‘When I feel very near to God, I always feel such a need to undress’: Religion, Nakedness and the Body Divine

We’re very glad to have such a robust crowd for to hear Phillipos

talks afternoon. Brian Lovaas is going to introduce our speaker. But I wanted to say

just one thing in the series, The Oxford History of the British Empire.

When we came to selecting the editor for a voice

for a book series on gender and Empire, Palapa

came immediately to mind. And she organized and eventually published

an excellent book that forms part of the series of the Oxford history of the British Empire.

Just say a word about Brian layback, because

not only is the chairman of the history department, but I believe he holds the

record as the longest serving chairman of the Department of History at the University

of Texas. And not really as Alan pretty pretty quick. Go

ahead. Eight years was enough.

And Martha can relate to it. So

it is my pleasure to introduce

my colleague Philip Levine, who

holds the Walter Prescott Webb chair

in history and ideas for many of those

as well as being and I don’t think I have to say this because I think everybody in this room knows

this. She is also the co director of British studies.

And she didn’t know that she has been that for not

nine years, eight years, nine, nine years.

He is a very distinguished historian. And

I was reading her CV last night and it really made me tired.

So I’ll just mention some of the books that she has as

written. And the first one, I think, was the first one she wrote on

historians in Victorian England and then a book on

Victorian feminism and then the book on the British Empire,

which is now going into its third edition. She also

wrote a book on policing venereal disease in the British Empire,

and also she has written a book and edited a book

on eugenics. So she’s done many different things. She’s currently writing

a book on nakedness. I understand it’s going to have

a little more complete title for like

taking your clothes off or something. Henniker it and

her talk today, which is related to that, that project

is when I feel very near God, I always feel such

a need to undress. That’s the quote. And then the

the subtitle is Religion, Nakedness and the Body Divine

Philibert. Yes.

Thank you, Brian, for that characteristically lovely introduction. I have one other thank you while I’m at it.

Before I start and that’s Dakota Heffernan, without whom the slides could not the to the

two snazzy slides would not be anywhere near a snazzy of the article. Thank you for that technical help.

I heard a voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And

he said, who told me that there was naked, half eaten of the tree where I commanded the

house? Should it not eat? Genesis 3 momentous words. We

all know what follows. Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden heat till the ground she to suffer the pains

of childbirth and hewants henceforward to expiate this original sin.

The Judeo-Christian tradition boasts no monopoly on anxieties around nakedness, but it is vitally grounded

in such debates. References to nakedness abound of both the old and the New Testaments,

as well as in commentary on the Bible and in teachings. Knowledge of and shame over

nakedness define original sin the burdens of the human condition. While Christ’s crucifixion

Naked on the Cross determined the basic precepts of Christianity, the key biblical

moment of the Old Testament is the fall in the Book of Genesis, and for the New Testament

it is the crucifixion described in each of the four gospels. But if the naked body

is close to the constant problem even for theology, it is nonetheless not easy to

characterize or generalize about religious attitudes towards it. Many commentaries

categorically see Christianity as the grounding source of bodily shame and negative

attitudes. There’s good reason to do so, but there’s also a powerful counter-narrative stressing

nakedness as a sign of purity of prolapse, Aryan innocence and a future.

Global challenges to negative connotations of the unclothed body have come as much from

within Christianity as from opponents, whether from sex positive Christians in the 19th and

church. While awareness of nakedness has always been central to religious thought and practice,

it’s always also been open to contestation. Some scholars argue

that the Bible exhibits an unequivocal condemnation of the naked form, the common and virulent

vocabulary of a horwitz or horror conveying absoluteness of this position.

