Shame, Fear, and Sin: A Reflection on Abba Sisoes 41

One of the great joys of reading ancient wisdom texts, like the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, is how they can surprise us. Today I’d like to look at one such surprising Saying, from Abba Sisoes, on what he considers to be two pathways to sin. So let’s give it a closer look and see what he might be trying to say:

[Abba Sisoes] also said: ‘Shame and fearlessness often lead to sin.’ (Abba Sisoes 41)

One of the most helpful things I’ve learned over the past decade or so is the conceptual difference between guilt and shame. As Brené Brown has put it, when we’ve done something wrong, guilt says ‘I did something bad’, but shame says ‘I am bad’. Both involve emotional pain, but whereas guilt can be a healing kind of pain, shame is not, causing an over-identification with and attachment to the ‘wrongness’ of the action, making us feel inherently ‘bad’ and unworthy of love. A healthy sense of guilt often leads to changed behaviour; a feeling of shame often leaves us stagnant and debilitated. So in that way, I agree wholeheartedly that shame can often lead to sin. But, as true as I think this is, it doesn’t mesh well how shame was understood in Abba Sisoes’ time, since the Ancient Mediterranean cultural sphere, along with many traditional cultures around the world, was an ‘honour-shame’ culture, where shame is used as a tool to try to keep people in line. So the question for us is what exactly did Sisoes mean here?

Well, an interesting and often enlightening challenge of reading wisdom texts from another culture, time, or place, is that words expressing abstract concepts never quite align with one’s own vocabulary. So even with a good translation, one generally needs a good lexicon for the source language to get a better handle on what the words actually meant. In this case, the word translated as ‘shame’ is aidōs. It’s not a word often translated ‘shame’, and generally has a positive and pious connotation, something like ‘humble awe, respect, reverence’ — hardly things we’d expect a monk to think of as bad! But in the human sphere, things start to go off the rails a bit, and the word takes on a connotation of ‘respect for the opinions of others,’ and hence ‘modesty, shame, self-consciousness.’ Now we seem to be getting somewhere, and interestingly it’s not as far off from our contemporary understanding of shame as I expected. What ‘often leads to sin’, according to Abba Sisoes? Being cowed by other people’s opinions or expectations of us.

If we put this conception of ‘shame’ into Abba Sisoes’ saying where it is paired with fearlessness, what emerges is not two different ideas, but really one simple contrast between self-consciousness and recklessness. Living as though all eyes are on us is not helpful and can often keep us from doing the right thing; but living as though no eyes are on us is likewise unhelpful. If we want to think of ‘fear’ here as the ‘fear of God’, we might also express the contrast as a question of whether we live in awe of what other people are thinking about us, or do we live in awe of God? Interesting things to contemplate on this Lenten Wednesday.

May God grant us all to find the middle path between self-consciousness and recklessness, between caring too much about ourselves and too little. And may we always live in awe of God — God’s greatness, goodness, mercy, and love — instead of in awe of others’ judgement. Amen.