We have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass.” … Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There’s no living with it till we recognize that one of its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon. —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
It’s not hyperbole to say that the ancient Greeks invented the body, at least in art. Sculpting the body was not only an artistic preoccupation but also a moral and social duty. The body didn’t belong to the person so much as the polis. Socrates is a curiosity because, even as he admired hard bodies at the gymnasium for their capacity to imitate the forms of Beauty (kalos) and Goodness (agathos) and regarded obesity as a sign of withdrawal from the public square, he had become fat himself—raising suspicions about his loyalty to Athens and his piety toward the gods. As a bearer of meaning, a plump, scrawny, or ugly body communicated moral defect, effeminacy, political apathy, or divine punishment—perhaps all of the above. A buffed and beautiful body communicated virtuous excellence (arête), masculinity, engagement in public affairs, and divine favor.
Sculptors visualized the contrast of values. A marble statuette from the Hellenistic Greek or Roman period depicts Socrates as possessing “the balding, snub-nosed, chubby-cheeked, pug-faced, and pot-bellied face and body of a satyr, the debauched follower of Dionysos, the god of wine,” as art historians Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner observe in The Greek Body. The 4th-century doryphoros or “spear bearer,” a masterpiece of bronze worker Polycleitus, typifies the idealization of the male body that Socrates praised, if not ogled. It’s not the clothes that make the man but his naked body. The doryphoros struts the kind of body that’s the envy of every man, the kind featured on the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine: a six-pack stomach and etched pectorals, an iliac crest on the torso, firm buttocks, powerful thighs, and sharply defined calves. His beardless face signifies youthful vigor and his small penis sexual restraint. Above all, the doryphoros satisfies the canon of beauty developed by Polycleitus. Influenced by the Greek cosmologists and physicians who emphasized a balance of opposites, sculptors tried to achieve perfect harmony. Jenkins and Turner claim the doryphoros “relied for its effect upon an arrangement of limbs and muscles into a biochemical system of weight bearing and weight free, engaged and disengaged, stretched and contracted, tense and relaxed, raised and lowered parts.”
The Greeks had a punning saying—Bíos, Bíos—that meant “Life is a bow.” The tension of binary opposites must be preserved like a drawn bow; otherwise, the fragile cosmos would be at risk. Where the sculpted athlete, warrior, or god showed off the divine mathematics of beauty, the sculpted hermaphrodite, centaur, or old nurse threw off the symmetry, leaving the salient impression that only virile twentysomething males can aspire to beauty. (Aristotle described the woman as “a natural deformity,” clumsily approximating Beauty as embodied by man.)
The Greek Body is a handsome volume of photographs and commentary, featuring Greek and Greco-Roman sculpture in marble, bronze, and terra cotta from the collection at the British Museum. Jenkins and Turner skillfully narrate the conceptualization and representation of the human body from the idealized male and female (when women were admitted to the club) to the later fascination with diversity and realism—a development that can be construed as the politics of recognition, in which the North African slave, Persian foreigner, grotesque hunchback, and flabby prostitute are given due attention in an increasingly cosmopolitan society, or as the decline of Greek heroism and superiority. Call it a perverse pleasure, but I relish the authors’ art talk because it entertains while educating: “The small-is-beautiful aesthetic is endorsed in art by those exceptional instances where male genitals are unnaturally large. In representations, for example, of the comic theatre, actors wear skimpy tunics with vast phalloi dangling down below the hem. Failure to control these wayward pendula is a hilarious sign of social dysfunction.”
Here’s a penetrating insight about the relation between art and the spectator from classicist Simon Goldhill’s book Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives:
‘Art’ allows the spectator to stare at what would otherwise be unacceptable, but it also polices the gaze carefully. The sculpted or painted body treads a fine line between the desired idealism and a worrying realism. If the image of the body becomes too redolent of dirt, or the messiness of actual sexual activity, it becomes disgusting. When a viewer looks, any awareness of his or her own body—and thus of his or her own sexuality, morality, mortality—needs constant regulation: society always worries about images of the body.