Certainly there is sound and plentiful evidence for such a reading, beginning with the epochal event of Adam

and Eve. His realization of their nakedness, the beginning of shame and its deep association with the uncle’s

body, the curse of Ham in Genesis 9 derives from his father canine’s proximity

to his own father’s nakedness. And throughout the Old Testament, negative associations persist

in and beyond the Pentateuch Ezekiel Yucks, Nakedness, Horten and Abomination

in Azir, Egypt, ashamed by the bared bodies of Egyptian captives, Leviticus 20

lays down the penalties associated with nakedness. Such negativity persists into the New

Testament when nakedness is associated with shame and desolation and revelations

and with clothing. Another’s nakedness is an act of piety and of charity. Matthew

the Gospels make quite clear the humiliation involved in the stripping of Jesus before his crucifixion.

Over and over, nakedness invokes shame, loss, humiliation

and vulnerability, as well as a reminder of sin. Yet there are also

significant physical and theological traces of very different attitudes which cast nakedness

in a far more felt much the positive attitudes towards nakedness can be found in the

earliest history of Christianity. The declaration in J-O-B 121 that a quote,

naked K-Y out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither naturalize

as nakedness as an originary state involving simplicity, innocence and the possibility

of ultimate redemption. Kahlo’s link between nakedness and a prehaps are in a state

of grace. Unmarred by shame was perhaps most apparent in the practice of nude baptism,

where a naked emersion ritual was followed by the dawning of a white gown representing

a new state of purity. Baptism returned, befallen human to grace, recalling Adam

and Eve before their expulsion from paradise, and invoking the pre-sexual innocence of the child

conjured in Jobe and Ecclesiastes. Not everyone approved the

influencial Puritan, which Baxter lashed out at the Baptists, insisting

in this his plain scripture, proof in scripture, proof of sixteen fifty, 53 that naked

baptism was in violation of the seventh of the Ten Commandments. An abominable wickedness

that puts its devotees, he said, on a par with savages, a sentiment that would pervade missionary activity

in a later era. But there can be no doubt that the story of Adam and Eve Centrals it was true original

sin to shame and disobedience nonetheless also implied that nakedness.

Could be sanctified for prior to tasting the apple. The first couple had no sense

of shame, but rather reveled in what Milton called that first naked glory.

It was this prehaps arrogant state that sustained ideas of holy nakedness, whether

expressed in baptism, the innocence of children or beyond Christianity in

fertility and other rites. The naked body then could connote both sin and

grace, both the carnal and the spiritual. It could symbolize the disobedience that

result of the expelled in the expulsion from paradise, or the redemption and rebirth

consecrated in the baptismal right in only modern Europe. A small

number of radical Protestant sects began what they called going naked for the Lord or

going naked as a sign. And Brian, there’s much more about this than I did my

experience. Their actions were intended as a critique

of the series and they felt was corrupting the church. These early penitents often adopted scant

and ran ragged clothing, if any, alongside bodily scourges, costume of the vanities

of the material world, articulating ancient doctrine of nudist, nude and Christian separate and

embracing poverty and deprivation as a sign of their enhanced spirituality.

As early as the 13th century, an often branded as heretics, a small sect in Bohemia

and in France in particular, worshiped naked. And in the middle of the 17th century, a handful

of English Protestant groups employed nakedness to articulate a radical critique

of these scratched church. Quaker William Simpson was prompted in the 7:16 fifties by his

desire to make known and we quote the nakedness and shame that is coming upon the Church of England.

This radically politicized nakedness among Quakers began early in the sixteenth fifties and

continue to force radically into the 60s 70s, with the practice tripling also into

New England. Here, this form of Quaker protest was preceded by other what

they called atomized sects. Gone back, of course, to Adam and Eve a decade earlier in the turbulent

year, 16 41 pamphlets denouncing subsect work circulated

wildly, widely sorry, December. And while the supposedly detailing

the immoral activities of naked church goers on the fringes of Protestant Christianity

and often including what David Cressey has called an excuse for pornographic representation,

as you can see here, they frequently featured graphic cover illustrations that highlighted not

just the mixing of the sexes, but they often featured. And this is exactly what’s happening here. A congregant

beating the erect member of another worshiper with a large stick. So it’s got two large sticks, right?

