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Dear Mr B,
I am grateful to have received your letter and I shall try to formulate an answer to it here. I believe I can already read the answer in a well-composed framing of the problem.
First then Genesis 3, the fall into sin and its aftermath. Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and were ashamed. It is difficult to discern precisely what that means, difficult in part because for centuries people read that passage under the influence of the Greeks, who viewed the corporal, the sexual as lower and base. What does it mean? Could it not be that what they saw was not so much their nakedness in the sense of being undressed as it was their frailty, their being unprotected – in contrast to the animals that had fur – but even deeper their being unprotected, their nakedness, their being separated from the Lord. They were ashamed. This expression also has two meanings in our language.
God then clothes them. Being dressed gives people a sense of self-confidence, and our clothing has become fully part of our personality. The extent to which this is so you can find in a humorous yet deep way in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, where he discusses the absence of clothing. Yet I believe we must also hold onto the idea that the nakedness and shame bear some connection with the sexual aspect. I sometimes feel that God made people that way for their own protection. Is the feeling of shame not a protection for a girl in our day as well, and is male timidity in this matter not its counterpart? But we must keep in mind that nakedness and shame in this sense are always connected with the most directly sexual.
It is good to reflect on these things. To say precisely what naked means in a generally valid sense is not even possible. That is a matter of custom that can change from period to period and people to people. Consider that girls as they walk around here in Holland are shameless in the eyes of the Balinese, for whom a woman may never expose her legs although there they all go around with their upper bodies exposed. Nevertheless, nakedness and shame are something that you find amongst all peoples, even the most primitive, but then only in connection with the pudenda, the ‘private parts’. It is typical that with many primitive peoples a man may feel free to show his member but not the phallus, which is much more directly connected with the sexual aspect – at celebrations in antiquity and possibly also with feasts of primitive peoples this was possible, but then we are talking about fertility rites, and then the taboo on these matters is only suspended for these special occasions.
Thus our conclusion is provisionally that shame is connected with the most primary sexual aspect, and the pudenda (the things about which people are ashamed) are in fact the genitals themselves (thus not a woman’s breasts); and further that shame is connected with our frailty, with our being unprotected in an everyday but also in a deeper religious sense.
That shame is directly related to the sexual, or perhaps one could better say to the erotic aspect, is clear from both practice and Scripture. A woman may show herself undressed to a physician, but there too there is usually a room where one may disrobe. Photographers’ models too come on the set entirely naked, for it is not their nakedness but the act of disrobing that has a much more directly erotic significance.
Remember that the height of shamelessness is the striptease, which is directly intended to arouse. Scripture accordingly says that men are not to uncover the shame of a woman whom they may not have, that is, to remove her covering. What the general practice was in those times is hard to know, but in many periods, such as the Middle Ages, when nude images were seldom made and the erotic aspect was far from having the central place it is given in our day, nakedness had a matter-of-fact place in everyday life, as in bathing or in the home – people slept naked and with many in a room. The subtleties of such matters, the connection of the erotic aspect with disrobing, we may perhaps infer from our own customs: a girl may appear wearing very little at the swimming pool or beach – in some countries she may even be entirely naked – and no erotically arousing significance is attached to it, while the same girl if she had to adjust her stocking while fully dressed, would turn away or dismiss herself although revealing less no doubt than at the beach. It would be shameless however if she were not to do that. The same applies to holding down one’s skirt while bicycling.
The pudenda, that is to say the parts which it would be shameless to show or exhibit, are thus in fact only the genitals or those parts of the body that because of the erotic implications one does not uncover in company where people are dressed. If we proceed now to consider sculpture and painting from this vantage point, we can establish several things. First, people have complied with this in practically all periods. Female nudes have a small cover over the primary sexual characteristic or simply do not have that feature – think of Greek statues and the statues of all eras, really, before the late nineteenth century. Then we witness the abrupt appearance of greater realism, which is to say that pubic hair and the like are painted or sculpted, whereupon the meaning of the images is also seen to have changed such that the objection based on Genesis 3 becomes operative. Shameless for example are some of Hodler’s paintings, but not Praxiteles’ Venus. The same is true of male statues. Naturally there is always a suggestion of the male member, but always very modest and with little emphasis. Here too one will encounter exceptions, but these are virtually always vulgar and unpleasant in their effect. The phallus is very seldom depicted in art – and when it happens, always either directly pornographic or else with a view to special circumstances, such as fertility rites with satyrs in antiquity (although even there people often exercised a certain reserve).
