Dr. Augustine Sokolovski
I. The Social Gaze
In Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame, shame appears not merely as an individual experience but as a social and cultural mechanism. It exists between the individual and society, between who a person is and who they are expected to be. Shame proves to be something more than a moral sentiment: it becomes a means of social control, a way of compelling individuals to see themselves through the eyes of others.
II. The Gaze of the Other
But what, precisely, are we ashamed of when we feel ashamed of our own nakedness? In his famous reflection on the cat that encountered him naked, Jacques Derrida raises a question that at first seems almost comical but in fact has profound philosophical implications: why does a human being feel ashamed of their own body in the presence of an animal? What exactly happens at the moment when we discover that we have been seen? After all, an animal has no human conceptions of decency, passes no moral judgment, and possesses no system of social prohibitions. And yet the cat’s gaze causes the philosopher to feel embarrassed. This suggests that the matter is not simply one of society and its conventions. Perhaps shame arises in the very situation of our exposure to the gaze of another, in the discovery of our own corporeality, which we are accustomed to concealing even from ourselves.
Giorgio Agamben, in his reflections on the phenomenon of nakedness, allows us to discern another dimension here. Nakedness is not simply the absence of clothing. It is a state in which the body is revealed, stripped of its familiar symbolic coverings, social roles, and cultural designations. A person finds themselves face to face with their own corporeality, which cannot be fully explained or justified. This is precisely why nakedness is so closely associated with shame, while at the same time it can become a condition for liberation from it.
III. Literary Nakedness
Here I am reminded of Mikhail Bulgakov and his The Master and Margarita. Woland’s ball, the naked female figures, Margarita’s nakedness — all of this is usually placed within the familiar symbolic framework of diabolical temptation, Mephistophelean play, and erotic liberation from moral constraints. Yet there may be another possible interpretation. It seems to me that nakedness in the novel can also be read through the symbolism of baptism. From this perspective, Woland becomes a figure who cannot easily be assigned to the traditional categories of good and evil. He is neither God nor the devil in the conventional sense, but rather a paradoxical, almost messianic figure who overturns familiar notions of social and moral order. Yeshua, by contrast, emerges as a character whose truth is profoundly corporeal and even mundane: the truth that Pilate has a headache and that Yeshua himself is vulnerable. Truth here seems to shift from the realm of absolute metaphysical assertions into that of immediate human experience. This can also be read as an anticipation of postmodern distrust of grand narratives, although Bulgakov, of course, cannot be reduced to such an interpretation.
Milan Kundera approaches the matter in a very different way, yet arrives at a remarkably similar result. His characters often push freedom, sexual emancipation, and libertinism to their limits. However, behind this freedom there gradually emerges not the fullness of life but its emptiness. The removal of prohibitions does not, in itself, mean the liberation of the human being. One can rid oneself of shame without attaining dignity; one can take off one’s clothes without coming any closer to one’s authentic self. Freedom without inner substance risks becoming yet another form of alienation.
IV. Baptismal Nakedness
Here I would like to return to the Christian understanding of nakedness and shame. In the early Church, the baptism of adults was performed in a particular symbolic setting: the person being baptized would remove their clothes and enter the water naked. This was neither an incidental practical detail nor the result of underdeveloped notions of modesty. Nakedness possessed an independent theological significance. The person removed their former garments as a sign of their former life, entered the water as into death, and emerged from it into new life in Christ. They were then clothed in new, white garments — the garments of purification and rebirth.
There is something astonishing about this rite. Nakedness, which in ordinary human life is associated with shame, here becomes a condition of holiness. A person stands before God without coverings, without social distinctions, and without the familiar markers of their status. They are neither displaying their body nor putting it on show. They are surrendering themselves to God. Baptismal nakedness, therefore, is neither erotic liberation nor an aesthetic declaration of naturalness. It is a radical act of trust, a renunciation of one’s former way of existence, and a consent to be born anew.
V. Time and Rebirth
Here I am reminded of another artistic image, unexpected at first glance: the music video by Rammstein for their song Zeit. It depicts a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, in the face of which human existence reveals its fragility and finitude. The song’s refrain sounds almost like a prayerful invocation: “Time, please stand still.” This is no longer merely a desire to prolong a moment. It is a desperate plea from someone who has confronted the irreversibility of time, the impossibility of recovering what has been lost, and the impossibility of undoing death.