The one that’s being beaten and the one that’s doing the beating. Protestant nakedness in the 16

forties was largely an artisanal movement at a time when sanctuary laws designated

the clothing material suitable for different classes. A radical aspect of going make it for the Lord

in2 with theological piety was his equalizing effect. Undressed the commoner,

and the aristocrat could not be distinguished. They were alike in the eyes of God. One of the key

messages of these radical religious groups images of religious

martyrdom, contemporary with this radicalism combines the same claims to piety with a predilection

for prurience. Samuel Clark, 16 51, a general martyr ology borrowed

heavily from John Fox, is acts and Monuments. You may know it as Foxes Book of Martyrs 1863,

its more famous title, but included many more and many more varied images

than had Fox almost a hundred years earlier. The illustrations in acts and monuments

mostly showed martyrs fully and respectably clothed, even as the flames licked

their bodies. But in some editions, there was one link fully captioned exception.

I’ll read you the caption in case you can’t see it. A lamentable spectacle of three women with a silly

infant bursting out of the mother’s womb, being first taken out of the fire and cast in again.

So all burned together in the Isle of Guernsey 15 56 July 18.

And in this illustration, as you can see, the four victims are naked, surrounded by fully

clothed male onlookers. Now, Fox is text says nothing about the women being

stripped before hanging and burning. And many of the versions of the work do depict the women clothed within

the flames as opposed to unclothed. But some early editions such as this, the fourth issued in fifteen eighty

three, made clear that their humiliation and their pain were compounded by their nakedness.

At the last look, small Fabricius text was copiously illustrated

with a far greater and imaginative variety, as you’ll see in a moment of torture’s, than the burnings

that characterised foxes. More sort of a telling clock was as respectable a puritan

as one might find. Yet the engravings in his book frequently depicted the martyrs unplugged

and unflinchingly detailed the. Wide range of torture’s. He claimed Catholic’s

inflicted on true believers in this engraving. Men have ropes tied

to what the book calls. They’re pretty members before being hung up. Looks awfully painful.

Another awfully painful to a woman identified as a mother endures both a whipping,

whipping and having, as the text says, her dogs pulled off with pincers.

A technique likely borrowed from illustrations of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha

and his two pretty classic Renaissance pictures of the

martyrdom of Agate as an Agatha. Nakedness, then, was a mean, if meaningful signifier

of the humiliations imposed on pious victims of intolerance.

Yet the condemnation of nakedness, however strident, was also alway oh,

also, in a sense, always doomed for clothing. That seeming index of respectability

was also always a fatally a reminder of the first transgression, a cloak

for shame made necessary because of human disobedience and the acquisition

of forbidden knowledge. Now by the 19th century were jumping here. Cutaway expressions

of radicalism and erotica were increasingly dissociated that this did not sever the

longstanding collective connections between religion and nakedness in the visual realm. We

need look only to the canvases of the controversial British artist

willing to give up. What’s that? Some. We know

that we can look then. Sorry to the canvasses of the many engravings of William Blake, the canvases

of the controversial British artist William Ettie. This is a very, very early photograph.

Ettie is dead not long after this photograph, and this is a 1830’s observer early

or the drawings of the eminently respectable Annacone writer Charles Kingsley at a later

date. As the revival in biblical Arch in the 19th century reignited debate

over whether and when Nicolas’s make it, this was appropriate. All three of these markedly

different artists would turn to the condition of human nakedness as they worked out their own belief

systems. With 19th century, in Michael Willa’s words, was a high point in the history of the

Bible in art, in Christian nations. There was leeway for what has been identified

as the socially privileged zorah of biblical illustration. William Etty,

a middle God, was Britain’s preeminent painter painter of the nude figure in the first half

of the 19th century. Born into a modest Methodist household in York, he

inched ever closer to Catholicism in adulthood. Elected a royal I can domitian in

his emphasis on news among the themes to which Etty frequently returned was that

of Mary Magdalene. There are at least five known such paintings. He is one of them.

