Nake is an extinct English verb meaning “to strip clothes off.” To be “naked” is therefore to be in a state of having had your clothes stripped off.
Why does this bit of pedantry matter? Because it speaks volumes about what our ancestors regarded as the natural state of man. While a couple of loopy groups attempted it in warmer Mediterranean climates in early Christendom, it is not until after the Reformation, the rise of the Enlightenment, and especially the rise of technologies that allow northern Europeans to maintain a bit of comfiness in chill weather that we started to see the rise of so-called “Adamite” movements (later frankly renamed “nudist”), which propose that our natural state is to walk around buck naked. The theory that clothes are an unnatural encumbrance on our glorious childlike freedom is an illusion that only technology and warm weather permit us to entertain.
For our ancestors of not many generations back, such a proposal was not just silly in a practical sense; it was also about 180 degrees from normality. Fallen man was, so to speak, born clothed. Something unnatural had to be done—he had to undergo some process of naking—for him to end up naked. It was seen not as a return to simplicity and beauty but as a shameful state. Pity—or scorn, never breezy flower-child approval—was heaped on those found naked.
The vast majority of sensible people have not been sophisticated out of this basic insight. It’s why there are separate men’s and women’s restrooms, and even in those we have separate stalls so we do not have to expose ourselves to strangers. It’s why people revolt against TSA scanners stripping travelers naked electronically. It’s why comic sketches, movies, and bawdy stories often feature a man caught in public without his pants or a woman similarly caught without her clothes. It’s why the Nazis, in addition to murdering their victims, savored the extra cruelty of first forcing them to strip naked. It’s why the Son of God was stripped naked by the agents of Satan as he hung on the cross. To nake someone, to strip him or her publicly, is universally understood as taking away that person’s human dignity. Clothes, in some mystical sense, quite literally make the man.
Of course, culturally relative issues crowd in on this insight. Martha Washington and, say, the San people of the Kalahari have altogether different ideas of what “being dressed” means. Moses’ notions of what constituted shameful dress differ markedly from those of my twenty-first- century wife padding around the garden in her jeans. (“A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5))
Libertines and puritans both have great fun with these cultural differences, jockeying either to eradicate the virtue of modesty or to raise fashion sense to the granite standards of Sinai, in any case oversimplifying the complex interplay of aesthetics, common sense, and morality. Puritans are dead certain they can define good and evil clothing and which movements of a button or hemline mark the flight from righteousness to sin. Libertines are quite certain that any thought concerning the symbolic function of clothing is puritanical. This is all of a piece with the sort of easy libertine relativism that attempts to say, “People dispute whether you can have one wife or several, so why bother with marriage?” or “People quibble about what constitutes just war, so do whatever it takes to win.”
In fact, however, the first thing to note about the diversity of views on clothing is that, while many argue about what clothes are proper, everybody normally wears some kind of clothes.That’s why nudists are in colonies and not in your street. It may be only a loincloth or a string of beads, but the thing that marks Homo sapiens off from the rest of the animal kingdom is that people wear clothes, even when there is no need for warmth or protection.
This gives the lie to the notion that Genesis 1–3 is somehow the cause of a religion of shame about the body. In reality, Genesis accounts for a phenomenon as old as humanity and as common among Hottentots, ancient Druids, and Japanese as it is among Jews and Christians: the fact that humans feel the deep psychological need to be clothed and avoid public naking, except in very specifically prescribed cultural and social ritual situations. A Roman might be at ease in the public baths without a stitch on. But it doesn’t follow that he strolled home that way. Archimedes may have leapt from the tub and run screaming “Eureka!” through the streets buck naked, but the reason we know the story today is because this was just as unconventional to Greeks and Romans as streakers at a ball game are to us today.
Because clothes have so very much to do with our human dignity, Jesus urges us to clothe the naked. But this confronts us with a problem. As with every counsel of Jesus, the command to clothe the naked has both a practical and a spiritual dimension, because grace builds on nature. Here’s the rub: My encounters with the naked beggar are fairly rare, as are yours. The people I meet in the soup kitchen line at Blessed Sacrament parish in Seattle are not naked. Nor are the homeless folk you meet in your town. Once again, we live in a society where the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is pretty well covered. In the First World the purely animal need for insulating cloth in which to enwrap the human organism is pretty well covered. Clothing banks swell to bursting with free clothing of every size. Rare indeed is the opportunity for us in the First World to live out Jesus’ command, “If any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well” (Matthew 5:40).
However, if we cast our view further abroad, we discover that this is not the case universally. At this hour, many millions of Lazaruses around the world sit naked or nearly naked because they cannot afford clothes. The ragged clothes they have—infested with maggots and insects and covered with their own blood, pus, and vomit—are their only shield against the elements and shame. Each one of these is Jesus Christ. Clothe him and you have clothed the Son of the living God, who will not forget it on that Day.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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