On Nudity

Thesequestions and answers were a part of the Westminster Discussions on Faith,Culture and Lifestyle, recorded at Westminster Theological Seminary  in January 1976 and edited by MarleenHengelaar-Rookmaaker.

Question:If art has an ethical side, that implies certain limitations. What are the limitations we need to consider andhow far does our freedom go? Forinstance, in depicting nudity?

As a rule,as a kind of yardstick, we can say that we should always be careful to judgeart by what it wants to say and not by what it portrays. Is it a sinful thingto portray the breast of a woman? I would say that’s a silly question. Becausean obscenity or something wrong in this respect are not defined by squareinches of flesh but are defined by what the portrayal wants to express. Manyyears ago I had a long discussion about this and I came up with the followingthought: why are Christians always talking about nudity, because what is reallyunhealthy, what is really wrong, the thing we should really be fighting isprecisely all the clothed women. I had in mind the cover images of themagazines around us which mostly use women as a kind of attraction feature. Ofcourse these women are nicely clothed – this was twenty years ago and they wereall nicely clothed then because one could not show more at that time, but ofcourse they were all very tempting and seductive, in a way they were adulterouspersons. So what matters is not the clothing or the absence of clothing but theintention.

There is agreat difference, and that’s where the confusion begins, between somethingthat’s social and something that’s in art. When you make a painting of a nudewoman, that has nothing to do with nudity in the social reality. Even if thereis a relationship it is not a direct one. Winckelmann, the great classicistictheoretician from the middle of the eighteenth century, said: ‘Why is Greek artso beautiful? That is because the artists were able to see nude figures aroundthem in daily life. And these people were all doing sports and that’s why theywere so beautiful.’ I would say that this is a naturalistic fallacy, becausethat was never true. The classical world was not such a fantastically idealworld where everybody walked around as if in a nudist camp. No, the [Greek]artists were painting and sculpting their ideas about humanity. Art is a metaphor,a symbol. I wish I could show you Jan van Eyck’s Eve [from the Ghentaltarpiece] at this moment, one of the most beautiful nudes ever paintedand one of the most chaste pictures in the world. Even though it is moreprecisely painted than most nudes are, in that it shows pubic hair and so on,nevertheless it is so pure. If people viewing such a picture have bad sexualthoughts, the source of such thoughts is inside them and not in the painting.But pictures with completely clothed figures can be very obscene and negativeand bad. So we should judge on the basis of the meaning of things and of whatis communicated, and not on the basis of a set of rules because that islegalistic.

Nudity isused as a metaphor and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people didnot have the prudishness that came later. And of course they did look back tothe Greeks. But why did I use nudes as examples in my lectures? Because theycommunicate easily, directly, strongly. To explain the same things without thenudes would have meant lectures three times as long – and probably less clear.

Question:But was it not because of their own nakedness that Adam was unable to look at Eve without shame, sothat God had to make clothes forthem?

I don’tthink that shame in this case should be understood in the sense of nevershowing any nudity. If in our culture it were a social custom that we bathe inthe nude on the beaches, then there would be a difference on the beach betweensome women and others. Some women would be very sexy and would go beyond thelimits of shame, and other would not. Just as at this moment some women withbathing suits are very unchaste, and very seductive, and sexually veryprovocative, and some are not. That has nothing to do with their clothes. Itall depends on how a person uses one’s body. Let me tell you a little story. Avery, very sexy woman came to L’Abri. This happened about fifteen years ago.She was a filmstar. She became a Christian after three weeks. And Dr Schaeffersaid to me later: ‘I wish I had some photographs: three weeks before and threeweeks after.’ Because three weeks afterwards she was not sexy anymore. What hadhappened? What happened was that her attitude to life and values had changed.But she had certainly not gone out and bought new clothes. She was wearing thesame dresses. It is not the dressing or the undressing that makes people chastebut the way we wear our clothes, the way we move, the way we express our corporality.

