Thomas Merton's counsel for Donald Trump (and the rest of us)

The latest revelation about Trump's financial history further confirms how preposterous his self-depiction has been. In response to the news, Schwartz suggested that the book be recategorized as "fiction," rather than continue under its current category as "memoir."

The ever-widening gap between Trump's self-presentation and reality has returned my attention to one of the best-known contributions the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton made to Catholic spirituality in the 20th century, namely, the distinction between what he called the "true self" and the "false self." Drawing on the insights of his intellectual predecessors, such as the medieval Franciscan theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus and the great 19th-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Merton held that each of us has a true identity — who we are in the most foundational sense — and that true identity is intrinsic, inalienable, unique and unrepeatable. Scotus called this haecceitas ("this"-ness); Hopkins called this "inscape."

In his 1961 book New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton wrote, "The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God." The true self bears a kind of interiority, but it is not exclusively of our making. It is that identity that God loves into existence; it is who we are at our barest and most basic core. It is that selfhood that God knows in its entirety, even when we struggle to know ourselves. Which is why Merton says: "Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him."

While each of us has a "true self" known to God, few of us actively seek God and therefore seek to discover who we really are. Instead, we succumb to the myth that we are insufficient as we are or unworthy of love, including the love of God.

So we construct "false selves," masks we present to the world, identities that reflect who it is we think we should be or believe that others want us to be. And we seek the affirmation, respect, assurance and praise that gives us the sense our "false self" is real. But it is always illusory and unreal.

In an essay published in his collection Raids on the Unspeakable, Merton unpacks the dangers that come with our obsession with the construction of false selves, that labor of ego and projection that attempts to cover over our sense of inadequacy or self-consciousness made all the more acute by the pressures of our modern society.

Now if we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men [and women] dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities — "selves," that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real).

Merton diagnoses a problem that we all face: the temptation to mistake our masks for who we really are, and then defend those projections at all costs. The harm that comes at the personal level, to others and ourselves, increases dramatically the more responsibility we have in the family, community, nation, world and church. To what end do we protect our false selves?

The uniqueness of Trump in this regard isn't the existence of his false self, but the scale and the consequence of his construction, embrace and defense of it.

Perhaps he wouldn't lie so often if he could accept that who he really is doesn't depend on ratings and popularity. Perhaps he wouldn't exhibit such naked hatred of migrants and refugees if he could accept that who he really is doesn't depend on the perceived power that comes with stoking fear in his political base. Perhaps he wouldn't have caused so much financial ruin, particularly to those left unpaid by his repeated bankruptcies and failed enterprises, if he could accept that who he really is doesn't depend on claims to be an irrepressible financial genius and master of deal-making.

How different Trump's personal, professional and political life might be if he would only heed the wisdom St. Francis of Assisi once shared with his fellow friars: "Blessed is the servant who does not consider himself any better when he is praised and exalted by people than when he is considered worthless, simple, and looked down upon, for what a person is before God, that he is and no more."

This is advice that we could all use, because Trump is not the only one who struggles with the true and false selves. He just happens to be the biggest, loudest, brashest and most powerful example of that struggle today.

[Daniel P. Horan is a Franciscan friar and assistant professor of systematic theology and spirituality at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter: @DanHoranOFM.]

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