Comely Apparel and the Naked Truth: Metaphor and Common Christian Culture

"Clothing" is a convenient metaphor (in Lévi-Straussian terms, "good to think with") for working through some of the major oppositions in Western thought such as nature versus culture, wisdom versus eloquence, the literal versus the figurative, object versus sign. Such broad dichotomies are bipolar; as Derek Attridge observes, crediting Derrida, they "do not and cannot function as stable, given, mutually exclusive oppositions, of which one member is simply primary and self-sufficient and the other secondary, exterior, and dependent." Indeed, the valences of such terms as "naked" or "natural" and the analogies built on them are always manipulable and relative—but always within certain cultural parameters. Each term or its opposite may be the "superior" one, depending on the particular paradigmatic contrast at issue (for example, "nakedness" may be better than "false" but worse than "decent" covering), and depending on the particular referents involved (for example, the "truth"—figured as a naked woman—is valued differently than an actual naked woman in Bedlam or on the street). To take a major Renaissance and Christian instance: nature, when understood as the God-given, as God's handiwork (analogous to nakedness as primal innocence), is superior to culture or art, understood as human traditions or institutions (analogous to clothing as "polluted" or deceitful). On the other hand, nature, when understood as fallen, perverted, or weak (analogous to shameful nakedness) is inferior to culture, art, discipline, or grace, understood as the supplier, repairer, or rectifier of nature (and analogous to clothing as decent necessity, or essential protection).

Such terms as "naked" or "clothed" are indeed positively or negatively valenced in the mainstream and on the fringes of Judeo-Christian culture as a whole. To give a sense of that multivalence, we'll begin with a brief sketch of the "naked" and "clothed" within Jewish and Christian culture in Greco-Roman times, and glance, as well, at nakedness and clothing in certain fringe religious movements of the sixteenth century. Then we'll focus on a detailed examination of these terms in central Reformation religious controversy, illustrating not only their flexibility and relativity within cultural parameters, but their culturally meaningful systematicity as well.

In part because the Jews sought to distinguish themselves from the pagan world of license where nakedness was routine in gymnasia and baths, there is "an enormous gap between Greek and Jewish attitudes towards the body," as Frank Bottomley indicates. In the Old Testament, after the Fall, nakedness is "related to poverty, destitution and exposure"; it is "a metaphor for complete vulnerability," "related to "subjective shame" and to "objective humiliation." In Leviticus, "the concept of nakedness seems to take on a special, almost technical, meaning" and "is particularly associated with incestuous and other unlawful sexual activity in the phrase 'to uncover his/her nakedness/" In fact, "nakedness' becomes almost synonymous with genitalia.'" "Conversely, ... clothes are related to status, honour and dignity," as well as associated with "protection and love." In his allegory of Jerusalem as ultimately unfaithful wife, Ezekiel describes how God "spread [his] skirt over [her]" and "covered [her] nakedness" when she was "naked and bare" (Ezekiel 16:8; 16:7), clothing her with "broidred work ... fine linen ... and silk" and decking her "with ornaments" — "bracelets," "a chain," "a frontlet," "earrings," and "a beautiful crown" (Ezekiel 16:10-12).

However, even in the Old Testament, clothing is not always a good; such glittering fineries may also be associated with the false allure of harlots and idols. "Thou didst take thy garments, and decked thine high places with divers colours, and played the harlot thereupon.... Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels made of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madst to thy self images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them" (Ezekiel 16:16-17). Somewhat rarer is the use of nakedness as a symbol of spiritually significant experience, or "religious ecstasy," as for example, when "the Spirit of God came upon [Saul]," and "he went prophesying.... And he stripped off his clothes, and he prophesied also before Samuel, and fell down naked all that day and all that night" (1 Samuel 19:23-24).

As Peter Brown shows in The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Christianity gradually brought about a new sensibility to nudity in the late classical world. "Nudity and sexual shame" had been "questions of social status." "The way people felt about being naked, or seeing others naked, depended to a large extent on their social situation." Social superiors were immune from "sexual shame" and could move about naked "without a trace of ... shame in front of their inferiors," while those at the bottom of the social scale (such as the womenfolk of the poor), as "civic 'non-persons,' " had "no right to sexual shame." Early Christianity, in contrast, generally emphasized the "somber democracy of sexual shame," the "universal vulnerability of the body, to which all men and women were liable, independent of class and civic status."

However, apart from the mainstream, in the early Christian ascetic movements, the positive symbolic signification of nudity as innocence and freedom from sin was exploited. Insofar as the participants regarded life "in a body endowed with sexual charactertistics," "all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth," as "the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn," they could even practice nudity because of their exemption from its temptations. The imagery of divesting oneself of old garments was already tied to baptism, the "rite of entry into the church," which enacted "an explicit stripping off of the distinguishing marks on which the hierarchy of ancient society depended," and emblematized the "primal, undifferentiated unity" of believers. Thus, among the Encratites of the...