Taste, but don't swallow.".
That is where man's fallibility lies, in the fact that an internal battle is being waged inside each of us that, unless we make the immense effort that it requires to follow the Spirit, it seems to be destined to be won by the body. "Within me" –says Nikos Kazantzakis in the prologue to his novel The Last Temptation of Christ- "are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces of God –and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."6 At the core of this issue lies the fact that God created man and woman free. Freedom is what gives us the possibility of choosing among the options set forward in front of us and it is also from it that our responsibility as moral agents comes from. If we had no choice but to do what we do (be it good or bad), then we couldn't be held responsible for it.
So, if we are free agents who can choose between right and wrong, if the body is weak and tends to favor the callings of the instincts in a context in which we should instead follow the callings of the spirit, then the result is obvious: Man is destined to a state of constant frustration. This state of frustration is translated into the unavoidable sentiment of guilt. Guilt is what we feel after we have followed the screams of the body letting ourselves go according to its dictates, and in the silence that follows we start again to hear the whispers of the Spirit. Freedom is also the starting point of guilt, since it only makes sense to feel guilty about something we could have done differently. Guilt is a sentiment that has its eyes in the past. It only makes sense to feel guilty about what has already been done and thus when we feel guilt, what we are doing is looking back at what we have done, thinking that we shouldn't have done it. From what we have said, it becomes clear that guilt is a private emotion, unlike shame, which is a public one.
