3 Books to read if you want to understand yourself

Who am I? Who are we? There can be few more basic and more important questions to ask and answer than these. The problem is that the question is much easier to ask than to answer. “Know thyself,” the ancient Greek philosophers commanded. But it’s easier said than done. “The self is more distant than any star,” says Chesterton, adding that we’ll know all the secrets of the cosmos before we know ourselves.

Although we can’t know and understand ourselves fully or perfectly in the way that God knows us, we can know and understand ourselves better.

The first step is to answer the question who am I? with the answer, I am a person. Then we answer the question what is a person? with the answer, Christ is a Person. Christ is the perfect person, the perfect human being. The True Person. The more we become like Christ the more fully human we become, the more fully ourselves, the truer to ourselves. (Sin is, after all, a lie. It is self-deception.)

Since knowing Christ is to know ourselves, it is clear that reading Holy Scripture, and especially the Gospel, is necessary if we want to understand ourselves. In addition, there are three classic works that will also help us better understand ourselves.

St. Augustine’s Confessions speaks to our age, as it spoke to Augustine’s own age, because it speaks to all ages. It speaks of those truths which are truly essential to our understanding of ourselves, of each other, and of our place in the cosmos. Augustine is sublimely accessible and perennially applicable because he is one of us. He suffers from the same temptations and succumbs to those temptations. He falls and does not always get up again, preferring to wallow in the gutter with his lusts and his illicit appetites. And yet, like us, he is restless until he rests in the truth, which can only be found in Christ and the Church He founded.   

Unlike other great philosophers, Augustine doesn’t seek in The Confessions to show us the truth purely objectively, by setting out the abstract concepts and proving his point with dispassionate and logical reasoning. He shows us the truth through personal engagement with it and by the consequences of his failure to engage with it. And yet, in describing himself, he is simultaneously describing us also. He and we are one. We share the same humanity with all that it entails. In seeing Augustine and his struggles, we see ourselves and our own struggles, and the struggles of each other.  

Dante’s Divine Comedy (consisting of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) is similar in many ways to Augustine’s Confessions. Although it’s a poem and ostensibly a work of fiction, it is autobiographical and, at the same time, it holds up a mirror to show us ourselves. Dante, the character in the story, is both a figure of Dante himself but also an Everyman who represents each one of us. He begins lost in a dark wood of sin, unable to break his addiction to the seven deadly sins and unable, therefore, to escape from the darkness of the wood and to see the light of the sun.

In order to break the bondage of sin, he needs to know himself. In order to know himself, he needs to see the ugly truth of sin by looking it in the eye. He needs to see its hellishness. Only then, can he desire to escape from its clutches, seeking to be purged of its power through contrition for his sins and the acceptance of God’s loving forgiveness. Then, purified, he can contemplate the beauty of God’s presence, enabling his soul to dilate fully into the Love that moves both heaven and earth.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis is probably the bestselling Christian work of all time except for the Bible itself. The reason for this is obvious. It is a practical handbook of how to understand ourselves through closer union with Christ. It shows us that we come to know ourselves better as we come to know Christ better, especially in uniting ourselves with the Eucharist in communion and prayer. We know ourselves in knowing Him in His Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament.

These three Christian classics show us that we understand ourselves best by growing into the fullness of who we are by striving to become whom we are meant to be.  

Editor's note: All three books are also available to download for free at Project Gutenberg.