In artthere are two types of nudity. Kenneth Clark, who wrote a book on this, saysthat there is nudity in the sense of shame, as in medieval art, and heroicnudes, as you find for instance with Michelangelo. I would say that we find theleast shame of all in Michelangelo’s David. It’s a shameless sculpture.I say that not because he happens to be nude but because of his attitude. Hestands there and radiates: ‘Here I am. I’m not afraid. Look how beautiful Iam!’ But Adam [from the Ghent altarpiece] of Jan van Eyck standsin shame before the Lord. He says: ‘I am weak.’ Just like the Bible says thatevery person will stand naked before the Lord – that means with nothing tocover oneself. One’s weakness will be exposed; one will stand before the Lordknowing that one has failed. That is what shame means in Genesis 3.

There’sanother, related point to be made about shame. When God does something in theBible, it always has a double edge to it. I mean this: when God comes with thecurse he also brings grace. To be more precise, when God said: ‘From thismoment on death will be a reality’ no one said ‘Hurrah, now we are going todie.’ Nevertheless there is one reason for saying ‘Hurrah, people die.’ Justimagine for one moment that after the Fall people were not to die. That wouldmean having all the worst tyrants and criminals of all of history around us.Happily these people have finished their lives. In that there’s grace. Peopleare also afraid of dying and that puts a check on their wickedness, but the gangsterwho can live without fear of death will quickly become a really nasty menace.

Now thesame is true of shame. If God had not given shame to people (and I think it isa gift) then there wouldn’t be boundaries. Now when men and women approach eachother there are always barriers to overcome, little thresholds to cross, littledoors to open. A man never just jumps on a woman unless he rapes her and thenwe call it rape and that is wrong. But if a man comes to a woman, he starts bytouching her softly, and she accepts or answers his touch. And so they go onmeeting each other, and every time a little barrier has to be overcome. Whenthere are strong barriers we talk about shame. So there is a difference betweenbathing together in the nude, as is done in some places in the world (and Idon’t think there is anything wrong in that), and jumping into bed with one ofthe women. There are boundaries because there is shame. Shame is very much tiedup with our most intimate parts. If you look at paintings, you will find thatthere is a limit. The most intimate parts of a woman are never shown. A womancan stand without clothes without her intimate parts being visible. They arehidden. That’s maybe why it is easy to portray a woman in the nude, because onecan depict her completely in all her beauty and she can become a symbol for humanityin its manifold aspects while evading the real tough point. And you may seemany pictures of nude men, but rarely will you see an erection. If you do, itis usually very strong in a wrong sense. You will normally not see that,because that’s the moment of shame. It’s a gift of God that he put restraintson our sexual relationships. So we don’t have free love, thanks to the Lord,because God gave us shame. But we shouldn’t say one has to be ashamed wheneverone sees a person in the nude. That’s a little bit over the top and not how itwas meant to be. That’s a nineteenth-century interpretation that comes out ofVictorian sensibilitities. I think we should strive for the right barriers andthe right forms, and of course our own feelings are also involved here. Weshould strive for more freedom, more openness at this point, even though that isvery difficult. If parents are not able to deal with their children on this level,they should try to get their children to go further; maybe in two or threegenerations’ time we will have more openness. We shouldn’t be idealistic,though, for never in history was the man-woman relationship completely right.We live in an imperfect world as sinful beings.

Question:But how can you be positive about a painting like Rubens’s ‘Rape of the daughters of King Leucippus’,which in my opinion depicts sin?

I putRubens’s painting [see Plate 5] on the screen next to a horrible picture byCorinth that shows rape in a very cheap way. We need to understand what exactlyRubens is doing here. His painting deals with a subject that is not just rarein art but totally unique. He uses a classical story that talks about rape. Theinteresting thing is that Rubens depicts these men, who were guards, as goodguards with nothing rough about them. And the story goes on, for it says thatafterwards they immediately married these women, which means it was not rapefor rape’s sake in the bad sense of misusing a woman and then leaving her inthe road while getting away. You might say yes, it’s not the worst kind of rapebut nevertheless it is not according to the laws that God gave for the  man-woman relationship. I agree, but I don’tthink that’s the point. Because Rubens was searching for a very strong visualimage and he used the story to provide him with a motif: the motif of womanbeing the inspiration for man. The real content of that picture is womaninspiring man to great deeds. There is nothing against the Scriptures in that.The beauty of Rubens’s picture is exactly in its not telling about sex in the sensethat twentieth-century people talk about sex, but that it tells about theerotic in a very fully human sense. This to me is very beautiful and somethingwe have little understanding of today because sex has been brought down to theanimal level. It is precisely the man-woman relationship, a love relationship,which is exalted by this picture. So, don’t look at the little story in toonarrow, too myopic, a way because Rubens was only using the story as a metaphorfor something great he wanted to say, namely that woman, including her bodilypresence, yet not only by the sexual impulse but through the fullness of her womanhood,inspires man in the fullness of his manhood to great deeds.