How, then, did the Greeks police the gaze? Judging by the exquisite photographs in The Greek Body, the 4th-century sculptures that feature the ideal male body steer the eye away from our mortal coil and toward an existence fitting of the Elysian Fields, where aging, infirmity, and death never touch the flesh. Because human life was snuffed out prematurely by war and disease, Greeks worried about their extinction like few of us do when peace and longevity prevail. They enshrined glorious manhood in the eternality of stone or metal, bracketing the side of man that Blaise Pascal called “feeble earthworm,” “sink of uncertainty and error,” and “refuse of the universe” while concentrating only on his side that is “judge of all things,” “depository of truth,” and pride of the universe.
Is it any wonder, in light of all this, that Hellenism animated the 19th-century cult of the body in Germany, where the Aryan race was ideologically linked to the Greeks because they were perceived as the taproot of human greatness? Friedrich Nietzsche maintained, “We are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluation, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were; but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies!” The German aspiration to become Greek in their bodies manifested itself in the Romantic love of nature, the modern reinvention of the Olympic Games, and, horrifyingly, in the Nazi war-machine.
We Christians might sniffily dismiss this aspiration as neo-pagan nonsense, but we should be more circumspect than censorious, recognizing, first, how beholden we ourselves are to the Greek body-image and, second, how our historical efforts to imagine the Christian body have often been inadequate, even deeply flawed. When a distinguished scholar like Goldhill summarily claims that the Christian tradition “despises the body as sinful, and longs for a spiritual, non-materialistic life,” the temptation is to fault him for being naïve or mistaken. I propose instead that Christians take an inventory of our tradition and confess that the inversion of Greco-Roman culture went too far, resulting in an unbiblical view of the body that motivated the theologian Origen to subdue his erections through the irreversible act of castration and the ascetic Simeon Stylites to extinguish bodily enjoyment by standing on a sixty-foot pillar in Syria for thirty years, refusing, as much as possible, food, drink, and sleep; in turn, his eyesight disappeared, his vertebrae dislocated, and his feet split open, emitting a putrid smell and attracting maggots. While these examples are extreme, they reveal a wrong turn in thinking Christianly about the body. Mortification of the flesh became just as much of a competition to Christians as glorification of the flesh was to Greeks. Neither attitude toward the body gets it right.
Christians should begin by remembering that “two great figures, Adam and Christ, overshadow the whole of human history,” as Reformed theologian David VanDrunen posits. “The fate of every other individual depends on the two of them.” Aesthetically and theologically, we can put Adam and Christ into a dialectical relationship. Adam’s fallen body has the appearance of vigor and beauty, but it’s vulnerable to sickness, enervation, and death, not to mention shot through with sin. Lest we become athletes of suffering like Simeon Stylites, we ought to affirm that Adam’s body was created by God and pronounced “very good.” Even in its fallen condition, it still bears the divine imprint. Christ’s resurrected body, by contrast, may bear the markings of his torture but is healed and glorified, free of the world’s weariness and the flesh’s iniquities. Where the Greek submitted his body to the polis, a Christian should submit his body to the ekklesia, consecrating it as the temple of the Holy Spirit.
The Christian body resembles the first Adam, but it’s slowly being conformed to the image of the second and last Adam. “Behold! I tell you a mystery,” the apostle Paul teaches. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:51-53, ESV). Adam’s body dies. So, too, our aesthetic works will pass away; it’s foolish to load them with an eschatological burden, as if the world-to-come depends on what we do rather than what Christ has already done and will do. Just as we’re instructed to glorify God with our body, we would do well to also glorify him in our artistic renderings of man (and woman), delicately keeping that Pascalian paradox.
Christopher Benson is a writer in Denver. His work appears in Christianity Today and The Weekly Standard. He blogs at Bensonian.org.
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