One of the most striking scenes in the video depicts a human being seemingly being placed back into the maternal womb, returned to the place from which they once emerged into this world. This image can be understood as an almost literal, albeit grotesque, visual quotation from the Gospel of John. When Christ speaks to Nicodemus about the necessity of being born again, Nicodemus asks a perfectly natural yet simultaneously tragicomic question: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” (John 3:4).
In Rammstein’s video, this Gospel image seems to be turned upside down. What is depicted is no longer rebirth from above, no longer spiritual renewal, but rather a tragic attempt to return to the starting point of human existence. A person wants to undo their own history, to return to a state preceding birth, as though it were still possible to take shelter from time, death, and the inevitability of one’s own existence. But such a return cannot constitute a new birth. It is rather an image of an impossible return to non-being.
This is precisely why the appeal to time acquires an almost religious resonance here. “Time, stand still” is not merely a cry of despair, but something resembling a prayer. A human being addresses that which surpasses them, asks for the impossible, and thereby discovers the limits of their own power over life. In this sense, the video can be read as a tragic inversion of the Christian idea of resurrection: instead of a movement from death towards new life, we witness an attempt to return from life to the beginning that preceded it.
Another important parallel with baptism emerges here. Baptism, too, is a return to the beginning, but not a return to the maternal womb and not an annulment of the life already lived. It is a passage through death into new life. A person does not become unborn, erase their history, or return to the state preceding their appearance in the world. They are born again, but in a different, spiritual sense. Water becomes an image of death and, at the same time, a space of rebirth.
VI. The Unity of Baptism
It is in this context that I find it important to recall the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.” The word “one” is crucial here. Baptism is understood not as an event that can be repeated indefinitely, each time returning a person to the starting point, but as a singular and unrepeatable event of spiritual birth.
Perhaps this is precisely why the attempt to rebaptize someone who has already been baptized, particularly in the context of a transition from one Christian denomination to another, raises certain theological questions. Naturally, different Christian traditions understand the validity of baptism performed in another denomination in different ways, and not every baptism is recognized by every Church. But if we proceed from the symbolism of one baptism, rebaptism can be understood as a kind of attempt to return a person once again to the death from which they have already emerged. In symbolic terms, this resembles an attempt to place them back into the maternal womb — to the place where they have not yet seen the light of day.
Yet the Christian understanding of rebirth does not consist in annulling one’s first birth or repeating it, but in passing through death into new life. Baptism does not return a person to the past. It opens up the future. The unity of baptism therefore has not only canonical or denominational significance, but also a profound anthropological meaning: a person should not have to return endlessly to the beginning in order to prove once again that they have been born.
VII. The Fullness of the Symbol
In a certain sense, baptism and death are two exceptional situations in which human nakedness acquires a particular significance. In ordinary life, nakedness is confined to intimacy, medical necessity, and social conventions. In baptism, however, it becomes not an imposed necessity but a theological event.
This is precisely why I find the reasoning of those who insist on full immersion in water as an obligatory requirement insufficient, as though the entire symbolic meaning of baptism could be exhausted by the quantity of water and the manner of immersion. If we wish to reproduce the ancient symbolism of baptism, why do we choose only one of its components? Water, immersion, death and resurrection, undressing and the donning of new garments constitute a single symbolic whole. Baptismal nakedness is no less expressive or theologically significant than the water into which a person is immersed.
Perhaps another question should be raised here: if we pay such close attention to the external form of baptism, why do we not devote comparable attention to the other elements of the ancient rite? Why does full immersion sometimes become a matter of principle, while the symbolism of nakedness, the removal of former garments, and the donning of new ones remains almost entirely unnoticed? After all, we are not dealing with a collection of separate ritual details, but with a unified symbolic action in which every element reveals the meaning of rebirth.
VIII. Liberation and Transfiguration
Perhaps it is here that we discover the fundamental distinction between liberation from shame and its transfiguration. Contemporary culture often invites people to rid themselves of shame through display, openness, and the rejection of prohibitions. Christianity proposes something different: not simply to stop being ashamed of the body, but to transform one’s entire relationship with the body, with another human being, and with God. Not to put nakedness on display, but to stand naked before the One before whom there is no longer any need to hide anything.
In this sense, baptism returns us not so much to a state of primordial innocence as to the possibility of rebirth. Shame is not simply abolished. It is transfigured into humility, while nakedness ceases to be a sign of vulnerability and becomes a sign of trust. A person no longer needs to defend themselves against the gaze of God. And perhaps this is the only possible transfiguration of shame.