Question:How do we determine what is beautiful, not only as to form but also as to content?

You ask forsomething that one knows. You ask for definitions, and definitions are sodifficult. There is a relationship between truth and beauty, a very narrowrelationship. The one painting of the nude woman is ugly, not because thepainter was a bad painter in the technical sense, or was below standard,because in his own class he was a very good one. But it is ugly becausealienation was built into the work. It lacks in its grasp of reality. Becauseof that, because of this ‘objectivity’ the woman becomes pornographic.Pornography always implies alienation. It’s something that is presented to usin a cold way, devoid of meaning, and we can then add our thoughts to it. Wecannot add our thoughts to the Rubens painting because the picture gives us ourthoughts. And there is true knowledge, an opening of our eyes so that we beginto see and know women in a new way. We wouldn’t know women unless they weredrawn for us. That’s why the pin-up is an eternal thing. But to have portraitsof women around us is important for us in order that we may grasp more and moreof reality and humanity. These portraits work as metaphors. The truth of apainting is certainly not divorced from its beauty.  

I have arecord at home. Suppose that you do not understand the language in which thesong is being sung and you would say to me: ‘That’s a beautiful song.’ Andsuppose I was a magician who could snap my fingers and say: ‘Now you canunderstand the language.’ And then I play the record again and you can hearthat from beginning to end it’s one big curse. Then, when the record finishes,you will no longer say it’s a beautiful song. For when you grasp the meaning ofthe song you will say: ‘Well, it’s very strange but in a way I now understandthat that melody, which I perhaps found intriguing, just makes the curse more powerful.’Because there is a unity in every good work of art, just as in every good humanthing there is unity. All the parts work together. A work of art gives us morethan just beauty. It is a trite remark to make when standing in front of apainting to say that it is beautiful. Rather, one tries to assess more of it,to determine what it means, what it expresses, what its relationship is toreality. That is very complex. I cannot give a simple definition and, to behonest, if I knew it I wouldn’t give it to you. I’m always asked: ‘Can’t yougive us a nice way to understand what beauty is and how you judge art?’ Ialways tend to say: ‘I know it exactly. It’s written on a little piece of paperand I have it in my pocket but I won’t tell you. Because if I tell you, thedanger is that you might believe me. And if you believe me, I would become thepope in art. And I don’t want to be the pope in art.’ There are no easy definitions.Just as there are no easy definitions of faith and love. But that doesn’t meanjudging art is random. No, it’s very precise. However, the difficulty is thatyou ask me a question that is universal, while I’m convinced that the universalcan only come to us in the specific. If at this moment we were standing infront of a specific painting, I could have told you what is beautiful and whatis ugly. With that there is always a measure of reality and truth implied. If alie is presented in a beautiful form, the lie becomes more ugly and that makesthe lie more of a lie. It is very interesting how that works in fairy tales:the bad woman, the stepmother, is usually ugly because her form is in relationto her content. But sometimes there is a very beautiful evil woman, theenchanting witch. Then she becomes even more ugly, just because she is so beautiful.Her beauty enhances her ugliness. If a person is tortured in a beautifulpalace, in a beautiful room with a lovely shape, the torture becomes morehorrible. That’s why tortures normally take place in dungeons, ugly places,more in conformity with the ugliness of the deed.

Question:Can we depict the negative?

