This article is by Kyle Brosseau:
In the Apple TV+ series, Severance, Adam Scott plays a melancholy employee of Lumon Industries, a company where select staff choose to have their memory chains severed upon entering and exiting the workplace each day. Scott’s character, Mark, reports to work every morning and heads home at night in the same body, but he has one stream of office-related memories flowing week to week and a separate string of consciousness threading his evenings and weekends. Severed personnel at Lumon are called an “innie” when they’re inside the office and an “outie” when they’re going about their personal lives. The common understanding on the severed floor of the Lumon building is that your innie and your outie are two different persons. The fact that the two share a body is immaterial.
The idea that selfhood exists not in the body but in one’s unique series of memories is not a novel invention by Severance’s creator, Dan Erickson. What’s often called the memory theory of personal identity was formulated over three centuries ago by the English philosopher, John Locke. In chapter twenty-seven of his 1689 book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in a section titled “Consciousness Makes Personal Identity,” Locke says what makes a person a person is the ongoing line of consciousness we each experience. In other words, your selfhood doesn’t have anything to do with your physical body, but rather, your collection of memories. For Severance and Locke, what holds your identity together moment by moment is your thread of consciousness, not your body.
Paula Gooder offers a thorough yet accessible look at the apostle Paul’s understanding of our physical selves in her 2016 book, Body: Biblical Spirituality for the Whole Person. Her work on 1 Corinthians 15 reveals a continuity in Paul’s mind between the natural bodies we sow at death and the spiritual bodies we’ll be raised with at the trumpet’s last sound. Like a seed and the plant that sprouts from it, these two bodies are starkly different yet essentially the same thing. Paul says the bodies we have now will be buried mortal and corruptible, but at Christ’s return, those bodies will be clothed in immortality and incorruptibility. There’s a certain perseverance to these bodies of ours, and they’re inexorably bound up with who we’ll always be. In the vein of Gooder’s work, more recent books highlighting the Bible’s affirmative posture toward the human body include Gregg Allison’s Embodied, John Kleinig’s Wonderfully Made, and Sam Allberry’s What God Has to Say about Our Bodies.
At the end of the day, personhood has everything to do with the body.
So, Severance operates with a definition of personal identity that’s at odds with the Christianity’s concept of embodied selfhood. Lumon would have its severed employees believe their innie and their outie are two different persons, never minding that one material body lives out the experiences of them both. In other words, Lumon is thoroughly Lockean, and this notion of a bodiless personhood misses out on much of the mysterious, body-affirmative sense of the self.
The show’s premise that our personhood is severable from our material body may also be reflective of a broader cultural assumption gaining ground today. Back in 2018, pop-spirituality pundit, Deepak Chopra, announced on Twitter: “You are not your body,” and he advanced the same theme in a short YouTube clip the following year. Rainn Wilson, who played the unforgettable Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The Office has also become a powerful influencer in American spirituality (his book Soul Boom is set to come out next month). About a week after Chopra’s tweet, Wilson shared a dashing picture of himself on the same platform, asking, “Does this body make me look fat?” Wilson’s tweet was probably just a lighthearted self-jab and not a meticulously calculated exposition of his views on human somatology. I think it’s illustrative, though, of our shared cultural assumption that there exists some “me” in each of us that’s not necessarily identifiable with these bodies we happen to inhabit.
In perfect harmony with his heritage, however, the apostle Paul saw things differently. One of the songs of Paul’s people had taught that God knit every person — not every person’s body, but every person — together in their mother’s womb (Ps 139:13). Paul stays true to this idea in his letter to the Corinthians. He still seems to see each human self as enduringly harnessed to the tangible body God formed for them in utero. According to Paul (and to his Jewish heritage!), each embodied person is just that: one person, intentionally crafted and beloved by God.
This body-oriented notion of personhood carries tons of implications. Since these corruptible bodies are very much a part who we are right now, people are inherently bound to our particular moment in time and space. Both Ecclesiastes 3 and James 4 talk about the fleeting nature of our lives in these bodies as they are now — fragile as can be. As embodied persons, we are inescapably ensconced in our social environment. You feel accountable to your mother because you really are that baby she nursed every night. You belong to your spouse (1 Cor 7:4) because you really are that person who stood beside them at the altar.
An embodied account of personhood means we are all very much in this world we see around us, and to me this is a good, good thing. Your self is not immaterial, so neither is your physical body when it comes to questions of personhood. If we are our bodies, this, in turn, allows us to see others as whole persons. To love people for who they really: having memories and stories, ideas and perspectives, hopes and dreads that are organically intertwined with the God-given bodies through which they’re experienced.
