Other considerations enter in too. On the one hand, clothes symbolize our external lives—the junk that doesn’t matter in the end. So Jesus tells us that the body is more than clothes (see Luke 12:23). But on the other hand, clothes also express the heart of the wearer. In the parable of the wedding banquet, the sinner was thrown out because he neglected to wear the wedding garment (Matthew 22:1–14). In Scripture you should not show up for a feast in rags, but neither would you wear rich apparel instead of sackcloth and ashes when you fast.
In short, clothes are never merely clothes. They mean. They express. Clothes are also extensions of ourselves, and they can even be sacramental. In the Old Testament there is, for instance, enormous attention paid to the clothing of the high priest—because clothing speaks. For similar reasons Paul tells us:
Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Romans 13:12–14)
And so the Church tells the newly baptized, “You have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ. See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity.”
This is easy to misapply, as European missionaries did in reasoning, “We are from Christian Europe, while these Africans are savages.” This thinking resulted in some of the silliest acts of colonialism: Africans forced to abandon their own customary clothing and wear nineteenth-century frock coats and top hats in equatorial Africa. Much can be made of such folly, and the enemies of the Church’s missionary enterprise have not hesitated to do so. But these same enemies of evangelization think nothing of imposing on the entire Third World one particular piece of clothing called the condom.
Indeed, the First World labors with might and main to fill the Third World with Madonna T-shirts, Nike shoes, and the rest of the output of a post-Christian consumer culture in a manner every bit as colonial as that of Victorian England. It’s just that the colonizers are now corporations instead of nation-states. The tendency of Euro- American culture to impose itself on the world is as vibrant now as a century ago, but what that culture now regards as the highest good is no longer God and country but consumerist, hedonist, democratic capitalism.
What is more, the First World has largely succeeded in these efforts. For all the maundering heard in politically correct circles about the horrors of the Church allegedly eradicating native cultures, one seldom sees Chinese diplomats speaking before the UN in seventeenth- century Chinese garb, untouched by Western fashion trends. Visit New Zealand, and the Maori will be cheerfully dressed in jeans and T-shirts; they’re not pining for precolonial Maori fashion. You don’t bump into Chinese women with bound feet (thank God), and the guys who run the gigantic, gaudy casino on the Indian reservation a few miles north of me have sartorial tastes that run more toward Gucci and less toward Chief Sealth. In a global economy, it turns out that people prefer what’s cheap, comfortable, and trendy over the solemn preservation of their own indigenous culture. It may be a loss, but it’s a loss as old as Joseph’s willingness to abandon his Semitic fashion choices for the clothes, perfumes, and makeup of the Egyptian elite (see Genesis 37–47).
All this is to say that, while we are commanded to clothe the naked, the Church largely leaves it up to us and our very loosey goosey sense of what is appropriate when it comes to how we are to do that. The Church seeks “enculturation”: affirming what is good and natural in local customs of dress but calling us away from immodesty and depravity in that matter as in others. Missionaries in the Church’s history (like Matteo Ricci) adopted the approach of wearing whatever the locals were wearing. Others have thought it necessary to define naked not as “lacking clothes” but as “lacking modest clothes.” In our sexually deranged post-Christian culture, it is easy to dismiss such people as cultural imperialists while forgetting that some of this thinking is directed not at “savages” but, quite justifiably, at our own culture.
One can, for instance, question the wisdom of clothing seven-year-olds as slatterns and sending them out in public to perform “Single Ladies.” Technically, the children who performed that dance were “clothed”. Indeed, they had more clothes on than a San tribesman on the Kalahari. But in the grammar of fashion as it is spoken in the West, the message was “Show me a culture that despises virginity, and I’ll show you a culture that despises childhood innocence.” Such a display aims not to clothe the naked but to come as close as possible to naking the clothed for the delectation of perverts. We needn’t be shocked that such a culture produces vast quantities of child porn.
Clothing, like all things human, is not something you can reduce to mere materialism, any more than the words on this page can be adequately understood only as black marks on white paper. Clothes have a language and grammar that speak in highly particular cultural contexts. We must understand that language and grammar as we clothe the naked, just as we must understand the language and grammar of food as we feed the hungry. Nobody wears mere clothes, just as nobody eats mere food. Offering bacon to a starving Jew in Auschwitz is not a work of charity but adds insult to injury. Giving a saltine cracker to a birthday child instead of a cake does not say “I love you.”
As a general rule, the command to clothe the naked is concerned primarily not with the need for human warmth but with the need for human dignity. Our task as Catholics is to clothe the naked in accord with the prevailing cultural “grammar” of virtue and to acknowledge human dignity thereby. It is to remember that clothes were made for man, not man for clothes—and that, above all, we are to:
put off the old nature with its practices and …put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:9–14)
(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).
Advertisement