Yes, we canportray corruption, murder and all the bad things in the world around us. Wecan protest in our art and show how ugly and bad these things are. But we mustbe very careful because the artists around us, the modern artists, also depictthese things, though in a very different way. In the way of gnosticism they saythat this whole world is bad. But if one paints rape as rape in order to sayit’s rape and therefore it’s bad, one has made a beautiful picture. At least,possibly so. In literature, in theatre or film it is possible to have verystrong moments that talk about things that are very ugly. If they are shown intheir ugliness, they are true. A film that I found wanting, just to give an example,is Barbara Streisand’s The Way We Were. It begins: leftwing girl, rightwingboy, meet each other, fall in love, but things are difficult, they have suchdifferent understandings and lifestyles. He’s a writer, she becomes hisconscience, as it were, and they marry. Well, people who marryleftwing-rightwing, they find it difficult. And the film shows us the difficulties.And it works, and it’s fine, it’s fantastic! They go to Hollywood and hebecomes a very famous filmmaker and so on. Up until that point the film is fineand beautiful. But at a certain moment the man compromises. And that can happen– that’s wrong, that’s ugly, he shouldn’t have compromised but he did, that’shuman. But then, how do they solve it?  

Well, inthe film they could find only this trite solution that the marriage has tobreak up, and so there is a divorce. On the very day the baby is born, the manleaves. In the next shot you see the woman ten years later, still a leftwinggirl walking around with a ‘Ban the Bomb’ protest march, and you see the mangoing into the Hilton with a beautiful woman for a fantastic dinner: a leftwingversus a rightwing attitude to life. I would say that at the moment of thedivorce that film became a total lie! And it’s bad propaganda, because it makespeople think that they can have a divorce that easily. But I know from experiencewith people who come to L’Abri that it doesn’t work that way. The man wouldnever have written another book in his life and the woman would have come,let’s say, to L’Abri and we would have had a long and hard time just to helpher live a normal human life again. It doesn’t work like that, it’s a lie. It’sa lie because it goes against reality, and the wrongness of the film is that itdoesn’t show that. It has a very sweet, sentimental ending where it could havehad a strong and real one. We always have to do two things, namely to showugliness as ugly and to hold up beauty as beautiful. If we don’t do both at thesame time the result will always be found wanting. Because then beauty becomes sentimentalor we become gnostic in saying the world is bad. There is always a tensionbetween accepting that we live in a sinful and broken world and at the sametime not accepting it. Both acceptance and  nonacceptance need to be shown, and they needto be shown together in their inner tension.

Question:But isn’t Rubens’s painting a lie as well? Does it not suggest rape?

No, itdoesn’t suggest rape. The picture talks about strong marriage relationships. Ituses rape as a metaphor but it’s not a story about rape. The other pictureshows rape in the bad sense, but this one is not about a real rape – Rubensnever said: ‘If you rape a woman it’s beautiful.’ He would have said: ‘That’sugly. But the married situation is fantastic, because then woman becomes aninspiration to the man.’ And if anyone in the world could say that, it wasRubens himself. He was married twice and both times very happily. He hasdepicted his wives, also in the nude, because they were his inspiration, in aphysical way but in a much deeper way as well.

So youmisunderstand the word ‘rape’ in the title of the painting, because the workbrings us into deep realities. Seventeenth-century pictures always stress thestrong relationship between man and woman. Rape in the sense of real rape youfind in the etching by Rubens of the wife of Potiphar. There you have sheer sexin all its ugliness. Rubens and Rembrandt always show a very high regard forwomen – not as sex objects (that is twentieth-century) but in the fullness oftheir humanity. The woman is shown as an inspiration to the man, and not onlyin relation to her body, because then we get into the Playboy kind of thing. Itis not the playgirl that inspires the playboy to be horny! But it is the womanin the fullness of her womanhood that inspires the man to be a real man and todo great deeds in the world. And it can only be done if they live together in avery close relationship, because the strongest unit in the world is a marriagein which the partners are fully man and fully woman. And that’s what Rubens istelling us about. This is clear in all of his other pictures and it’s so clearwhen you read seventeenth-century literature. They had a much better andhealthier view of marriage than many people around us today, even in Christiancircles. Their ideals were much better than ours, and much less sentimental.

