Leaving behind us for a moment all of the wearied and wheel-rutted arguments for and against “modesty” and all of the recent condemnations of “purity culture” I want to consider, if only in passing on this Monday morning, the nature of “the veil” —by which I mean here anything drawn across the body in order to give it a glory and a covering.
Such coverings in the Bible do not obstruct or apologize for the body, neither do they dissemble or redact it. They exult the bodies on which they are wrapped. They glorify them. This makes them an instrument of love. Unlike false coverings, which degrade and shame the bodies of those who wear them, glorious biblical coverings magnify the Image of God in use in both aesthetic and symbolic ways. They help us see the body for what it is. In this way the biblical view of clothing is apocalyptic: glorious clothing unveils the truth of the human body even as it veils the body in certain ways.
This is why, for instance, the Lover and Beloved of the Song express simultaneously the desire to clothe nakedness and to uncover it.
One thing accomplished by biblical glorious coverings is love. The veils and garments most fitting to the human person help us create a threshold of symbol and ritual around the body which protects it from sheer exhibition and commodification. It protects the human body, the Image of God, from the violence of immediate accessibility.
Byung-Chul Han notes the way in which exhibition, which plagues our society, “destroys any and all possibilities for erotic communication” (32). Exhibition coerces the human into a “naked face without mystery or expression —reduced simply to being on display[…]” Exhibition empties the human of the person. One is no longer a person, one is “just there for the taking”.
The problem is not nakedness per se, it is when the human body is excavated from being wrapped in love, in relationship, in ritual, in language, in garments, etc., all the ways in which we are in-vested with personhood. Adam and Eve were ashamed int he garden not because they suddenly realized their nakedness, or because nakedness suddenly became loathsome, but because they lost the “garments” of Yahweh’s glorious covering. As Bonhoeffer suggests:
Man perceives himself in his disunion with God and with men. He perceives that he is naked. Lacking the protection, the covering, which God and his fellow-man afforded him, he finds himself laid bare […] shame is man’s ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement from the origin […] (24).
Thus exhibition, is at work in both the shame-based coverings (“cover it up I do not want to see that" its gross and dirty”), as well as the postured and manicured stylization of the body which renders the person edible for the demands of materialism (“yeah, work-it, show off your good side”) —which are the demands to have the human body without the glory of covenant.
Love covers even as it unveils. The practical application of this paradox can be found in John Paul II’s fantastic saying: “There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.”