In them, the figure of the madelin is almost always fully naked, and invariably

partially so. She contemplates, and most of them the usual symbols of crucifix and skull

associated with this theme. Signs, of course, of human mortality and frailty moreof

as well as corporeal. Yet her nakedness surely connotes in a specifically biblical mode.

Again, the promise through absolution of a return to paradise by

penitence and redemption, that his work was part of a revival of interest in the

figure of Mary Matalin. But she was usually not in at his hands, depicted either

with a single breast exposed or demurely converted to fully dressed, respectable

national human, rather than a transcendental figure. For Etty to

elect to produce starkly naked depictions of the figure was a controversial move by theologically

and artistically. Given that this is the early Victorian period, the Madelin pictures date largely from the mid

It is nude, spent him equal portions of praise and disavow. Some critic critics constantly

took him to task for what they saw as unseemly and fleshly nude women. Though in reality

it is ERV what was split fairly evenly, as you can see from this, between depictions of

naked women and naked men. And I think this is a particularly interesting picture because it’s a highly sensuous

male nude. I mean, it really is for a period. It’s extremely unusual,

actually, although principally a history painter in this

the 1828 world before the flood. Now Southhampton City Art Gallery, like

his Matalin’s took up a religious theme based in this instance lines in Book Eleven

of Milton’s Paradise Lost and depicting the commonality that precipitated the precipitated

the flood in Genesis Chapter 6 to 9. The painting shows, as in Milton’s verse,

men observing, dancing with and claiming interest intimacies with women.

All of them in various states of undress, as you can see here. The scene I think in the painting

has a curious stateliness to it. The dancing at its center, seemingly quite formal,

rather the bacchanalian, more Jane Austen, if you like them, the Hellfire Club, the storm clouds

gathering behind the revelry. You can see in the back there behind the trees, anticipate the

coming wrath of God unheeded by the joy seekers despite the formal qualities

of the work. And I think it is a very formal work and a great deal of admiration for it in some quarters.

At his critics took exception. A high minded observer writing for the Literary Gazette commented

in stentorian terms that and I quote, We have already warned Mr. Etty

to avoid that deadly sin against good taste. Voluptuousness, we warn

him again. Judging by the machinations that followed,

he showed little interest in following such advice other than SIST as he did towards the end of his life.

That, and I quote, where no immoral sentiment is intended. I affirm that the circle

undisguised naked figure is innocent. In the ensuing decade, the unclosed penitent

Madelin would remain among his favorite things in the early 19th century.

The visionary poet and artist William Blake depicted, as you see here, Adam and Eve

morning over the body of their dead son while the murderer. The other son, Tares, agonized

at his hair and flees the scene. Blake’s figures, as in the early days, discussed

muscular a naked textbook, examples of his quirky opinions on both the Bible

and the human form. Blakely envisioned a millennial Christian morality that combined

earthly delights and spiritual high mindedness in equal parts. His biblical illustrations

and his visions of heaven and hell are filled with powerful bodies shorn of clothing.

Whether they ascend to the skies or fall into the eternal pitch in this feverish,

feverish re busy engraving Lao Koon, the texts that you see all around that were added

after the figures, Blake surrounded the figure of the Trojan priest, his sons

and the attacking serpents, which is what the. This was done first with aphorisms

in many languages and in the top right hand corner and faced corner. You can see that in red there.

And I’ve also pulled it out there. I did that bit myself. But in college, you have it. You can see it there.

One of them reads and I quote, Art can never exist without naked beauty

displayed. It was a position to which Blake closely hewed in his unfinished poem,

The Everlasting Gospel. He speaks of the naked human form, divine and many

of his mutter Adarsh, as many of you know, certainly follows that precept.

Blake’s conviction that Christian nudity was desirable and wholly shared by the 19th century

English clerical novelist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley imbued many of the drawings he made to his wife,

Fanny, with religious meaning in the early 1840s. He was writing a biography of Saint Elizabeth

of Hungary, which he planned to present to Fanny on their wedding day, some wedding present.