Question:Do we then need to have knowledge of all that is implicit in these artworks in order to be able tounderstand what they are saying?

No. I didstart off by saying that you see what you know, and of course your knowledge isimplied. But it’s not true that one can only understand a painting when one hasa lot of art-historical knowledge. That is drawing a wrong conclusion out of aright definition. What we chance upon here is exactly the greatness ofseventeenth-century art. I’m not saying that there is no criticism to be madeof Rubens, but I think we should begin with giving honour where honour is due.Rubens is one of the greatest artists in the world. He was a man who at leastat this point had a very deep understanding, which he was able to express verybeautifully. So, let’s not begin with criticism but end with it, very softly inthe case of this painting. Rubens’s art, as well as Dutch and other seventeenth-centuryart, works in layers. So, if you’re walking in a palace with Rubens’s Rapeof the daughters of King Leucippus hanging on the  wall, what you see is a very beautifulornament. Fantastic colours. You  canpass it by like that. But when you stop and you look at it, what you  see is this: movement, magnificently paintedwomen and men. That is  the next layer.Then you begin to ask about the story. What does it tell  me? Next you reflect on the implications ofthe story. Why was it used?

I tried toclarify the meaning of subject matter in seventeenth-century art with my schemeof motifs and themes. The painting is not just telling a little story but thestory is used to depict a motif. Once you have understood the motif, you can godeeper and deeper until you end with the universal: that love is so important.And then you begin to see that this is one of the greatest works of art. Nowwhen you come to Munich for the first time and you stand in front of thatpainting, you are not able to talk about it like I am doing now. That’sobvious, because I am a professor in the history of art and you are not. Butthat does not mean that I see things that you do not see. Because the moment Istart seeing things that you do not see there is something wrong.

Maybe thereis something wrong here. Maybe you were raised in the wrong framework.Let me try to clarify this with a story. I gave this same lecture with theRubens painting half a year ago in Calgary. During the lecture some people leftthe room. And the next day many people came up to me and said: ‘Are these nudesnot obscene? Is that not pornography?’ Well, when one person comes to you likethat, you think to yourself: ‘Maybe I overrated my audience, maybe I made amistake, maybe I didn’t make myself clear, of course these people are not accustomedto this type of thing, after all they live in Calgary.’ But when people kept onasking me the same thing, I became very worried. Two evenings ago I gave alecture about God’s salvation and our calling. When I had finished, someonesaid to me: ‘I have a question: if a Christian is an artist and he goes to anart school, is that a good thing, for he has to paint nudes and so on?’ What ishappening here? Are you not living people? You can compare it with this: sayyou are going to start a new bank. You need to have money, a building,personnel, and to have an understanding of banking and money problems. But ifyou would then come to me and tell me that you are worrying all the time about whereyou are going to buy the paper for your office, I would say that maybe youshouldn’t start a bank, because your mind is too fixed on insignificant things.Well, if you talk about art, you don’t talk about nudity. It’s such a littlething in relation to the big things!

Of coursenudity is a loaded thing. Why? Not because the nude is so loaded, but becausehumanity is so loaded and reality is so loaded. And it’s good to think aboutit, but we shouldn’t make it too strong. I get really worried when people inAmerica always talk about it. I think it’s completely out of context. It’s alittle thing, not a big thing. It’s so beautiful. And if anybody wants to dragthe Rubens down and say that it is pornography, I really get angry because theydon’t know what they are talking about and they are debasing the world. Theysay that something that is beautiful is ugly. That’s rape, rape of the beautyof that woman in that painting. I’m worried about America, I’m worried about Christianity.Why are we talking about it? Is it small legalism? Is it sentimentality? Isreality in which men are men and women are women too strong for us? Havingbodies? I’m worried that we may end up as people who don’t have bodies, whodon’t live, who are dead people! This reminds me of the question of a hippie,and I think it is one of the most forceful questions we have to answer. And weas Christians have the answer, and we have to live the answer. The question is:Is there life before death?

