In ancient Greece, those who sought counsel from the Oracle at Delphi passed under an arch that bore the inscription, “Know thyself.” Presumably, those who did not know themselves would be ill-equipped to hear the truth. Yet unanswered questions reverberate down through the ages: what form does such self-knowledge take, how are we to gain it, and what difference will it make if we do?

　　Knowing yourself could mean many things. Knowing your strengths and your limits. Knowing that you are both mortal and sinful. Knowing that you are an embodied creature with a soul. Knowing that you are not an island. Or knowing that, in knowing yourself, you glimpse reality itself, the universe.

　　How are we to gain this self-knowledge? From navel-gazing, or engaging in rigorous self-analysis and self-criticism? Perhaps a sage, counselor, or therapist could help? Or should we turn to philosophical treatises, sacred texts, or novels?

　　Finally, what difference will self-knowledge make to our lives? Will it show us how insignificant our lives really are, or awaken us to latent significances that we had previously overlooked? Will it lead us to become more self-centered, or inspire us to live for purposes beyond self? Will it lead us to despair or render us more likely to enjoy life?

　　At this time of year, seekers after self-knowledge would be well-advised to turn to one of literature’s great texts on the matter, Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol, which tells the tale of one Ebenezer Scrooge’s reluctant journey toward self-knowledge.

　　I am currently working through the text with a group of students in a senior living community whose average age is north of 80 years. If sheer quantity of life experience increases prospects for self-knowledge, then this group should have it in abundance. As Solon warns to call no man happy before he is dead, so this group, perhaps closest to death, has known life in full, and sallies forth upon Dickens’ pilgrimages of self-discovery with an urgency unknown to my 20-something university students.

　　When we first meet Scrooge, whose surname is likely a portmanteau of screw and gouge, he is described as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” He has no place in his heart to make merry at Christmastime with his nephew, no donation for charity workers who come in search of assistance for the poor, and no pity for his woefully underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his underfed family.

　　Scrooge looks upon others with disdain, as little more than opportunities for self-enrichment, maliciously delighting in the fact that a sucker is born every minute. He “edges his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” Like Rembrandt’s portrait of the rich fool, he sits alone at his desk at midnight, counting his coins, supposing that by amassing more he is somehow securing a good life.

　　In fact, however, his life of unremitting extraction has left him utterly alone. His fortress has become his prison, and double locking the door behind himself has only cut him off even further. When the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, appears, the spirit laments bitterly how such a life left him “captive, bound, and double-ironed.” Scrooge cannot believe it. “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.”

　　“Business!” thunders the ghost. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the compressive ocean of my business.” Yet Scrooge is somehow unmoved. His only hope of seeing himself and the life he has led for what they really are, Marley tells him, is to be visited by three ghosts.

　　The first, the Ghost of Christmas Past, shows him scenes from his early life: a lonely boy abandoned at boarding school for the holidays; an evening of great merrymaking with Fezziwig, a former employee; falling in love and winning a young woman’s heart, but eventually being rejected because an “idol has displaced me,” that being of course Scrooge’s professional ambition. Some years later, Scrooge is shown the holiday jubilance his former fiancee shares with her husband and children.

　　Scrooge’s frozen heart is somewhat thawed by the sight of his lonely childhood self, and the reminder of his affection for Fezziwig, a much kinder and more benevolent employer than Scrooge himself became. Yet seeing Belle tell his younger self that he will soon forget her “as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke,” is more than he can bear. He accuses the spirit of torture.

　　Yet we know from Marley’s ghost that this is all for Scrooge’s welfare, his “reclamation.” He must see his life not from the perspective of the day planner, the quarterly statement, or even the annual report, but from the vantage of his life writ large. To appreciate the change that has come over him, and how far he has strayed from his initial aspirations, he must see it all, from the very beginning. The Ghost of Christmas Past prepares Scrooge for more complete self-knowledge by showing him that he has lost his appreciation for good and beautiful things that his younger self was able to relish.

