Healthy Shame? An Interchange between Elspeth Probyn and Thomas Aquinas Tom Ryan SM ABSTRACT In her recent book Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn offers a profile of shame drawing on the disciplines of psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology. She argues that shame is a) inherently value-oriented, b) necessary for human well-being and c) universal or ‘essential’ as a human phenomenon. This approach to shame has significant resonances with the theological anthropology and christian ethics of Thomas Aquinas. In exploring these authors, we can gain a clearer picture of the transformative function of shame in the personal, social, cultural and moral dimensions of human life. ___________________________________________________________________ We all blush, feel uncomfortable, and for a host of reasons. As part of life, shame ‘raises questions of great and enduring interest concerning what it means to be human’. These words encapsulate Elspeth Probyn’s concern in Blush: Faces of Shame (xviii).1 This is an enlightening, enjoyable and even uplifting work, due to its accessible scholarship, personal engagement and, at times, the author’s courageous transparency. In accepting the author’s invitation to come exploring with her, I found myself following her suggestion to discover ‘sidetracks’ of my own. Naturally, some of these were in personal memories. But I was often intrigued with the number of times Probyn’s investigations appeared to resonate with the work of Thomas Aquinas on shame. In this article I would like to meander down that sidetrack and probe perspectives from the thirteenth and twenty first century. My approach will use three key positions argued in Blush (ix-xviii) as markers to re- visit Aquinas’ discussion of shame in his Summa Theologiae. For Probyn shame a) consistently entails values, self-evaluation and the contours of living a good life; b) is an integral part of healthy human functioning in the personal and social realms; c) 1 can be seen as a universal, even ‘essential’, aspect of human life. I will compare and contrast Probyn and Aquinas in three stages: first, in relation to their respective contexts, aims and methodologies; second, in their understandings of the meaning and role of shame; thirdly, to conclude by some brief observations about shame in the contemporary context. 1. Contexts, Aims and Methodologies Naturally, Probyn and Aquinas have differing historical contexts. The backdrop to Probyn’s book is the world shaped by post- modernism, pluralism of cultures, multiple perspectives and especially that of feminist thought. Further, her methodology blends the empirical (quantitative research), the Image Source: Wikimedia Commons qualitative (personal experience and narrative), with insights from sociology, psychological theory and cultural anthropology. Her conclusions and arguments have their grounding in researched data and informed commentary. Alternatively, Aquinas’ setting is the relatively stable world of the thirteenth century and its classical world-view. While open to other cultural perspectives (e.g., Islamic), his primary aim is to elaborate a theological synthesis of the Christian faith within an ecclesial context. He uses the tools of philosophy, especially of metaphysics and philosophical psychology. His writing is, at times, informed by his personal experience, as in his insightful calibrations of love and friendship. But, overall, his work is characterized more by philosophical argument from reflection on common experience than by rigorous empirical method or the warmth of personal narrative. 2 Again, while Probyn acknowledges the role of other emotions and affective realities, her dominant focus is on shame’s role in human life. Aquinas has a broader canvas. In the equivalent of two or three books, he develops a moral psychology of the emotions, the affective virtues and their role in moral action, virtue and the Christian life. Between the two authors, there is an interesting point of convergence. Probyn presents two approaches to shame. As a psychological/ scientific reality, shame is an ‘affect’ that involves the workings of the brain and associated bodily reverberations. As a sociological/cultural reality, shame is an ‘emotion’ which has a cognitive component and is expressed socially. Interestingly, this approach has its parallel in Aquinas’ recognition of the psychosomatic aspects of human behaviour. He uses ‘passions’ to describe movements of what he names the ‘sensory appetite’ – the bodily aspect of human affectivity that is ‘affected’ or ‘moved’ to be immediately responsive to sense experience, particularly in the area of relationships.. It entails a both a bodily alteration together with an evaluative cognition of an object – an attitude for or against an object perceived to be good or bad, hence love, desire, hate, fear etc.2 For Aquinas, ‘passion’ is a blend of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ found in Probyn. 