So maybeyou were raised in a wrong framework and I’m challenging that framework, thelegalistic fundamentalism. The answer to fundamentalism is not to jump into theworld and become worldly, but the right response is to get back to theScriptures because the Scriptures do embrace life in all its fullness. Peoplein the past said it is impossible that the Song of Songs could be about therelationship between men and women, it has to be a kind of metaphor for Christand the church. Well, of course, the Bible is full of this: the relationship betweenChrist and the Christian community is that of the bride and the groom.Therefore the Song of Songs is also talking about Christ and the church. But inthe first place it’s talking about the relationship between a man and a woman.We barely dare to read it at table to our children because it’s so strong,strong with all the beauties of life. God says in Ezekiel: ‘I found you lyingnaked in the wilderness. And you were bathing in your blood, you were a newbornbaby. And I bathed you and I raised you, and then you became beautiful and yourbreasts were like towers . . .’ And so on. That’s the way God speaks about itin the Bible, not as a shameful thing but as something beautiful. Why do we tryto rape the Bible and take these things out of it?

Question:Why are evangelical or fundamentalistic people in America so very tight about nudity in art?

Somebodygave me a very interesting answer recently: ‘It is because they have alwaysused that little tag to avoid talking about art.’ As a result, when anyonebegins to talk about art, the very first thing they respond with is: ‘O yes,but then you have to go to college and draw nudes and that’s no good.’ Thenthey don’t need to think about it any further. So they cling to this littlequestion to avoid the big questions. Even so the interest in art is growing andthere are many young Christian artists, which is a very new situation and oneI’m very happy about. It’s so important that artists are there, for there willnever be a real reformation without the arts, because the arts bring it to us. Neverthelessthere are questions, and I am not denying that. We need to look at these thingsfrom a historical perspective, with an understanding of history and culture,but twentieth-century people tend to be weak in this respect. I remember someyears ago saying to an audience of nice American girls from some university:‘You must understand as you’re all sitting here very nicely dressed that if we happenedto be in Bali, of course, you would all be considered very immoral. For in Baliwomen walk around with the upper part of their body uncovered but for a womanto show her ankles is considered obscene.’ Cultural customs do play a big role.And we should be very careful to judge other cultures. When people, let’s sayin Japan, bathe together in the nude that doesn’t mean that they are immoralpeople; it only means that they have a different way of doing things.

In Europesince the beginning of Christianity the attitude to nudity has always beenambiguous. Sometimes people said yes, sometimes they said no. Some of thethings they did we may find strange, but it’s our own time that I find verystrange indeed. When I go on an excursion with my students it’s impossible forboys to sleep in the same room as girls. And everybody would think it verystrange if that should happen. But at the same time these same boys and girlsread things and look at things that everyone in a previous age (and that isperhaps just ten years ago) would have considered wrong. There’s a strangetension in our world in that things which are not acceptable are consideredacceptable while acceptable things are considered unacceptable.

In thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was on the whole a much more healthyapproach to these things than there is today. People were not prudish. There isa very interesting story I want to mention: during the time of Cromwell therewas an Englishman who travelled in Holland and kept a diary. He tells us abouthis experiences when he visited Delft. What he talks about was not anythingextraordinary but something very normal. He went to stay at an inn. As he camein he asked: ‘Do you have a bed for me?’ And they said: ‘Yes.’ He ate and dranksomething and then the guests were ushered to the sleeping hall. There were nosmall rooms, just one or two big rooms with many beds. And in these beds women,men or couples would sleep. And as they all slept naked in those days (theydidn’t have any pyjamas) everybody would undress, because that is how one wouldgo to bed. And nobody thought anything about it; it was the most natural thing.So this Englishman describes how he woke up in the morning and saw a lovely ladywake up and rise. He says: ‘And I looked as she dressed, because this Dutchfashion is such an interesting thing. It’s so different and wonderful.’ Lateron he mentions how he didn’t dare to kiss the hand of that lady because thatwas something one just did not touch. So they were not prudish, but at the sametime they had strong morals.