　　Afterwards, it is always said of him, “That he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

　　The next spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, shows Scrooge how Christmas is being celebrated all over the world, even in a lonely lighthouse and a ship at sea. They visit the Cratchit family, where a spare but joyous feast is in preparation, and Scrooge glimpses for the first time his clerk’s ailing son, Tiny Tim, who will soon die if the course of events is not somehow changed.

　　At the end of their journey, Scrooge sees something strange protruding from the spirit’s robes. They are a boy and a girl, “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling.” Assuring Scrooge that these are “his children” the spirit tells him that, “This boy is ignorance and this girl is want.” Scrooge is shocked and dumbfounded. “Have they no refuge or resource?” he stammers. Echoing Scrooge’s own words to charity workers who had asked him for a donation the previous day, the ghost counters, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

　　Up to this point, Scrooge has regarded the poor as an abstraction. They are people whose income or net worth places them below a certain threshold, and thus must consign themselves to the stations to which society sentences them. They fit a statistical category and should meet with their Malthusian statistical fate.

　　In Ignorance and Want, the spirit shows him his own moral failings personified by the sorts of people he once regarded as beneath his concern. By flinging his own callous words back in his face, the spirit helps him to understand that his belligerence to the worthy poor (such as the Cratchits), and his rudeness to philanthropists (such as the ones who approached him the previous day) are all defense mechanisms, which he uses to hide from the awful reality of his own moral impoverishment. 

　　Scrooge is then visited by the mute Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who shows him some disreputable people haggling over the meagre possessions of a man who died rich but unloved. Alarmed by the lack of feeling for the deceased, Scrooge asks to see someone who truly cares for the dead, and he is taken to the Cratchit family mourning the death of Tiny Tim. Then he visits a neglected grave bearing the inscription, “Ebenezer Scrooge.”

　　To understand the life he has been leading, Scrooge needs to see firsthand where his life trajectory leads. In contrast to Tiny Tim, deeply loved even in death, he will die alone, unmourned, a veritable laughingstock among those who care for nothing but the earthly goods he left behind. At last, in the cemetery, he is prepared for the full weight of self-knowledge. He is the failure, not the poor man on the street. He is the one whose life has, through his own choice, been emptied of everything that really matters.

　　He pleads with the ghost, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

　　On that note, Scrooge awakens. It’s Christmas morning, and he is not dead. In a euphoria of gratitude, he resolves,

　　I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! The Spirits of all three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees.

　　Scrooge, who has not laughed for many years, finds himself laughing at a world so transformed, now brimming with possibilities for giving and making merry.

　　Scrooge sees a boy out his window and sends him to buy the prize turkey—twice the size of Tiny Tim—for the Cratchit family. Walking the streets, his delightful smile is so incandescent that many passersby wish him a merry Christmas. He encounters one of the charity workers and makes a donation so munificent that the man does not know what to say. He visits his nephew’s home, where he is so full of cheer that he feels at home in five minutes.

　　The next day, Scrooge catches Bob Cratchit arriving at the office a few minutes late, and feigns anger before suddenly raising Bob’s salary, a move so unexpected that the poor man cannot believe it. From that point forward, Scrooge is a changed man. To Tiny Tim, he becomes a second father. And afterward, it is always said of him, “That he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

　　Self-knowledge freed Scrooge from the prison of his spiritually impoverished existence. But keeping Christmas well takes him beyond mere self-knowledge. It is the knowledge that the universe revolves around no one human being, that every person is part of a larger whole, and that we can only acquit ourselves well in our human role by serving that larger whole of which we are but a part. Instead of living only for himself and his money, which is to say, to die a little more every day, for the first time in a long time Scrooge hears a call to live for others.

　　I see it in the gleaming eyes of the seniors—the call to live in the past, present, and future, rejoicing in the rediscovery of what it really means to live, yet yearning to have glimpsed this secret sooner along life’s path. May each of us heed the lessons of the spirits!