2. Meaning and Role of Shame Think of four moments when we find ourselves embarrassed. I walk into a room and think someone else is smiling at me. My interest is aroused. I move forward to talk to the person and realize that the smile was directed to someone just to my left. I had misread a cue. There was recognition, interest but it was misplaced. I feel Image Source: Wikimedia Commons awkward and self-conscious. Or I walk through a half closed door. I find two people in a hushed conversation. I instinctively say ‘sorry’ and withdraw. Or it may be that the same couple are embracing or even engaged in sexually intimacy. My discomfort is more intense. I 3 quickly stammer a blushing apology then make a fast retreat from a similarly red- faced couple. Thirdly, I see a public figure covering his face with a newspaper on TV. I am not sure if he is a convicted criminal leaving a courthouse or someone innocent hounded by paparazzi. There is something instinctive about hiding from public gaze. The esteem of others is important for us. How mortified we would be if some of our most secret failures were ever exposed. Finally, I think back to childhood as does Probyn, to the time as an eight year old when she made another girl cry. She teased her because she did not have the same name as her mother. The author recognizes that she was a child. She could not have appreciated that the little girl’s mother had remarried and taken another man’s name. But, even years later, this does not stop Elspeth Probyn from blushing. As with the other examples above, we can readily identify with the sense of feeling small and undone, even from the flash of memory of a shameful moment from our childhood. What do these scenarios have in common? It is my body telling me that I am out of place. I have not been invited to join the person who seems to smile in my direction. Or in entering another’s physical space, two people feel invaded and I, an intruder. I readily appreciate the bite of another’s public exposure even if they are innocent. Or I may have demeaned and humiliated someone. I feel diminished in my diminishing of the other person. I remember how, in that instance, I was not the person I would like to be. What is common in these examples is that I have been affected in a bodily and psychological way. I am emotionally moved in that my body instantly senses that a boundary has been transgressed within the realm of those social/cultural patterns of how to act or not to act. This brings us then to our first marker. 4 Shame consistently entails values, self-evaluation and the contours of living a good life. Common to the above examples is blushing as ‘the body calling out its interest’ (Blush, 28). This is not in a dualistic sense. It is about embodied personhood. Probyn argues that the various ‘faces of shame’ reveal our desire for connection even the possibility of love.3 When it appears to be offered but isn’t, I feel exposed and even rebuffed. The same is true when I show interest in another and it is rejected. Again, I know that ‘mortified’ feeling if others know something I have done, or worse, I am caught in the act. What others think of me and how I think Image Source: of others, is important to each of us. Shame is the Wikimedia Commons register of those connections and the interest they involve. There is something very wrong with a person who feels no shame.4 Shame and its accompanying interest (in myself, in others) entail what is important to me- the things and people I hold dear. Unlike guilt which can be dealt with and often put aside, shame ‘lingers deep within the self’ (Blush, 2, 45-6). When I am ashamed it is because of my strong interest to be good person, says Probyn. What shames you may not shame me. Shame is an involuntary re-evaluation of myself and my actions (64). It is revelatory – disclosing our ‘values, hopes and aspirations, beyond the generalities of good manners and cultural norms’ (Blush, x). It may even imply a radical shift in attitude and in embedded patterns of responding and acting (‘rerouting the dynamics of knowing and ignorance’, 105). There is a bridge between personal life and cultural practices. Thus shame comes, in a sociological term from Pierre Bourdieu, within the domain of habitus, a non-discursive knowing or ‘embodied 5 history, internalized as second nature’ in which the body is ‘a repository for the social and cultural rules that, consciously or not, we take on’ (51, xvi). Through shame, according to Probyn, we are consistently reminded that we are embodied beings. Whether at the interpersonal, social or cultural level, shame points to boundaries, to habitual patterns of how we see values and rules and respond to them. It is particularly reflected across cultures in the experience of the body ‘being out of place’. For instance, Probyn tells of a journey to Central Australia and a visit to Uluru. She feels caught by a sense of being an outsider, ‘I don’t belong here’. She was intruding on another’s space, that of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Again, this is evident in awareness of what is private, even sacred, for instance, in the sexual area. Probyn says that sexuality (sexual identity) is commonly held ‘as an area ripe for shame’. But she notes that it is not necessarily a ‘site of shame’ or ‘the same site of shame for everyone’ (Blush, x). Later, she writes of the people of Mt Hagen who speak of big pipil – the shame accompanying sexual activity in public or incest (32). While Probyn does not investigate sexual activity in depth, we are reminded that there are boundaries and norms of acceptable behaviour concerning its exercise in every culture. Its accompanying sensitivities are trampled over by, for