1 • Trends and Counter-trends
In the part of the world where I live, we can do and say almost anything without being judged.
In fact, the ability to push the boundaries is often seen as a great asset.
Being transgressive gives you an edge in the entertainment world.
Going against the trend is a good way to get the spotlight on yourself.
From Marilyn Manson to Lady Gaga, from Kanye West to Machine Gun Kelly… people who color outside the lines always get everyone talking…
…especially if their lifestyle is a bit libertine.
What used to be called the deadly sins are now badges of honor.
Gluttony? Today it’s “a virtue“: the more refined your tastes and the more Michelin-starred restaurants you eat at, the more interesting you are.
Pride? “Come on, you need a little: without a bit of nerve, you won’t get anywhere!“
But something doesn’t add up: to me, none of the things I’ve mentioned so far seem to be going against the trend at all.
Nor does Harry Styles‘s nail polish…
…or Måneskin‘s outfits…
…or Miley Cyrus‘s sexual preferences…
…
…to me, all these things simply look like the product of what our culture, advertising, marketing, music, TV shows, Netflix, the most famous influencers, etc., push on us every day.
According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the word “counter-trend” means “a trend (= a general change or development) that is opposite to an existing (and dominant) trend.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the British writer and journalist, wrote:
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
(GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON, The Everlasting Man, Part II, Chapter VI)
If I had to name something that goes against the trend in the part of the world where I live, just off the top of my head, modesty comes to mind.
2 • The Pendulum Between “Moralism” and “Permissiveness”
In the Purgatorio, Dante (1265-1321) has his friend Forese Donati speak these words, complaining about the behavior of Florentine women:
O brother sweet, what wilt thou have me say?
A future time is in my sight already,
To which this hour will not be very old,
When from the pulpit shall be interdicted
To the unblushing womankind of Florence
To go about displaying breast and paps.
(DANTE ALIGHIERI, Purgatorio, Canto XXIII, vv. 97-102, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Franco Nembrini‘s paraphrase, from his commentary on the Purgatorio:
[[ Dear brother, what do you want me to say? I can already see a future time before me, one not far off from this hour, when the shameless women of Florence will be forbidden from the pulpit to go around baring their breasts ]]
In short, complaints about a lack of modesty aren’t just a thing of our time (*).
Long before ours, there were other eras with… a different sensibility (let’s call it that) when it came to modesty.
That’s because, throughout history, mass culture has often done nothing more than swing back like a pendulum in reaction to the previous era:
Moralism – Permissiveness – Moralism – Permissiveness – etc.
It’s not a mathematical law, but it often happens that:
- a prim, puritanical grandmother might end up with a granddaughter like Doja Cat;
- a libertine like Howard Stern might turn out to be the grandfather of the next Mother Teresa.
The problem is that we are now emerging from the cultural dominance of those currents of thought that, in reaction to centuries of legalism and moralistic formalism, have devastated entire generations with the ideology that man not only can but must see everything, hear everything, touch everything, etc.
The responsibility of these false teachers, whom we have even crammed into our school textbooks, is immense.
You see, we always come back to infantilism, which swings from prohibitionism to the devastation of “anything goes”.
The way of freedom is traveled by few.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, p. 101)
3 • A Life Dictated by Marketing?
When it comes to modesty or shamelessness, burqas or boobs out, skirts “down to here” or “up to there“… there’s one word that ends every discussion.
That word is “freedom.”
It’s like the ace that takes the whole pot: the house always wins.
- “Everyone is free to do as they please!”
- “You can’t interfere with other people’s freedom!”
- “I have the right to say/do/wear whatever I want, so let me be free!”
“Freedom.” “Freedom.” “Freedom.”
All fair points, of course!
Anyone who talks to me about “freedom” knows they’re preaching to the choir…
…but…
…but…
…but…
…what puzzles me is the distorted idea of freedom that has spread through the culture we live in.
In an interview a few years ago, the Italian punk singer-songwriter Giovanni Lindo Ferretti (born in ’53) said:
Freedom is a more complicated matter than “rights“; freedom is a form of discipline.
There’s an anecdote I’ve always liked: I take you, drop you in the middle of the desert, and tell you, “Go, you’re free.”
You’re not free, even though you seem to be.
To be free, you would need to know where the nearest oases are, know where to go, know how to find your way.
Today, man is disoriented.
But he calls this disorientation “freedom.”
Instead, you have to be aware of what this world is really like, in order to trace a path that is your true, disciplined freedom.
(GIOVANNI LINDO FERRETTI, from an interview on July 25, 2016)
In a world where:
- …we’re bombarded by marketing;
- …when we scroll through Instagram, every two or three posts there’s a sponsored ad winking at us about how we should dress/eat/think/talk;
- …half the stories posted by the influencers we follow are paid for by someone with a financial interest in them;
- …every time we visit a website, we pick up cookies that are used to target ads so they can sell us something more easily;
…I have to admit, I can’t help smiling a little at guys who want to feel “free” to wear nail polish, or girls who want to feel “free” to wear a skirt an inch shorter.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: paint your nails however you like. And go out in your underwear if you want…
…do as you please… I’m not going to stop you… and I won’t judge you…
…if you want to be “free,” be “free“…
After all, “Now that’s authentic ‘freedom’! Genuine! Absolutely unconditioned! These needs spring from a desire that’s deeply your own!“
“Yeah, yeah. Sure. Right…“
~
Up to this point, I’ve been talking to everyone (believers or not). For Christians, I’ll add a thought from Marko Ivan Rupnik:
One cannot live the divine life, the life that never dies, if the rhythm of our days is dictated by marketing, by the pleasure of buying and consuming.
