Today, revealing the body has become commonplace. Prevailing fashion has become, to a large extent, based on revealing various, striking parts of the body. Some of those who are concerned complain that finding modest clothing in clothing stores is no longer easy. Revealing the body has, at the present time, become the standard adopted by fashion houses and echoed by clothing merchants everywhere.

In light of this reality, it is appropriate for us, as believers in the Lord Jesus, to ask questions about this phenomenon and its repercussions on people’s souls and relationships.

In human relations, the body has nothing to say. The whole word belongs to the face. The face is the place where the human being is revealed and people communicate face to face. In the face, the eye is the place where the human being’s presence or… absence is evident. The rest of the body, and the garment that is adorned with it, are supposed to be centered on the face, and then the eye in the face. The body is the extent of the face. This is the nature of the relationship between the face and the body so that the face does not become an extension of the body. Hence, a garment that is not centered on the face does not help, but rather harms the human nature of the relationship between people. When the garment deliberately reveals striking areas of the body other than the face, the attention of the viewer shifts, partially and completely, from the face to the place and areas visible in the body. After that, even if a person takes the trouble to examine his companion’s face, he does not examine it clearly, as a center of attention, because what attracted him robbed him, clouded him, and introduced confusion into his consciousness that shakes his insides. Every human being is inclined to the passions of the flesh. This is not part of human nature, but rather a defect that has afflicted it as a result of what we call the fall and departure from God, when man, in general, has abandoned His obedience and no longer resides under His protection. The defect here is that the body has become, in itself, a passion and is no longer linked, structurally and automatically, to the meeting of heart with heart. The inclination has become to seek the body for its own sake. Before the fall, there was one center of interest in man, which was the heart, and the heart was for God, and the light of God preserved the heart and all of man as one to Him. When man fell, the heart was no longer the initiator and the gatherer. Man was scattered and replaced by various centers of interest: emotion, thought, and body… and each center was governed by a mechanism of its own. There was no longer one will emanating from the heart that governs and directs all of man, but rather there was a will specific to the body, another to thought, another to emotion, and so on. The ontological interaction between people on the basis of the confrontation of heart with heart no longer occurs, after the fall, in a spontaneous and automatic manner. What man has become spontaneously inclined towards has become the passion of thought, the passion of the body, and the passion of feelings. As for the human relationship at the level of the heart and being, man, every man, needs an effort to tame it, to restore it with the help of God. When the sole focus of man is his humanity in the heart, everything in him, then, becomes humanized, becomes at the service of his human relationships, his thought, his body, and his emotions. When the dimensions of man turn into aspects of the personality with their own centrality, there is no longer unity in man, but rather contradiction prevails in him. He says one thing and does another. His appearance becomes one thing and his interior becomes another. The lasting common denominator, in this case, is the love of self (philautie) in its various dimensions: the love of thought, the love of bodies, the love of feelings, etc.

In light of the above, we return to say that deliberately exposing the body is an element that disrupts the integrated relationships between people. It is harmful in two ways: it stirs the passion of the body, in the seer and the seen, at the same time, and transforms the discourse between people into lascivious suggestions. The girl who exposes sensitive areas of her body, whether through tight clothing or relative nudity, her attention is focused, in depth, on her body, she is aware of it and it feeds her vanity and she seeks to attract attention and enslave souls. The eyes of others upon her are her pleasure and the measure of her success. As for the one looking at her, he is an experimenter, attracted by her beauty. His eye is on something other than her face and his sense is on something other than her humanity. She becomes, in his eyes, a density of flesh, and his face is hidden and becomes a fleshy extension that purifies the suggestion of her body, so passion flows from her eyes so that she becomes closed, her face wiped with the touch of seduction and the challenge of the desire of the body.

There are those who innocently adhere to the prevailing fashion, at first, because it is common, and they do not know anything about what it leads them to. When they adopt it, it introduces them into a climate of whims that wounds and corrupts them, and causes others to stumble because of them, and they are found, without realizing it, contributing to the transformation of human relations between people into physical and psychological relations.

All this makes the body humiliating. There is no doubt that whoever looks at a human being as a body has humiliated him, has made him, in fact, flesh and treated him, in his heart, as flesh. He has turned him into a consumer item. He has objectified him.

There is no doubt that it is a filth of destruction that a significant segment of our people embrace the fervor of the funeral procession today and that our churches, in the name of modernity and freedoms, become places for the normalization of exposing bodies and displaying bodies. Eyes, accustomed to the spread of the spirit of debauchery, no longer find anything harmful in what is happening. A state of carelessness and even indifference prevails, both among the clergy and the public. This has begun to kill the tendency toward chastity and zeal for righteousness among us. What testimony can be given to Christ from chests adorned with the cross that are full of debauchery? What kind of Christianity can those be called who, consciously and unconsciously, steal eyes with the rags of their unveiled bodies? The argument always seems pastoral, that we do not want to frighten people and do not want to push them to abandon the church. Observe what is required, and do what is pleasing to you, and teach what you find necessary. The important thing is that we do not make excuses for sins! The important thing is that chastity remains visible, tangible, a framework for our conduct among us, a framework for worship in spirit and truth. “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves”! There are no longer, in conscience, in feeling, in emotion, boundaries between the climate of Canaanite fertility rituals and the climate of Christian rituals. This attack on the chastity of the Ascension threatens the entire structure. The church has become accumulated bodies, not the truth of Christ shining in the hearts of believers. You are amazed that street advertisements reveal bodies without embarrassment, especially in Christian neighborhoods, as if they are favorable climates for them. As if Christians are the vanguard of those calling for freedom of debauchery. This silence about the explosion of absurdity, this disregard for the new paganism among us, in our homes, in our churches, only exposes the senselessness we have reached. There is no doubt that if we do not address the matter quickly, we will no longer have a chance to stop the slide into a carnal, psychological Christianity that has no connection to the Spirit of the Lord and is not subject to reform. We feared that, in the face of the explosion of the spirit of fornication around us, we might have reached a level of deviation in our view of things that we have reached the point of no return!!!

Archimandrite Toma Bitar
Dots on the letters newsletter
July 31, 2005