The early Christian fascinated anxiety about (or anxious fascination with) the body has provoked much analysis over the last twenty years with questions of its gendered representation increasingly exercising a controlling voice. Although the cover illustration of The Nude Eve demonstrates that such concerns are hardly to be avoided, Virginia Burrus adopts the lens of shame both to scrutinize a thread that runs through this material in a range of early Christian texts and to explore its potential for contemporary society. There are four substantive chapters, each adopting a different starting point, developed through the re-reading of key texts: first, the exposure of the martyr's body; second, the incarnation and the capacity of flesh to convey the divine; third, the deliberate embracing of chastisement or humiliation within asceticism; fourth, the verbalization of such in confession and in the relentless search for something to confess. These four chapters are prefaced by a brief introduction, emphasizing the early Christian shameless adoption of shame, and concluded by what is labeled an “afterword” but which bears a manifesto-like quality. Whereas many studies of early Christian attitudes of the body tend toward the lachrymose, Burrus traces their sorry after-effects and argues for a willingness to name and to embrace shame as a creative response in a world divided by the politics of difference. This combination of an acceptance of the insights of recent scholarship with a challenge to move toward a positive retrieval is to be welcomed.
In her other publications, Burrus has shown herself a sensitive reader of early Christian texts, especially those from the worlds of martyrdom and asceticism. And so it is here. She ranges widely, allowing her different examples to develop the train of thought; the narration is interspersed with dialogue with more recent theorists such as Irigaray and Kristeva when discussing believers' participation in Jesus and in Jesus' flesh in John, Levinas in preparation for “the pursuit of humiliation,” and Foucault and Derrida in relation to Augustine's Confessions. The introduction invokes several recent analysts of the concept of shame, while her dialogue-partners in the afterword are primarily Martha Nussbaum and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
This procedure certainly enriches readability, although at times the repetition of overblown images and language jars (see below). The straightforward re-reading or re-telling can be seductive, but after a while the reader may feel that she is being coerced into accepting Burrus's encounter with the text and is not being given the freedom, or the knowledge, to disagree—especially since the narratives tend toward summary. There is little engagement in detail with the textual strategies which direct the reader's attention and interpretation, or with the possibility of alternative readings. The question also arises whether the shame is identified by the (or this) modern reader of the texts or if it is one that the texts themselves admit. Clearly, the latter is often the case, but it is not always so.
All this renders the book something of a personal journey; indeed, it starts with—in cultural studies, now almost de rigueur—an autobiographical reflection on the author's own experience of the rhetoric of shame from her grandmothers (“my shame”). This already signals something that may be more problematic than is admitted: the grandmothers are identified by their own cultural heritage and experience, acknowledging—as indeed Burrus does—that categories of shame as here unfolded may be culturally specific. Yet frequently it feels as if shame is being treated as a universal coinage. The questions that need to be asked more clearly are, what is (or was) it that constructs particular experiences or actions as in some way “shame-ful”; and, of whose shame are we speaking, given that in many contexts the deeds or actions of one person are felt to bring shame upon another?
Related to this universalizing is a tendency to use the terminology of shame pervasively. The discussion of flesh in the Gospel of John assumes that carnality necessarily involves shame: “In the joying, there is both a shaming abjection of flesh and a passage through the boundlessness of abjection into the infinitude of sublimity” (47). This is not a position that all Johannine interpreters would adopt. As in the following quote, “shame” is routinely associated with “abjection” and “abysmal,” both somewhat overworked concepts: “incarnational Christology … reflects a common and ongoing preoccupation of ancient Christian thought with the abysmal fecundity of an abjection that is always edged with the sublime” (80). In the conclusion, too, Martha Nussbaum's position is articulated in terms of “shame” although the quotation that heads the chapter speaks of society's “humanity.” Perversely, the insistent creation of a rhetoric of shame may divest it of its productivity.
These concerns may also invite more consideration for the hopes of the afterword, for it is precisely a feature of the contemporary context that different concepts of the nature of shame co-exist within different sections of society. Further, the society in view, whether consciously or not, feels unequivocally to be that of the United States, explicitly referred to as “the American Empire” (149). Are the narrowing of audience and the potential alienation of a reader “from elsewhere” the inevitable concomitants of a self-conscious ideological or cultural re-reading of the past? If so, perhaps this should give the scholarly community, so often rightly resistant to any narrow nationalism, pause for thought. Perhaps one answer is to see this book as the opening up of a conversation, inviting the named dialogue partners as well as its readers to a response. It deserves to succeed as such.