instance, pornographers who, as Graham Ward notes citing George Steiner, ‘parade the vital privacies ‘and whispered vulnerabilities of sexual experience.5 Finally, Probyn rightly stresses that shame makes us reflect on who were are and what our actions might set in motion (8, 34). Its positive role as self-evaluative and self- transforming emerges only if it is acknowledged. As with any ‘negative’ emotion, there is the need for conscious engagement with shame if it is contribute to human well-being. Shame is integral to self-assessment. To live a good life involves deliberation and freedom. This is particularly the case if shame is not to remain an expression of the super-ego or of habitus expressed as the cultural unconscious holding individuals in self-destructive behaviour. It must move to the realm of adult conscience and in collaboration with self-awareness and responsibility. This brings us to Aquinas and his view of shame in the setting of virtue and chosen self-direction in ones life. 6 For Aquinas, emotions are essential to the moral life and human integration. Shame, closely associated with the body (especially touch), is part of the affective virtue of temperance or self-care. Aquinas’ approach, contra the Stoics, is that of the average sensual person for whom friendship with God entails enjoyment and harmony in mental, bodily, sexual, emotional and social existence. While his method differs from that of Probyn, there are central insights that are common. In one article in the Summa Theologiae (Henceforth ST), Aquinas asks (in carefully worded language) whether there is any emotion that is always good or evil ‘by its very nature’ (ST 1.2.24.4).6 From an earlier discussion (24.1), he argues that their moral status is discerned as guided by reason and only in a relational context. In the language of traditional moral theology, an emotion, like any action, can only be evaluated morally in terms of its object, end and circumstances. Aquinas replies that there are two such emotions. An emotion evil by its very nature is envy. It is part of our humanity to recognize what is good in others and to have a basic response of pity and compassion to their suffering. To take pleasure in another’s plight or be sad at their gifts or success indicates defective self-esteem. Ones moral character is flawed. Alternatively, an emotion that is good of its very nature is shame (verecundia or modesty). Citing Aristotle’s Ethics, Aquinas says that verecundia is a praiseworthy emotion. He notes elsewhere that it is a virtue in the broad sense (ST 2.2.144.1) since ‘feelings of shame’ foster a disposition to avoid what brings disgrace or opprobrium (ST 2.2.144.2). Modesty (verecundia) is a fear of what is base or dishonourable in ones behaviour (timor turpis), that ones moral excellence is somehow sullied and brings a sadness at its inevitability (Reid, 1965, 189). In the specific article here (24.4), the Blackfriars version translates timor turpis as ‘fear of unchastity’ (Vol 19, 1967, 43).7 This rendition is debatable. However, for our purposes we can consider that this specific form of shame (verecundia) is representative of its wider meanings which all tend to revolve around self-respect. We can examine Aquinas’ approach first in general and then in specific terms. 7 Firstly, for Aquinas, shame (verecundia) as an emotion is good or evil of its very nature in a relational context, namely, as being ‘in tune’ (conveniens, fitting) or out of tune (dissonans, not fitting) with right reason or authentic humanity. It answers the question ‘how would the practically wise or virtuous person respond in this situation?’ It is an emotion that enhances human flourishing, personally and socially. While shame is negative (makes us feel uncomfortable), its positive function emerges from its object, namely the value it is directed towards upholding and the attitude produced.8 In contemporary terms, by disposing our sensitivity to what can distort our moral horizon, shame is a sentinel guarding our personal self-transcendence in terms of the search for meaning, truth and value. Aquinas is arguing that certain emotions such as shame, when understood and described carefully, have a built-in significance. It is not that they are morally neutral (psychological facts) and ones attitude to them makes them morally good. It is that the emotion itself crystallizes an habitual disposition to make, with ease and consistency, a ‘felt evaluation’ of an intentional object in that it is perceived as ‘fitting’ (good) or ‘not fitting’(evil). This is precisely the understanding of Martha Nussbaum, cited by Probyn (120).9 Aquinas also holds that emotions and their level of moderation differ from person to person. Without resorting to ‘right’ or ‘good’ emotions being responses of ‘perfectly programmed’ automatons (an understandable concern of Probyn’s, 10), there are some ‘objects’ and situations that are arguably ‘fitting’ (right) and appropriate in our personal and social life. For instance, to feel no shame or sensitivity to another’s pain is not a desirable or even admirable state. For both Aquinas and Probyn, then, shame reveals both values and the moral configuration of a person. It is an emotion that reverberates in both the intra-personal and inter-personal domains. We return to the specific aspect noted earlier, namely to shame in