Although he made little progress on the manuscript and abandoned it once Fannie’s high family finally agreed

to the marriage. There are eight extant drawings from that manuscript, and

they include a depiction of the saint. There she is naked, carrying the burden of a heavy

cross on her back. Although Kingsley abandoned this project, he didn’t stop drawing

in a series of sketches preserved by his wife. And now in the British Library, he delightfully depicted

himself and Fanny. Now his wife unclothed. And here they are in two

of these eight drawings. For Kingsley, devotee of muscular Christianity, nakedness

and religion were inextricably connected as they work a blank. His belief in the redemptive

and spiritual qualities of nakedness linking to a long tradition of religious asceticism,

and he adopted on occasion to the habits of expiation in one of his drawings. Fascinating

what I think shows him prostate on the floorboards and largely naked in an attitude of penance.

He explained the scene on the back and actually down here in the corner as well. Charles is fast. Exclamation

mark every Friday at ten o’clock. But despite his taste for scourging

and self-punishment, Kingsley was nonetheless and enthusiastically sexual husband. The letters

he and Fanny exchanged were joyous about their sexual union, which they understood as both divine

and corporeal, a celebration of all that Christian communion signified. Kingsley

had predicted that their marital bed would be a quote from his letters A Heaven on earth. In a letter he

wrote fanni in October 1843, close to a year before their marriage. And we assume

that at that point the marriage was not constantly non-marriage. At that point was known quantity in an

undated drawing. The couple ascend and this is he and Fanny ascend heavenward

in an obvious state of bliss that provocatively entwined bodies, strongly suggesting

that carnal and spiritual bliss will. By no means mutually exclusive. The banner

above the two figures quotes Luke 8:52, in which Christ breathe life into

a young girl believed to be dead is funny in Kingsley’s vision, perhaps spiritually

awakened by sexual Congress, achieving the fullness of divine harmony in the arms

of her husband. That’s how I read it. Many of these 90 works

were, in effect, visual sermons striking to such a moral point. One very fine

example is Jeff Watts massive nine-foot spirit of Christianity

in which a clutch of nick naked innocent babies suffer the little children to come unto me a gathered

at the feet of Jesus. What’s described this work as a plea for religious tolerance.

It was exhibited in 1875 at the Royal Academy under the title dedicated

to all the churches. It’s now known as the version of Christianity Nakedness. Here was

the guarantor of a spiritual innocence embodied in the uncorrupted child, safe

under the hooligans, the celebrated photographer Oscar costof. I

never know how you pronounce his name. I’m going to say Reg Landor because it’s got a janea, but I don’t think that’s right. But anyway, his extraordinary

composite photograph, The Two Ways of Life 1857, offered viewers a choice

between the paths of vise. On one side, you can tell which is which. And a version of an elaborate,

technically virtuoso work. While the alleged verisimilitude of its photographic

nudity, you can see it down here, made it a controversial work, despite the enthusiasm

of Queen Victoria, who bought a copy for Albats. The piece was intended as a

moral tale, demonstrating the gulf between idleness and toil, indulgence

and righteousness. Wrong. And writes a classic binary kind of thing. The

central image is a young man poised to make his choice between these two parts.

The sash around his neck resembles a cross. Surely not a coincidence in such an allegorical

work. To one side of him are industrious figures fully clothed, to the other

side, naked figures lol. Insolently the fate of the latter.

The loling indolent people had been Invision some 25

years earlier by Etty again. Who’s the destroying angel and demons of evil? Interrogating the

orgies of the vicious and temperate. Long title it resembles virtue in etches

painting appears only in the figure of the powerful angel of the other top laying

waste to iniquity. The Angel Amost Slade of sports, not surprisingly,

well-developed, mostly naked bodies, the property of both the virtuous and the vicious.

The message is akin to that of rich Linda that there are consequences to this moral choice,

a choice conveyed in both cases highly effectively by the deployment of the naked

body. Yet the combination of nakedness, however strident, was

in a sense always doomed for clothing. As I said, that seeming Indyk’s of respectability was

a reminder of the first transgression. Absent Adam and his fall from grace, the

naked human was a paradisiacal innocent, and it was this state to which Kingsley

and others aspired. When I feel very near God. Kingsley wrote to his

wife. And here’s my my titled quotation I always feel such a need to undress

as if everything which was artificial jarred me. What a bliss! He says to Hi!