In thehomes of those days the beds were in the living-room. In Holland they werebuilt into the walls, and one found that in many European countries. So, let’ssay you were having a gathering in the evening and the daughter of the housesaid: ‘It’s time for me to go to bed, for tomorrow I have to wake up early. Yougentlemen, you just talk on.’ Then she would go to bed, and that would happenin the room. All this changed in the middle of the eighteenth century, one ofthose very difficult passages in history. Somewhere around 1730 or 1740 therewas a medical doctor in Lausanne who published a little book about masturbationsaying that masturbation causes sicknesses. He had made it all up, but everyonebelieved him. And people started to consider lust as something sinful or bad orugly. Someone in Holland recently made a very extensive study of this. And thisman, who is not a Christian, came to the conclusion that the change occurredfirst of all in humanistic circles. Humanism brought in the change and aboutten to fifteen years later the Christians followed suit – which to me is atragic moment in history. Why did the humanists have such a negative attitudetowards lust and the body? Well, just imagine a duke reading in his library.He’s reading the latest thing: Diderot and the Encyclopaedia fromFrance. He’s very well educated and he reads French. And so he reads: ‘What isa man?’ The answer is basically this: ‘There is no difference between peopleand animals and plants and things.’ There is no difference, people are justlike the animals. Who said that people were so different?

Of coursethis was meant to be a very violent antichristian statement. It was alsosomething completely unproven. Suppose the duke who was reading that book thensays: ‘Wonderful what this man is saying, it’s great, fantastic, convincing.’An hour later his wife, the duchess, comes in. As he has just been reading thatthere is no difference between people and animals, when the duchess comes in,basically, she is equivalent to a female rabbit. And he is a rabbit, and theyproduce children. But it’s a little bit difficult to look at the duchess, whois a very cultured person, as a kind of rabbit. So, what should one do? Well,in order to accept Diderot and the Encyclopaedia and all that went withit, one had to save one’s humanity. And in order to save one’s humanity one hadto push human carnality right out of the picture, which people certainly did.That’s my explanation of why people became so prudish.

In thenineteenth century people even went so far that little girls could have anoperation to take away a little piece of their body in order that they wouldnever enjoy sex, because sex was so lustful and sinful. It went that far, I’mnot inventing this. But as a Christian I would say that if God gave women thatlittle part, even if it is there only for sexual arousal and enjoyment, thenwe’re not going to say it’s wrong. We have to accept it from God’s hand and saythank you. It was really wrong that the Christians followed the humanists. It’svery interesting that nowadays the humanists violently reject the repression ofsex and have turned around to an overindulgence in sex. But Christians, beingafraid of the overindulgence – and it’s good not to go along with it – cling tothe repression instead of raising their own voice and saying clearly what is good.I am not saying that it is easy to have a right balance, but we do need torethink these things.

Even if wedo gain a new perspective on sex and nudity and our bodies, this doesn’t meanthat we can change everything . . . by tomorrow. There’s too much emotioninvolved, because these things are so very deep and important. Also, the way wewere raised and the things that have been brought to us from our own backgroundgo very deep and it’s very difficult to just jump out of them. So, when a youngartist comes to me and he says: ‘I’m in the academy, but I have difficulties ingoing to the life-drawing class’ my first reaction would be: ‘Why don’t you tryit, because you will find out in five minutes that it’s not as you think. Ithas nothing to do with sex. But if you continue to have difficulties, you knowthere’s Christian freedom and there’s no one who’s going to force you.’ Just asPaul said: if you cannot eat meat because for you the meat is contaminated,then don’t eat it because you cannot go against your conscience. Though thereis a very interesting passage in the Bible, in one of the letters of John,where it’s written: if your conscience goes against you, but God says you cando it, God knows better, so don’t be afraid. However, if someone comes to meand says: ‘I really can’t do that, it’s against my conscience,’ I would say:‘Never force yourself.’ Because whatever we do we must do to the honour of God.Even if there’s freedom to draw nude figures, this should never be forced uponanyone. But I would also like to stress that we should think these issuesthrough carefully. If personally we cannot do certain things, we should not dothem. But that does not mean others who can do those things are sinful andwrong.  

Published in M. Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (ed.): H.R. Rookmaaker: The Complete Works 3, Piquant – Carlisle, 2003. Also obtainable as a CD-Rom.