My main motivation for writing this book was better to understand my own experience of shame, particularly in relation to my engagement with religion. As the volume has progressed, I have occasionally illustrated it with examples drawn from my own history. It may be appropriate now to say a little about where I have been left at the end of this project.

The whole of this book has been composed under the watchful gaze of the Angel of the Judgment (see Plate 1) who appears in the Roger Van der Weyden's altarpiece for the Hospices de Beaune painted in the early fifteenth century (Gondinet-Wallstein 1990). I first saw this heavenly being in about 1990, but I felt that I recognised him and, indeed, had known him all my life. The Angel was for me a physical portrayal and externalisation of the sense of shame-producing self-surveillance that had accompanied me all my life. It was, as it were, ‘his’ critical gaze (or rather, my projection of that gaze) within me that epitomised my sense of shame, defilement and inadequacy. It may be that one of the innovations of the picture is precisely that it invites people to judge themselves internally rather than being judged by an external accuser (Gondinet-Wallstein 1990: 111–12).

Subsequently, I have spent many hours in Beaune staring back at my glorious persecutor. Furthermore, a miniature version of the altarpiece has been attached to the front of my word processor throughout the writing of this book as a symbol of my attempt to come to terms with shame.