To see that you feel the same. The bared body of Mary Magdalene in

at his paintings, the taut bodies of Blake’s visions, the nude contemplations

of Charles and Fanny Kingsley all represent a rejection, I think, of secular

form, a desire to return to earlier and purer forms of faith, untouched

by materialism, the palpably not by physical design. There was a longing for

innocence, even as they embraced the carnal. There was never a moment, then, in which the

unclothed human form was not in world of Christianity with a negative

and a positive. Whether in doctrinal practice, artistic representational exegesis

of holy texts, nakedness was wielded by a variety of actors for widely different

ends. It could represent the rejection of religion. The presence of evil and a lack of proper

control. But it could also have, as we’ve seen, signify ascetic wholeness,

heightened devotion or the glory of creation. One of his characteristic

beliefs in evangelical Protestantism was that nakedness in all in any circumstances

constituted obscenity. One notable exception to this tendency to a dominant role in

any nudity was the work of the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, active in the mid 18th century

and a major influence on Blake sweetcorn linked Swedenborg linked spiritual progress and

nakedness in radical ways in his vision of heaven detailed on a number of his writings.

The angels were not richly wrote. But make it in their innocence. They had no need of clothing,

nakedness, he won’t corresponds to innocence, sweet or reimagined. Nakedness is the

ultimate grace. But like Blake, his was a minority position, crowded out by a

more austere and punishing perspective that equated nakedness with sexual sin and often

took a virulently anti-Catholic stand. As, of course, you saw the Puritan stuff.

The Christian morality movement sprang up in the West in the 19th and 20th century, regarded

control of sexual desire as a first principle, and were virulent in their opposition to display

of the naked human body. anti-Catholicism, long a strong force among radical

Protestants, often focused on what suspicious evangelicals saw as licentiousness

of Catholic doctrine. Low church and evangelical Protestants condemned all and

any instances of nudity on occasion. They took matters into their own hands, destroying

works they found offensive. When the Council of Trent decreed that was sidious works were inappropriate

in church settings, they were responding in large part to acts of iconoclasm in which offended

believers smashed works they found inappropriate. By the 19th century, such act had

become rarer, but were by no means unknown. In his remarkable memoir of growing

up among the evangelical Plymouth brethren, Reverend Edmund Gosse tells the story and quoting

of a flighty, excited young creature from his provincial congregation who,

visiting London, was taken by some relatives to the Crystal Palace. This is a fairly lengthy quote from Gough’s

in passing through the sculpture gallery. Susan’s sense of decency had been so grievously affronted

that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of a parasol before her horrified companions

could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among statuary and had been arrested and brought

before a magistrate who dismissed her with a warning to her relations that she had better be sent home to

Densher and looked after Susan Flood’s return to us. However, it was a triumph.

She had no sense of having acted injudiciously on becomingly. She was ready to recount to everyone

in vague and veiled language how she had been able to testify for the Lord in the very temple

of BVO. For so she poetically described the Crystal Palace.

And if you think Susan is no longer with us. My most recent example of this is from 2010,

when a female truck driver from Montana took a crowbar

to an artwork in a Denver in the court in the Denver Museum of Art in Colorado,

giving evidence before the select committee in the National Gallery in 1850. The British artist Thomas

Erwin’s recalled another such occasion on which I quote a man in a moment of very

mo furious rage took up his crotch and struck the picture, a painting who

intoned that indeed was an offensive picture. Such behavior may have been relatively

rare. By the 19th century, but the sentiments animating it were not. The shocked tones of an American

Protestant clergyman traveling in Italy in the 1840s typified the anti-Catholic diatribe

with 0 0 appeaser. He wrote. I saw several females prostate before the

statues of Adam and Eve, which exhibited in a state of almost entire nudity. Naked forms in a

marvel abound in all the churches. Nothing struck him, which struck me with more force

than incidental circumstances like these as indicating the gross ignorance, credulity,

superstition and dishonesty abounding in the Catholic Church,

both popular in pornographic fiction, trafficked visually and verbally, and tales of women

frolicking with priapic monks or more almost ominously, raped by them. My picture

here has a trigger warning attached very modern because it is a piece of pornography,

but it’s a very typical example of the kind of thing that got got

both said about and drawn about the Catholic Catholic priests. Yes, quite.

