If we take psychologist Walter Riso’s phrase “Dress up, wear makeup, lose weight, but to flatter yourself, not to flatter others” out of context, we will disagree with him because of his apparent egocentricity.
But ultimately, he is saying that we should not be slaves to fashion, and that we should be free to dress however we want: “you should be the first person to like your body and the way you cover it up.”
In an article entitled “What women notice when they look at other women” in the online newspaper El Confidencial, psychologist Cristina Wood states that “when two women meet on the street, they scan each other from head to toe.” When two women haven’t seen each other for a long time, Wood comments that the conversation revolves around their physical appearance:
You look so slim, you look great. But do men do this? When a man looks at another man, does he say: “Those pants look great on you, man,” or “You’ve lost weight”?
– Cristina Wood
This article includes this very illustrative testimony from Silvia:
What I notice most is her self-esteem, which I detect by seeing if she is too shy or if she shouts when she speaks, a sign that she is insecure. I also notice how she moves and how she reacts in unexpected situations. Then, in addition to men, women also comment on the breast size of other girls. I like them to be small; very few women with very large breasts carry them with elegance. I pay attention to aesthetics, the most basic things, whether they are well waxed, whether their hair is damaged from dyeing, whether they haven’t had it cut in more than two months.
– say Silvia
Silvia seems to be a good example of a scanning gaze, but we are interested in reflecting on her view of self-esteem. What are our priorities in terms of self-esteem? From the above examples, it seems that priorities lie in the sensory world, in the body. This interest in the sensory seems to be Adam and Eve’s mistake. Instead of turning to God, desire turned to the physical pleasures of the body, according to Maximus the Theologian in the 7th century:
The more man turned toward sensible things through his senses alone, the more he was overwhelmed by ignorance of God; the more he cultivated self-love, the more he invented multiple means to obtain pleasure, the fruit and goal of self-love.
– Máximo (Theologian)
St. Maximus concludes that Adam and Eve were fraudulently persuaded by the Evil One to direct their desire “towards something other than the Cause of beings, that is, God”; thus, evil “managed to fabricate ignorance of the Cause,” that is, ignorance of God. Therefore, the other side of self-esteem can lead to evil consisting in “manufacturing ignorance of God.”
Miguel de Unamuno, in his novel Abel Sánchez, based on the biblical passage of Cain and Abel, also raises the issue of self-esteem from the perspective of envy, with his envious character addressing God in these terms:
Lord, Lord. You told me: love your neighbor as yourself! And I don’t love my neighbor, I can’t love him, because I don’t love myself, I don’t know how to love myself, I can’t love myself. “What have you done to me, Lord?” …
– Unamuno
He then went to get the Bible and opened it to the passage that says, “And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’” He slowly closed the book, murmuring, “And where am I?” That is the question: where are each and every one of us? . Here is a sickly portrait of a lost man who does not know where he is, in four verses by Leopoldo María Panero:
Sólo un hombre errando solo
solo, a solas con Dios
un hombre solo en la calle
errando a solas con Dios.
– Leopoldo María Panero
The desideratum would be to feel total gratitude as a currency of exchange for that gift from God because He has had the grace to give us life. In this way, we build on solid rock (Matthew 7:24-27) and not on the shifting sand of apparent certainties. It is hard to say that we are wandering alone with God, if by wandering we mean “walking aimlessly” and “making mistakes.”
So, where did we go wrong? What is our mistake? “Where am I?” Let’s look at self-esteem from another perspective, that of Basil of Caesarea in the fourth century: “Man is a creature who has been commanded to become god.” But he does not understand this in the sense of self-esteem or self-love based on oneself (“a man wandering alone with God”), but rather, Basil clarifies, one is god insofar as one wants to resemble God, take him as a model, unite with the nature of Christ, because one is like him. Cain’s mistake was that “he offered the Lord the fruits of the ground” (Genesis 4:3), not thinking of God, but using him for his own interest, wanting to please God in order to ask for things and exalt himself. We often ask God for things out of self-interest, and that is our sin and Cain’s. Therefore, God does not accept his offering, and instead of critically asking himself what he has done wrong, Cain rebels and becomes angry with God, withdrawing into himself, “resentful and dejected” (Genesis 4:6), wandering alone with “his God” as in the previous poem. In short, he goes about “manufacturing ignorance of God.”
In conclusion, we do wrong when we look at our navels and “manufacture ignorance of God” and turn our gaze to other gods (fashion, envy, slander). The advice God gives Cain and everyone else is that “if you do wrong, sin lies at the door and stalks you; but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7). And it stalks us when we want to be gods, flattering ourselves with such high self-esteem that we pretend to be God, ignoring Him.
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