With respect to the nude we can add the following. There are two kinds, in principle, namely where the nude appears in frailty, as in the Middle Ages (remarkably enough with an indication of the pubic hair of the female figure); and there is the heroic, glorifying nude that we find in the works of the Greeks and a fortiori in the Renaissance, with Rubens, and so forth. Our time, with its downfall of humanism, can scarcely indulge such glorification any longer, and we therefore see, since the late nineteenth century, the realistic nude that is a direct representation of the reality, including the pudenda, without any reference to the idea of frailty in the Christian sense. Such figures often have a crude impact and people experience them as an insult to human dignity. Yet sometimes people in our century do endeavour to uphold old and deeply seated norms in these matters, for example with nude photographs, and so retouch them in order to remove especially the pubic hair – unless we are talking about the photography of nudists, thus of people who want to give nudity a place in normal social intercourse (which usually comes across however as quite unnatural). Nudism will perhaps become acceptable at the beach or a swimming pool, and I do not believe that that has to be prohibited if custom would start to allow it, but that is quite a different matter from ordinary social activities such as volleyball and the like. And if nudity would become allowed in instances where one is now wearing bathing suits, then the distinction between chaste and shameless will remain valid, just as girls can happily move about shamelessly in bathing suits and the like.
Now, you write that it is not permitted to glorify the body. Certainly, for in art that usually means glorifying human being. In that case however our argument is not directed at the nude but at this glorification. The question in art must always be not ‘Is it nude?’ but ‘What does the artist say with that nude?’ Michelangelo’s David of 1504 is a shameless statue, not because of its nudity but because with this nudity such a forthright confession is made of man’s greatness, of the Renaissance spirit in its most profound sense, that of the emancipation of humanity from God. Michelangelo no longer has any notion of frailty. A Venus by Giorgione, by Titian, a female nude by Rubens, for example in the Rape of the daughters of Leucippus, have nothing to do with violating the idea of Genesis 3 in the sense that nakedness should be covered but rather they extol human nature in its erotic aspect, in its warm humanity, in its fundamental aspect of relations between the sexes.
A discussion of these paintings must thus address the question whether these aspects may be extolled in this way without reference to humanity’s fallen situation, but on the other hand we may not say that people must always hide these things and never occupy themselves with them because the sexual is per se sinful. That is a Victorian viewpoint and it is unbiblical. Do not forget that the Bible contains the Song of Solomon and that men are advised in Proverbs to be aroused by their wife’s breasts [Proverbs 5:19: ‘may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love’].
You go on to say, correctly, that with these nude figures much more is expressed than simply that which is purely sensual, or to put it more sharply, the purely primary erotic aspect. Much more, for they are about human being in the fullest sense. The male-female relation in marriage is certainly not as in the case of animals purely and solely sexual, but there is a great deal more going on in the love relationship between a man and a woman. Also, a nude figure may even be entirely lacking in erotic implications, for instance when it is a metaphor for Truth.
Nude figures that may accordingly be judged entirely unobjectionable from a biblical standpoint, that on the contrary can be judged very positively, are Rembrandt’s Danae and Bathsheba. They are songs about the joy that has been given to us in the man-woman relation, including the directly sexual (but not restricted to that) without any exaggerated glorification of humanity accompanying it.
Thus we must always ask what meaning a nude has, what is said with it. Many eighteenth-century nudes, such as those painted by Boucher, are gallant nudes, nudes directly connected with adulterous erotic play (very refined but adulterous nonetheless), with flirtations and mistresses. They are idealized images of the courtier who passes his time making ‘conquests’.
And now Rodin. He stands close to the Renaissance, although he is a typically nineteenth-century figure in his emphasis on the psychological. His Kiss strikes me as entirely responsible, as an interpretation of a profound human value, although I am drawn more to Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, which in essence seeks to express the same thing. In contrast I regard L’éternelle idole as highly questionable. As woman is glorified in it as an object of enjoyment, I find the content of the work vulgar and therefore reprehensible; if the woman is declared a deity in it, I have every objection to that for reasons that need no explanation.