The Catholic priests were up to Matthew Lewis’s 1796 deeply anti-Catholic

God Gothic novel. The monk warned of the excessive sexuality that could erupt from enforced

monastic celibacy. Lewis conjured cross-dressing clerics out of wedlock pregnancies

and eroticized ghosts tracts such as the 18th century work, the clothes laid

open, all the adventures of the priests and nuns with some account of confessions and the lewd use

they make of them published in London are mostly stuffed French. But that was published in London, delighted

in details of sexual misconduct or pornography. As you can see here, and even mainstream

fiction reveled in fantasy laden, not only tales. And in a parliamentary debate

in 1852, Henry Drummond, the MP for West Surrey and author of a plea for the Rights

and Liberties of Women Imprisoned for Life under the Power of Priests, asserted that nunneries are

prisons and I have seen them so used. Such literature relied on a gendered

reading of the ills of Catholicism seen as an overly physical faith, which would be the down.

Well, as you can see here of womanly respectability, this animus

against the hypocritical lusts of religious men and women were commonly articulated through

a strident Protestant anti-Catholicism, also fueled a robust anti-clerical

literature. Hence the importance of the French here, which detailed the lustful excesses

accorded priests by their privileged access to the young. And in the confession box.

But artists choosing biblical themes had to be attentive to the boundaries which the faithful

policed, even where Art’s relationship to the church was conceived in less oppositional ways.

Most Protestant aren’t in the 19th century strove to avoid ideal idolatry crucifixes

to Catholic in their imagery, mostly absent in church decoration and painting, found

favor of a potentially sensuous sculptures. 3D obviously gives you a sensuality, which

you can’t get in painting. Nonetheless, they were highly influential thinkers in the 19th century,

for whom art was the principle expression of the divine. But deeply devout Anglican politician

William Gladstone believed art had the power to redeem fallen natures. While

the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt saw art as a means and I quote, to make more

tangible Jesus Christ history and teaching controversy

over artistic form and religious context was hardly new, of course, in the 19th century. How to represent

divine figures, how to depict different kinds of worshipers, how to

test the limits of the devotional or well-worn topics. While they had always been

controversy and debate over the appropriateness, status and respectability of exposed,

what is that complexity? A multiplicity had by no means lessened over time.

Although Etty and other artists might find their honor and intentions questioned in some quarters,

they nonetheless continued both to exhibit and to sell. Among his patron patrons were

interesting enough Anglican clergy, presumably undisturbed by whispers of the artist’s unseemly

dwelling on naked bodies. Indeed, this painting was owned by the Rev.

E. P. Irwin, and it is pretty voluptuous as Venus and her satellites and the Rev. Isaac

Spencer also commissioned a Magdalene painting from William Petit.

Nakedness Mechanism Religion continue. I would argue even now to foment strong feelings,

as many artists have found to their cost. Such debates, of course, are not exclusive to art.

A proliferation of literature debating whether nudism and Christianity are compatible exists

alongside articles in the popular press that report on congregations worshiping nude. The

modern equivalent of the early modern pamphlets denouncing adament sex. In 2004,

The Times, the London Yes. The London Times reported on the construction of America’s

first nudist show, and a decade later, the decision of the white-tailed

Chapel in Virginia to permit Wishaw worshipers to attend services naked briefly made

headlines like this internationally. The press dutifully reporting the pastor’s belief

that the decision follows logically from the Book of Genesis. But you see, the journalists could not resist.

