Tuesday 18 December 2012

Beyond the negatives.



"Flesh does have positive meanings in Christian thought, notably as the temple of God. Indeed, the Incarnation of Jesus only makes theological sense if human embodiment is seen as worthy and meaningful".  Ruth Barcan - Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy.

"God couldn't be God-with-us if he weren't flesh. The flesh of the baby is father to the flesh of the man. In his (Christ's) flesh, the spit of God mixed with the dirt of Galilee to make a healing paste. The naked baby must be flesh so that God can be stripped and seen again, trading his 'dusty garments' of distance for the immediacy of the splinters of the cross".  Mary Ellen Ashcroft - Gift-wrapping God.



As we approach Christmas, I thought I'd pen a few thoughts on what we. perhaps, need to consider as we think about life, the body, and God's immediate 'connection' to it all....


It's tellingly easy to ill-define ourselves. No where do we see this more than we when we come to the nude. 

Definition, of course, plays a key part. One popular theological concordance defines 'nude' as almost entirely negative - to be uncovered, devoid of grace, heinously sinful, destitute, and so on.

There are clear reasons, in relation to the human condition, why these statements are made,
but the concordance also speaks of another truth as well regarding being nude - "a state in which things are discovered, known and truly revealed". It's this aspect of nudity that faith, and in a smaller fashion, art allows us to encounter and embrace for some essential reasons regarding both the nature of God and ourselves.
So, let's consider our own definitions for a moment.

C S Lewis, in his study 'The Four Loves', provided some useful pegging points on various views of the body. 

These might be titled:



·The ascetic pagan or christian who deprecates the body to a mere tomb (used and discarded at death).

·The ‘neo pagan/nudist’ who view the (present) body as presently glorious (but, again, of no eternal purpose or value).

·Those who view the current state as both a virtue and a vice (“pathetically and absurdly beautiful”).

It's pretty clear that our own culture has a fairly splintered and often unproductive approach to the body - it's either idolized or hated, with very little tolerance for anything in-between. That's because, like the Greeks, we tend to 'deify' the immediate (what pleases or satisfies us now) and discard any thoughts of transcendence within the material, dislocating the spiritual and placing it in an entirely different orbit to the here and now. The trouble is we know there's a problem here, because it's actually amidst the material world that we all encounter startling moments of truth, wonder and astonishment that make us tellingly aware of the spiritual within  the material. Whether we are talking about finding out something deeper about ourselves or the nature of reality, it's these moments that truly impact upon us and transform us, so there clearly is something more going on here than merely a satisfying of the immediate - we yearn for something more, and the world, through numerous means, but often by faith and art, 'speaks' to that deep need. 

The futility which often marks our lives steers us to look at beauty in general and the body in particular as ultimately,  an uncomfortable irrelevance to our prevailing pain and strife - it's all pointless or temporary, so we eschew any notion of permanence and wallow in the ugly despair so tellingly present, or just enjoy the moment whilst we can, for there isn't anything, at least in the material sense, to really look forward to. The problem, of course, is reality is deeper than this.

Whilst we cannot deny the reality of the ugly side of life, there's clearly more going on here, and looking through the 'window' of an acknowledgment of this allows us to begin to engage with a far wider and more challenging understanding of both ourselves and the nature of our world.

As I've already noted, it's easy for religion to be deemed negative about the matter of nudity. Like the Greeks of old (which is actually where a lot of the trouble started), Christianity has often taught a 'general uptake of Aristotelian biology and ideas', thereby deeming the body to be inherently 'bad' in an of itself and the nude, especially the female nude, to be something which quickly 'communicates sin, sex and evil' (Barcan, page 108), but again, reality is far more troubling and enriching.






During the recovery of the Biblical world-view in the 1500's, artists transformed by this, such as Lucas Cranach, were free once again to genuinely paint and convey the beauty of the female form. This was because the very nature of God's validation of the material, both in it's creation and in it's recovery through the Incarnation, become restored as an essential aspect of Christianity and then culture, showing us that there was a right 'uncovering' of both truth and ourselves that had to take place, and that is still true today. It's so very easy to let our thinking and approach to life to be eschewed by the temporary and immediate, but it is often when we look closer and deeper into the very nature of these things that we will be struck with what we might term an impinging grace that can change and transform, even amidst the mundane. Art, beauty and the enticing richness of seeing God in Christ lead us to this better realm - where life can properly be uncovered.


Images: Magenta in Cornwall by Howard Nowlan.