Review of Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation by Stephanie Arel
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Review of Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation by Stephanie Arel Kathryn House 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation (Arel 2016) is an innovative transdisciplinary work pressing new insights for affect theory, trauma studies, psychology, and Christian theological anthropology. Arel begins by explaining that shame is a natural and biological part of the human condition. Bringing trauma studies and affect theory to bear, she argues that when shame is interred in the body in “toxic” ways, ways that prevent healthy attachment and contribute to isolation, shame becomes problematic (p. 2). Whereas guilt occupies a prominent role in Christian theological diagnoses of the human condition, the role of shame has been neglected. To disrupt the stronghold of guilt’s prominence within the Christian imagination, Arel engages the theological anthropologies of Augustine (1467/2003) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1943/1996), “master diagnosticians of the human condition” (p. 5). In her final turn, she helpfully explores the “tactile testimony” of touch, and emphasizes that while touch can be painful and/or traumatic, “good” touch within the realm of “friendship, care, love, or interestexcitement” ameliorates the toxic effects of shame (p. 137). Arel articulates an affective theology of shame through first tracing the history of key developments of affect theory in literary theory and psychology. She explains that affects are preverbal “muscular glandular responses” that arise from “beneath consciousness” and “grasp the body and demand attention” (p. 26). She points to the significance of affective responses first appearing on the face, demonstrative of affect preceding behavior (p. 27). Arel distinguishes between affects such as shame, guilt, and disgust, noting shame’s role in severing attachment, preventing human bonding, and provoking an individual to turn inward without healing severed bonds. Invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus (p.51) and Silvin Tomkins’s exploration of scripts (1995), Arel emphasizes shame’s power to shape the body— it is a habitus, a disposition (p. 52). Shame’s power to interfere with the connections between human persons and God, and its manifestation in a person’s belief in the inferiority of the self, or parts of the self, compels Arel’s turn to the theological possibilities for disinterring shame. Arel then turns to Augustine’s interpretation of the Edenic drama and offers a reading of his interpretation of humanity’s fall via affect theory (p. 63). With close attention to Augustine’s City of God Book XIV (1467/2003), she proposes that Augustine’s interpretation of the fall
* Kathryn House [email protected]
1
Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA, USA
Pastoral Psychology
points to two kinds of shame (p. 65). The first is a primal shame that is embodied, appearing as “shamed parts,” or pudenda that is on the body (p. 78). In this way, “the body bears the burden and the consequences of the soul’s d
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