Before The Fig Leaf
I did not set out to spend thirty years thinking about Genesis. It came to me sideways, through the men in the room—through things they said, or refused to say, or said in a way that suggested they were working against an older script.
One man, a lapsed Catholic in his sixties, lay on the table and said: “This is what I imagine paradise felt like. Before they ate the thing.” He said it with his eyes closed, without embarrassment, and I understood from his tone that he was not being theological. He was describing a quality of presence—being in his body without the static of assessment or apology. But he had reached for Genesis to describe it, which told me something about where the static came from in the first place.
The text is sparse. Genesis 2:25: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” One verse. Then the fruit, then the opened eyes, then Genesis 3:7: “they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” What precedes the shame is not described. What produces it is not explained. The nakedness that was present and untroubling becomes, in the space of two verses, the nakedness that requires covering. Something has changed. The text does not say what the body was before that change, only that whatever it was, it is different after.
Augustine spent considerable energy on this two-verse gap. What he concluded, laid out most fully in On Marriage and Concupiscence, was that the change was located specifically in a bodily response that the rational will could no longer control. Before the Fall, he argued, the body was obedient to the soul. After it, certain movements of the body—he was particularly interested in the male erection—occurred without the consent of the person they belonged to. This involuntary quality was itself the sign of the disorder: the body had become, in his word, disobedient. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “for them to be occupied in laudable procreation without shameful lusts.” The shame arose not from the body in itself but from the body’s refusal to remain under rational governance.
This is precise in a way that has consequences. Augustine was not saying the body is disgusting. He was saying the body’s independence from the will is what requires management. The male body in particular—because its evidence of arousal is visible in a way that female arousal is not—becomes, in this account, the site at which the disorder of the Fall announces itself most legibly. The male erection is, for Augustine, the sign of original sin made flesh. What you cover, when you sew together the fig leaves, is the evidence of your own disobedience.
The men who came to me sometimes arrived carrying something that felt, when I had to find a word for it, like Augustine’s account in bodily form. Not as belief—most of them had no conscious relationship to Augustine—but as a texture of experience. A sense that the body’s responses were, precisely, not fully under control, and that this not-fully-under-control was both the point of being there and the thing that required management. Several men arrived with erections and apologised for them, which I found one of the more intriguing social rituals I witnessed over the years. They were apologising to me for something their bodies had done without the full consent of their wills. Augustine would have recognised the gesture exactly.
What is less often noted, I have found, is what Genesis says before the fig leaf. The verse that precedes the shame—“naked and unashamed”—carries its own weight. The Catholic theologian John Paul II, in a series of lectures delivered in the early 1980s known as the Theology of the Body, spent considerable time on this verse, and reached a reading quite different from Augustine’s.
He argued that the original nakedness was not a state of innocence merely in the sense of ignorance—not simply that Adam and Eve had not yet learned to be embarrassed—but that it expressed a positive quality: that the body was, in the beginning, transparent to its own meaning. It could be seen fully without the seeing becoming possession or objectification. “The nakedness that makes woman an object for man, or vice versa,” he wrote, “is a source of shame. The fact that they were not ashamed means that the woman was not an ‘object’ for the man nor he for her.” The shame that arrives after the Fall is, in his account, a loss of that transparency—the body becoming opaque, requiring concealment not because it is bad but because something in the way of seeing it has been damaged.
I notice that John Paul’s reading and Augustine’s reach the same scriptural text from almost opposite directions, and that both of them are doing something I recognise from the room. What I watched, in the men who came, was not a single relationship between a man and his body but a range—men who seemed to inhabit their bodies with a quality of ease that was not performance, and men who seemed to be at a slight distance from their bodies, managing them rather than living in them. The Augustinian men and the Edenic men, very crudely. And the range between them was not obviously correlated with anything I could identify from the outside—not with age, or with what they did for work, or with any visible feature of the body itself.
What I have read suggests that the tradition was never quite as unified as Augustine’s formulation implies. The early Christian communities, before Augustine’s enormous influence had fully settled, held different positions. In the baptismal practices of the second and third centuries, the person being baptised entered the water entirely without clothes. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, described the sequence: the candidate strips, is anointed with oil, professes belief, is immersed three times, emerges, and is clothed in white. The nakedness was not incidental. One scholar, Michael Wilson, suggested that we “resist any suggestion that nakedness is being employed lightly—it is a costly word to express a costly truth.” The person going into the water went in their original condition, before the fig leaf. What they came out in was something new.
I find that image genuinely strange to hold beside Augustine. Here is the same nakedness—the body without cover—functioning not as the sign of disorder but as the condition for restoration. The pre-Fall state and the redeemed state meeting at the baptismal pool, the body exposed not as evidence of sin but as the medium through which sin is released. The same text, the same body, an entirely different logic.
What the tradition did, over the centuries that followed, was largely abandon this logic in favour of Augustine’s. The baptismal nudity disappeared—the records suggest it was gone in most Western churches by the early medieval period, replaced by partial immersion and robed candidates. The body that early Christians had brought naked to the water was the body that medieval theology increasingly managed, covered, and disciplined.
Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century wrote of the body as the garment of the soul—not a prison, exactly, but a covering, something worn. The mystical traditions were more interesting: Meister Eckhart in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries spoke of the need to be stripped of all things, including the self, in order to encounter the divine. His nakedness was metaphorical and also not metaphorical—the tradition of mystical poverty, of the voluntary dispossession of everything including the body’s ordinary coverings, ran through the Franciscan and Dominican movements as a counter-pressure to the Augustinian inheritance.
I am cautious about what I make of this, because the history is complicated and I am reading it from outside it. What I notice is the pattern rather than any specific reading: that within the tradition that produced the fig leaf campaign in the Sistine Chapel, and the copper garland on Michelangelo’s David, and the Comstock laws, there were also recurring movements that understood the body’s exposure—literal or figurative—as proximity to truth rather than distance from it. The strand of Christian thought that said: strip everything away, including your covering. The strand that put men into the baptismal pool without their clothes as the condition of new life. These were not departures from the tradition. They were the tradition, running beneath the more visible history of management and concealment.
In Jain asceticism, the Digambara monks take this further than any Christian mystic proposed: they go without clothing entirely, permanently, as a practice of non-possession. I have read that the word digambara means sky-clad—the sky is their garment. The body exposed to air and light as an act of radical simplicity, the shedding of the last possession. In Shinto, the harae purification rites involve immersion in water in a condition of near-nakedness, the body brought directly into contact with the element that cleanses it. These are not the same as early Christian baptism, but they are in the same territory: the unclothed body as sacred rather than shameful, the exposure as the condition of something rather than its undoing.
The man on my table who invoked paradise was not thinking about Shinto or Jain asceticism or the early Christian baptismal pool. He was thinking about what he felt, which was a quality of being in his body that he had no other word for than the word his tradition had given him, and the word was paradise. He was fifty years past his own baptism and lying in a room that the culture he had grown up in would not have considered a sacred space, and he was using the language of Genesis to describe it.
I did not say anything to him. There was nothing useful I could add to the observation. He lay there for a while with his eyes closed, and eventually he got up and dressed and left.
What I keep returning to is not what he meant by paradise—I think he knew what he meant—but the fact that the language was available to him. That somewhere in the tradition which had given him the fig leaf and the shame and the centuries of management, there was also this: naked and unashamed, which he had found again, briefly, in a room that had no theology attached to it at all.
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