relation to sexuality. Aquinas’ cryptic, even elliptical, treatment assumes the reader’s awareness of the broader context of his discussion. First, Aquinas says that shame has a range of different bodily expressions (ST 2.2.144; Gilby, 1968, 55). Second, Aquinas’ treatment of the gift of sexuality is earthy and basic, without giving unchastity ‘the dreary eminence it has for later moralists’ (Gilby, 1968, xxiii). Third, he acknowledges human ambivalence in this area as in a certain ‘powerlessness’ over our 8 emotions or sexual movements (even with the virtuous exercise of ones sexuality, see ST 2.2.151.4). Fourth, and most importantly, it is not by chance that Aquinas’ language about shame, especially in relation to the sexual sphere, suggests a concern with self-respect or the sacredness of the person. The word verecundia (shame, modesty) has its verb root in vereor (respect, fear, reverence). This is foundational for Aquinas. For him, shame’s object is not the body or ones sexuality but the ‘out of place’ (dissonans) invasion of an area of embodied personhood that warrants respect. Hence, only with some difficulty can we construe Aquinas’ view of shame simply as fear of sexual sin (the misuse of one’s sexuality). In its broader setting, shame is prompted by a sense of respect for the self and sensitivity to ones moral ideals and character.10 This is evident in Aquinas’ later discussion: a) healthy self love is an essential component of Christian living (ST 2.2.25.4; b) we must have love for our body as a gift from God (ST. 2.2.25.5); c) concern for one’s own good is integral to virtue or moral self-transcendence (ST. 2.2.26.6). It is not surprising that, for Aquinas, there is some truth in saying that the more virtuous a person is, the more they will be sensitive to shame (ST 2.2.144.4). Probyn (briefly) and Aquinas (in his more elaborated treatment) mirror what is common to all cultures, namely, a sacred ‘space’ around a person as a bodily, and especially as a sexual being. Shame implies reverence for vulnerability and the intimate whispers ‘spoken in the night’ alluded to earlier.11 Aquinas himself speaks of a ‘certain delicacy’ needed in sexual matters and of ‘a respect which is the opposite of shamelessness. It sets up a certain reticence and sense of impropriety about exposure’ (ST 2.2.154.9). The intersection of personal and social life entails respect, care for oneself and boundaries. Transgression evokes an instinctual movement of shame and accompanying self-evaluation. This brings us to the second marker. Shame is integral to healthy human functioning both personal and social. In highlighting the productive role of shame (‘as an essential part of yourself’ (Blush, x) that we do ‘well’ together with the intimate connection between shame and interest, Probyn is indebted to the work of American psychologist Silvan Tomkin. Shame, like 9 fear or anger, is an emotion whose role is to make us feel uncomfortable. There are some things we should be ashamed of, just as there are things about which we should be angry or afraid. Like any emotion, especially those that we call ‘negative’, shame can be constructive or destructive. Feeling shame can sustain personal well-being and guide our responses in our relationships and social life. In this context, used properly, it can be a positive instrument for healing and reconciliation, as in processes of restorative justice (as with Maori and indigenous peoples, Blush, 90-98). On the other hand, we cannot overlook shame’s capacity to undermine the sense of self. For already damaged individuals, it can be ‘lethal’ (92). At the social and cultural level, it can be an instrument of reproach, power, control and submission. Such uses, especially under the ‘guise of moral rectitude’ can both unpalatable, even to be feared (94). There is the individual and collective historical experience of shame involving subordination as a ‘pervasive affective attunement to the social environment’ (Blush, 85). Women and ethnic groups are closely acquainted with this. Through the influence of structures of power and of habitus, especially at the unconscious level, shame and patterns of humiliation can be re-activated consistently unless the pattern is broken and a new habitus established. This demands conscious reflection, understanding and decision. For Aquinas, shame, as part of the virtue of temperance or self-care, helps us to grow in the likeness of God. It is reflected in sensitivity to whatever demeans oneself as a person. Its companion is honestas, namely a sense of moral excellence and of love for its beauty. Shame makes one more sensitive to what threatens virtue, personal goodness, and, most importantly, what fosters or undermines our responsiveness in relationships (ST 2.2 142.4 and 144.1). Like Probyn, shame for Aquinas reflects interest in being a good person. Within the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, Aquinas highlights the personal sphere, namely patterns of habitual response and action that are virtues or good moral habits. Alternatively, Probyn’s access to the social sciences enables her to analyze the dynamics of social and cultural influences on personal life, especially in their destructive forms.12 In dealing with such distortions, she is addressing what, in theological terms, could be understood as structural or social sin. 10