Clearly, if the life of Christ is not nourished only by his body, that is, by the Eucharist, but by a whole set of other elements, if this life is not supported by a context, going to the Eucharist becomes something foreign to everything else.
I think this is the problem for many Christians today: a life immersed in phenomena, in environments completely governed by the rhythm of the economy, of consumption, of a way of thinking that feeds on many other channels. As a result, everything that belongs to the spiritual life, and that should constitute the innermost core of the self, becomes increasingly external, superficial, and formal.
And in this context, every religious proposal is either watered down in the same style as the world, to attract more people and not seem too different from everything else, or it is simply handled as a duty.
Either way, in both cases, it is not about life, because the person actually lives elsewhere, on another level, and the spiritual dimension is only a temporary optional, a momentary distraction.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, pp. 103-104)
4 • What Is Modesty?
But let’s get to the question in the title: what on earth is modesty?
No. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As I wrote above, modesty has nothing to do with “moralism” (we’ll leave that to the English Puritans of the 16th century… who, by the way, weren’t Catholics but Calvinists).
Here’s what the infamous Catechism of the Catholic Church says about modesty:
Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden. It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness. It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2521)
Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love. It encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships; it requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled. Modesty is decency. It inspires one’s choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2522)
There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2523)
The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2524)
Modesty is not in conflict with freedom.
Quite the opposite: modesty is the use of one’s freedom “taken to its ultimate conclusion.”
As I wrote in the previous section, there is a “freedom” that doesn’t really set us free: a dis-ordered freedom (which leads nowhere except to selling ourselves cheap). That’s the kind of freedom some of the New Testament letters talk about:
Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God.
(1 Pet 2:16)
Only take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. […] Thus, sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.
(1 Cor 8:9, 12)
Modesty, on the other hand, allows us to sub-ordinate our freedom to the service of what is Good, Beautiful, and True.
Modesty (truly) makes us free.
5 • Clothing Covers the Impersonal Through the Imprint of the Person
All right.
If you’ve made it this far without getting annoyed, we can take the last step and talk about the most irritating topic of all: clothing.
A very thorny subject, because of its very nature, because of the cultural context we live in, and because of the incredibly low outrage threshold this climate of over-the-top political correctness has left us with…
Back to Rupnik once again:
[…] for us Christians, clothing – while inevitably also a moral or cultural issue – is above all a theological and spiritual matter, and therefore it cannot be handled by rules alone.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, p. 172)
There’s no handy little rule; the way I dress has to do with something much deeper, which weaves together:
- morality
- culture
- theology
- spirituality
Ummmmmmmm… meaning what?
As for the first two aspects—the moral and the cultural:
Clothing protects us from the gaze of others, which locks us into the impersonal realm of the species and, whether in contempt or in desire, separates the body from personal identity.
Clothing covers the impersonal through the imprint of the person, the expression of their taste, the meaning of a culture, so that the whole body becomes an expression of the person in their entirety, becomes a face.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, pp. 172-173)
What does it mean that “clothing covers the impersonal through the imprint of the person“?
It means that if I walk around with my butt hanging out, I’m not showing myself to others fully.
If I walk around with nothing on and my wiener in the wind, other people miss out on a part of me.
The personal part of me.
That something extra that makes me not just an animal of the species Homo sapiens, but Alessandro.
In human beings, nature and culture are intertwined and inseparable.
So modesty helps me show myself better, in truth, and (to borrow Rupnik’s words) “protects me from the gaze of others, which locks me into the impersonal realm of the species and, whether in contempt or in desire, separates the body from personal identity.”
As for the other two aspects—the theological and the spiritual:
[…] for us Christians, clothing is important because it symbolically expresses the fact that we are clothed in Christ.
So the clothes we wear must somehow help convey this truth of ours to others.
If clothing is always a form of communication, for us it is the communication of our transfiguration in Christ.
We must be careful, then, not to turn it into a mask, but to let it express our truth.
We do not try to impress with our clothing in order to cover up an absence of glory; rather, through our clothing we must truly point to our journey toward glory, in a unity that embraces, on the one hand, our being rooted in creation and, on the other, our sinking into the absolute mystery.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, p. 173)
Conclusion
If you want to dig deeper, I highly recommend the various resources I’ve listed in the bibliography.
So, yeah…
Over and out, with one more thought from Rupnik:
Beauty in the theological sense is never exhausted by what reveals it, because it partakes of the inexhaustibility of God, and so it always surpasses itself.
Therefore, a Christian’s clothing will move between a beauty that is simple and a mystery that escapes us.
Clothing helps us see the other, but it also reminds us that the other is not only what I see, and therefore I cannot possess them.
(MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L’arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Rome 2011, p. 175)
salt
(Fall 2021)
Sources/insights
- THÉRÈSE HARGOT, Una gioventù sessualmente liberata (o quasi), Sonzogno, Milano 2017
- ALESSANDRA LUCCA, Trombamica d'eccezione : 5 mosse per uscire dalle relazioni ambigue, Streetlib, Milano 2020
- MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, L'arte della vita : il quotidiano nella bellezza, Lipa, Roma 2011
- CATECHISMO DELLA CHIESA CATTOLICA, (in particolare il paragrafo "La lotta per la purezza", parte terza, sezione seconda, capitolo secondo, articolo 9)
- GIOVANNI PAOLO II, Udienza generale, mercoledì 19 dicembre 1979