They just couldn’t resist going for the love of just love. And in 1981,

Pope John Paul, the second, addressed the question of nakedness at some length, praising modesty,

but noting to the circumstances in which it might be acceptable. In modesty, he concluded,

is present only when the naked when nakedness plays a negative role with regard

to the value of the person. When its aim is to arouse concrete essence, there is

thus plenty of contemporary debate about religion and the naked body. Modern

evangelicals contest John Paul seconds.. position. He’s Catholic, after all, regarding nakedness

as a categorical expression of sin. What the evangelical Bob Jones University,

a modern vulgarism, retouch his artworks to avoid offending its principal constituency.

They have wrecked a number of works of art beyond the world of evangelicalism. Naked Christ

images in Britain, New Zealand, the United States, Germany and elsewhere have been met with

protests. And in some cases, the work has, as a result, been withdrawn. In the early 1990s,

the Catholic devotees staged staged monthly rosary vigils protesting the genital area

that the Catalonians sculpture your Suder Ax gave the Christ figure in his work.

Completing the Passion facade of an. Anthony Goude is Sagrada Familia Church

in Barcelona, and as you can see, he was made to act alone. In 2001,

Debra Marsters, an American artist, added a loincloth to her crucified Christ mural

at a New York airport after protests from the Catholic League. Although she claimed rather oddly,

that had always been her intent to do so and that she had simply forgotten.

Two years later, Holtzberg Cathedral removed

a painting by Michael Traeger, one you can see here. From an exhibition, because in it, the resurrected

Christ emerged naked from the grave. The New Zealand sculptor Llew Summers,

who died of cancer earlier this year, did the same in 2005 at the request of

church officials at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Christchurch. In the

South Island of New Zealand, the exhibition in 1984, a British

artist, Edwina Sand, is naked female Jesus Krista in New York’s Episcopal Church

of St. John the Divine was cut short by protests some three decades later.

Interestingly, just in 2016, the church launched its Krysta project, bringing

back Sandy’s work as part of an exhibition of images of the suffering Jesus.

And the list goes on. I could I could go on for another 15 minutes with examples like this, but I want

in every case, the objections raised encompassed both the sense of insult to faith and the

dangers of an encroaching secularism. Can these contemporary articles we see a clash of sensibilities

pitting the faithful against what they see as increasingly godless and unmoored worlds.

It’s a position that ties believers to a longstanding discomfort with nudity as original sin,

but ignores the discomforting presence of a naked human body in theological reasoning

and the secularism perceived as undercutting it. We can see in this the impossible

yearning to separate sexuality and religion, perhaps at its height in the 19th century

as an impulse which clearly continues to this day. The tenacious power of religion

and the potency of the human make it form that’s continue to roil contemporary spiritual

sensibilities quite as much as they have done for hundreds of years. What are public expressions

of make it? This may now be more common. The long reach of theological reasoning and religious belief continue

nonetheless to exert a significant degree. So to sum up, in

of Psychoanalytic Test on a phenomenon of human clothing. Langner drew heavily,

obviously, on Alfred Adler’s ideas of the inferiority complex and claimed that the principal

impetus for clothing lay in the desire to emphasize human distance from Admati.

But he also linked the same to religion, writing that I quote, In our great

Christian civilization, we seek by every means to hide our relationship to our world

and to relate ourselves to God. A more potent acceptance of the deep

link between the unclothed human body and the religions of the world would be hard to imagine. And indeed,

Langner goes further, implicating not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but other major

religions as well. Langer’s work may have fallen into obscurity

and his assertion that evolutionary progress dependent on clothing may strike the modern reader as a peculiar remnant

of a more celebratory age. Nonetheless, his insight that the clothing of nakedness

was a preeminent and urgent concern realized in large part through the strictures,

practices and beliefs of religion is surely upheld by the long history of strife,

even into the present in which the naked body has been mired. Nudity and nakedness

have long been a doctrinal combat zone, one which the encroachments of secularism have

seen done little to calm. Thank you.