No faith in flesh: art exposes Christianity's original sin

For centuries, defenders of the nude in art have faced a battle against Christian fear of the naked human form

• •  reddit this
• Comments (54)

In nude health ... Donatello's David at the Bargello Museum in Florence, Italy. Photograph: Olycom SPA/Rex Features

Arguments over religion rage. Atheists and/or scientific materialists worry, with good cause, that creationist beliefs threaten the very foundations of western reason. As a candidate with creationist sympathies leads the US Republican presidential race, in Britain our best-loved natural historian David Attenborough has spoken out against the fundamentalist threat. But in discussions of contemporary religion, the oldest and most glaring idiosyncrasy of Christianity is rarely stressed. This is its contempt for the human body.

A news story from Bristol draws attention to the original sin of Europe's dominant religion. It has been discovered that a 17th-century nude statue in a church house where John Wesley prayed was fitted with a breast plate for modesty's sake, back in the times of the Methodist leader. Now the statue's original nakedness has finally been revealed. But this is just one small incident in a 2,000-year history of repression and deceit, whose most extreme consequences include the scandals in the modern Catholic priesthood.

In the very era of John Wesley's Methodism, the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the poet and artist William Blake expressed his rage at the repression so basic to Christian belief. In Blake's eyes, to nurse unacted desires was murderous. His art is a rich attempt by a religious man to invent a faith that reveres both body and soul. Why did Christianity, alone among the great world religions, lead eventually to the birth of a secular society by the 20th century? Because it is the only one that so fiercely condemns a basic human biological drive. Something had to give, and in the end it was the Church.

The reality of Christian disdain for the flesh is very visible in the history of art. Nude statues were the highest form of artistic expression in ancient Greece and Rome. With the rise of Christianity, the nude was suppressed, cast out of Eden. A stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral shows a nude pagan statue: it has horns to show it is diabolic. When a figure of Venus was dug up in medieval Siena, the mob destroyed it. Only a new reverence for the learning of pagan antiquity in 15th-century Italy suddenly made the nude justifiable again after a thousand years of body hate. Modern secularists should go down on our knees before Donatello's David.

Yet for centuries, defenders of the nude in art still had to find elaborate explanations for it, claiming it was "disinterested" and "aesthetic". The struggle between Christianity and human desire was not over, least of all in art history, where in the 20th century, influential scholars spent their lives showing how Titian's sensual paintings supposedly contain spiritual meanings.

Today many critics of religion assume that creationism is the most lethal aspect of fundamentalist Christianity. I suspect they have never experienced church all that closely. For Blake, and many like him who knew Christianity as practitioners, it was the hatred of the flesh that hurt most.