracted and dispersed among mortal things—one of the results of original sin for Augustine—thus imaging God improperly. This dispersal or distentio which is, in a sense, the self, must be brought under control. Cosmos must reign over chaos. The time that is the self must be structured and patterned so that the self can be structured and patterned. The ordering of formless matter which is at the heart of Plato's account in the Timaeus of how the cosmos came into being is internalized by Augustine. The real cosmic drama is the drama of the self, created in time and creature of time, heir to dispersal and distraction. By being pulled toward God, the self is pulled away from, dispersal and distraction: "[B]ut I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts and the deepest places of my soul are torn with every kind of tumult until the day when I shall be purified and melted in the fire of Thy love and wholly joined to Thee" (XI, 29). The Confessions reveals how the patterning and structuring of Augustine's life took place, how cosmos emerged from chaos.
        Augustine's procedure in the Confessions also reveals that self- patterning and self-ordering are more important than self-knowledge.  Augustine is convinced that attempts at self-knowledge are inevitably incomplete and unsatisfactory because of the self's relational and changing nature, the limitations of introspection, and the constant threat of self-deception. As Oscar Wilde put it, "Only shallow people know themselves."  The primary task of autobiographical reflection is indirect self-knowledge, not direct introspection.
        To be a selving or an imaging means that one fights chaos by replacing it with cosmos, disorder by replacing it with order. Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living; it can also be said that the unpatterned, disordered life is not worth examining.
        Ordering and patterning are not wholly narrative activities. Narration is only one kind of ordering or patterning, a verbal ordering or patterning. In a sense, an autobiography is more than a narrative. It is not an actor (the present self who is writing the autobiography) reading another's lines (the past self who has lived the life the author is relating), but some one who performs and whose performance supplies order and pattern. As an author, the self is detached and remote; it becomes irrelevant—as the deconstructionists have concluded. An author is separable from his text and is not necessary to our understanding of it.
        A performer, however, is not separable from his performance:  "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The autobiographical performance, then, presents rather than relates the mode of self-- ordering and self-patterning which gives coherence and significance to this life. This self-ordering and self-patterning in the autobiographical performance take into account the possibility of self-deception and the
limitations of introspection. Like a Jackson Pollock painting which reveals a pattern not consciously intended, the result of an autobiography—even when the authorial consciousness lacks total control—is never chaos or chance arrangement, but order and pattern of a certain kind.

        These excursions into narrative theology, autobiographical theory, and Augustine's image doctrine have issued in results more suggestive than definitive. The approaches to the self which emerge from these disparate areas of specialization represent the beginnings of what I take to be a new consensus about the nature of human selfhood. The current dominant conceptual framework which pictures the self as an inner entity is slowly breaking up. And I am convinced that some, if not all, of the approaches to the self sketched here will form the basis for a new conceptual framework which depicts the self as an ordering and patterning over time. I admit the need for further analysis and clarification of this notion. But I am certain that the way to a view of the self which is more fruitful than one which sees the self as an inner entity is by means of such analysis and clarification.