The Shame of Humanity

Adam and Eve were not ashamed to be naked before they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Afterwards they were afraid to be naked--but naked before whom?  Before each other, as husband and wife?  Before God, as creations of the all-knowing and all-seeing?  Adam, equipped with his new facility for "knowing good and evil," did not know authoritatively what he was talking about when he answered God to explain why he and his wife hid themselves--at least, that is what appears to be the case based on the text, and based on common understandings of the nature of God and of humanity.

Of course, the stark question of the accuracy of humanity's estimations based on the "knowledge of good and evil" is not addressed explicitly in the text, but it would be fatuous in any event to imagine that "knowledge of good and evil" is not apt to be faulty knowledge in the minds of humans.  What is even more foolish, however, is to imagine that the moral lives of humans are punctuated by instances and episodes that are self-contained--and in no aspect is this un-containable quality reflected more than in the matter of shame.  Genesis says that Adam and Eve were not at first "ashamed" to be naked, and then they become "afraid" about it.  Their fear about the repercussions of their disobedience was of course well-founded, but it was to be allayed by God relenting in the immediacy from his threat of death.  (And given that the prospect of eternal life in paradise awaited after "death," not even the end of earthly life was enough to actuate the initially-proclaimed death sentence for disobedience.)

Fear about having committed transgressions--even mistakenly-conceived transgressions--can be allayed (as in the initial experience of Adam and Eve after the Tree Moment) and it can be counter-balanced or even outweighed (as in the heaven-prospect offered by eternal life), but shame admits of no similar antidote.  Shame attachable to some transgression is intrinsic to the committing of that transgression.  Attempted remedies or counter-balances to transgressive acts can weigh in the whole of a person's experience-life as anticipation of savoring memories of good deeds to dilute the sting of remembered misdeeds, for example, but in such playings-out it is fear of future remembrances of remorse balanced by the reassurance of a store of good reminiscences, or it is the pain of recalling one's transgressions balanced by the pleasure of recalling one's more-laudable acts.  Fear and pain can perhaps be cancelled out (and healing or recompense provided to the injured), but shame rebounds forever (at least on this plane.)  The shame that Adam and Eve DO NOT feel initially (and this emphasis seems justified, given the fact that its mention has no intrinsic connection to the flow of events, and is not therefore necessary to the narrative) is a potential shame that is not mentioned even after it is visited presumably on Adam and Eve.  Neither in Eden nor elsewhere on Earth is there a curative for shame.

Neither is there to be, in this life, a curative for our misapprehensions about Good and Evil.  We will always wonder what sins we might have committed.  We will always be liable, therefore, to generalized shame.  Shame is an intrinsic quality of a morally-aware person, and the true test of moral awareness is found in the twin implications of having done innumerable things wrong, compounded by having made innumerable mistakes about what is right and wrong.  Such is the state of humanity.  Such is the state of human beings.  To feel shame is as intrinsic to human nature as it is to feel temptation.  One might imagine a human being who had never either transgressed nor felt he or she had transgressed, or a human being whose moral state had remained securely in the too-short-to-be-measured span of an infant's innocence, but this would be the same as to imagine a human being in the same moral condition as the Adam and Eve of the puerile preachers' conventional conceit--Adam and Eve absolutely without sin while reaching for the fruit, and then damnably sinful at the instant they swallowed.

Adam and Eve sinned, of course, before ever they ate of the fruit, and but for the preachers' pap so beloved by Paul, one would not think of either of the First Couple as being free in any textually-described moment from both sin and shame, however incrementally.  If, then, we are to think of Jesus as having experienced true human life, then it is ridiculous to contend that this experience consisted of being faced with temptation (which, in the argument here, we will consider he met perfectly), while at the same time NOT being faced with the tribulations inherent in confronting the generalized shame that perfuses all competent (that is, morally accountable) human beings.

We must consider then, that Jesus experienced the shame, not of being reviled, being arrested, being mocked, being tortured, or being crucified, but rather the shame of being a human being.  It is a hideous conceit of some Christian commentators, to harp on the notion of Jesus being "shamed" by his mistreatment at the hands of others.  No one is shamed in the proper sense by another's misdeeds, and while for us feeble mortals it is indeed usually horrible--and a horrible sin attributable to the inflictors--to be "put to shame" by others, it is silly to think that Jesus fell victim to the temptation of internalizing shame he did not deserve.  (Moreover, the recurrent Christian fixation on Jesus having suffered shame discounts often the Jewish Scripture's paradoxical and crucial regard for the servant reviled and disfigured in the service of God.  The Suffering Servant is treated shamefully--he is "shamed" only in the conceit of his tormentors.)

It would do violence to any conception of God's justice, to contend that any age of humankind was bereft of the opportunity for salvation.  Similarly, the accessibility of God through prayer has existed always, even when the thread of any Scriptural narrative (or, to think of it, any non-Scriptural conceit) has held that God has closed his ears to the importuning of humanity.  On this latter point the teachings of Jesus are quite pertinent.  Greater even than the workings of Jesus on earth, might be our accomplishments, if only we pursued them in prayer, prayer accompanied by even the most miniscule of faith.  Adam, or even Cain, could have made the earth spring forth with abundance, if only they had asked in faith.  According to Jesus, all things are possible when requested in prayer--while yet at the same time nothing (or at least next-to-nothing, in the greater estimation) is possible through our prayer, since our faith is either nothing or next-to-nothing, as any fleeting moment of conceptualization warrants.  This is our shame, and we will always be required to confront the shame of our simple existences, shame both unbounded and unquantifiable.

Even if Cain had asked in such faith as to be granted health and prosperity for a thousand-year lifetime, and even if Cain had asked in such faith as to be granted the ability to intercede successfully in a thousand potentially-deadly conflicts among siblings, still he would never have lived free of the shame of his murder of Abel--nor even would he have been free of the shame that attended him (and us) always, murder or no murder.  Indeed, even the most perfect imaginable of us mere mortals--for the sake of argument--who prayed successfully for a blessed millennium-lifetime would still be a mere mortal burdened by the shame common to humanity.  It would be as logical a contention as any to say (again, for the sake of argument) that this paragon would at last lie down to die out of mere shame.

This places us, finally, in the arena of wonderings-beyond-wonderings--the place we are driven to when we try to think about Jesus.  The stories in the Gospels are given to us for reasons, but we must always wonder if the reasons are to be as beyond our compassings as are the stories themselves.  Jesus deserved no shame, he did nothing that would bring shame, he thought nothing that would bring shame, but did he--in taking on the nature of the human--partake of the self-experience of shame common to humanity, a generalized shame unbounded by particular misdeeds and yet inherent in any workings of a mind burdened by identification with us?

We are presented with a story of a Jesus who humbled himself before God in the garden, either asking for what he knew he could not have, or asking for something about which his knowledge was incomplete.  In our own lives we have similarly-describable experiences, and we experience them perfused with shame.  We can try out of piety to imagine a Jesus without shame, but we cannot conceptualize simultaneously a Jesus overcoming that which is common to humanity without reckoning that shame is common to humanity.

This also is the Jesus who declares that he will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him.  And this also is the Jesus who, though he does not (simply stated) just lie down and die, but rather cries out in the most piteous of manners and embraces the death to which he will not in the end succumb in the failings of his breath.  If this cry is not one of shame inherent in the human nature taken on by Jesus (as opposed to shame attachable to Jesus proper), then one can only wonder what it was.