I have two additional comments. The fact that an image has a stimulating effect on us can certainly be subjective; it may be attributable to a variety of circumstances, but in general we will be able to figure out whether that is due to something in the image or something in us. In my lecture I also discussed this subjectivity, which differs from person to person, in connection with the need for self-discipline – in this respect there is freedom. Secondly, we must look at art with a view to what it says: the Rape of the daughters of Leucippus depicts an old myth, selected by Rubens in order to sing in a lofty rhetorical way about passion, desire, heroism, the greatness of life, the central place of the woman in this, and so on. He was certainly not all that enchanted by the story as such (although the classical element had a different emotional value in his day than in ours), yet it is also not simply a pretext for painting a crude kidnapping in a nudist camp. Here the theme is part of the rhetoric and the glorification, which also lifts it more into the realm of principles and values than that of actual everyday life. A late nineteenth-century painter simply makes a kidnapping of it: a naked woman is carried off on a horse by two soldiers whose intentions are questionable. It is precisely the dropping away of real human values in the man-woman relation and the exclusive concentration on a randy story without further depth that renders the painting vulgar and degrading. But that brings us close to pornography, defined by D.H. Lawrence as ‘to throw dirt on sex’. There the woman is an object of lust. This surfaces already with Ingres, who painted odalisques, and later on with Picasso. Perhaps there are people who carry on that way, but it makes a difference whether one violates a norm or lives without norms!
In conclusion, a final comment: this ultimately all has very little to do with clothing or the lack of it. The sex bombs used on magazine covers to catch the eye, with a hint that more may be revealed inside, are usually well dressed, but in their purely sexual effect or titillating intention they are violations of Genesis 2. This is shamelessness, separating sensuality from the rest of our humanity in its normativity and values.
These are a few thoughts. I went into them extensively because I regard the problem as very important for us, twentieth-century Calvinists who must emancipate ourselves from a Victorian past without sliding into the normlessness and shamelessness of the Freudians, and also because I believe that in this way we can come to understand better what art does and how it can express its message. I think it is instructive as well because when dealing with nudity in art we come into contact in such a direct way with the cultural-historical and current problem of the loss of a sense of norms and of insight into the worth of human values. I have also written it all out at such length because I hope eventually to use it in a little book that I am writing about Christians and art. I would be pleased if I could cite your letter and my reply, without mention of the name or circumstances. In that regard I would like to receive your reply, together with any additional questions, comments or objections you may have. I want to thank you already for that.
Yours sincerely,
H.R. Rookmaaker
April 11, 1961
Dear Mr B,
I am grateful to have received your letter. I had not forgotten it but was so busy that I put it aside for a while. I hope you do not find that too bad. I believe you probably no longer needed it for your paper. Here then is a short answer to your questions. Kuyper, I believe, contradicts himself. The distinctive service of Calvinism is that it emancipated art from ecclesiastical ties. So it is not correct to say that Calvinism did not have an art of its own, for precisely our seventeenth-century art, for example a still life, reflects a typically Calvinistic view of reality. May I leave it at that? Art style and lifestyle are to my mind closely connected. I can no longer recall what K. Schilder wrote about this, but I cannot concur in general with what he had to say about the theme of culture.
I do not reject common grace. It is an interesting theological construction, but I believe it proceeds from an entirely incorrect framing of the problem. I do not reject it because doing so would quickly draw me into these theological discussions. I simply believe that the entire debate skirts reality. It is a piece of scholasticism. As I see it, we are most easily finished with an answer in these matters if we say that the non-Christian lives in the same world, created by God, that the Christian lives in and that one can never step outside this world, not even through suicide. If we accept the theological framing of the problem, we always end up at such a theory of common grace or something similar but I just do not believe we should think in this vein.
Then the questions about the nude. The story of Noah I find difficult to apply in this matter. What were the customs in that time? Was it so terrible that a son saw his father’s nakedness? Or was the bad thing rather that he mocked his father for his drunkenness and lack of self-control? I do not believe that we can conclude from this or other passages that it is wrong for children to see their parents naked. I think the direct family relationship and living together as a family make things different in this case.
In the matter of uncovering, I will stick with my opinion for the moment. I do not believe that bathing naked in company as that occurs with many peoples has anything to do with glorification. It is instructive to notice that in the time that people began to glorify the human body, the Renaissance, nakedness as an everyday phenomenon disappeared. That sort of interested looking evoked the shame, but more importantly the ideal could not bear the confrontation with the sober reality. Titillation need not and will not come from an ordinary situation of nudity in a swimming pool (but we are unfamiliar with such a normal situation and so can have little feel for it) any more than from a normal clothed situation. It is instructive too that titillating magazines and the like seldom show full nudity – the partially clad is much more arousing. And a girl with a lovely figure can always have an arousing effect on a man, but that depends primarily on how she moves and behaves.
Rodin is a problem apart. His influence as I see it has not been very great. His psychologically oriented art was relatively unique in the visual arts, and so in that respect he stands much closer to the literature of the day than he does to his fellow artists, the painters and sculptors. I hope that the above may in some way have helped you further.
Kindest regards,
H.R. Rookmaaker
Published in M. Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (ed.): H.R. Rookmaaker: The Complete Works 4, Piquant – Carlisle, 2003.
