dangerous, and
enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.

It would, however, be a mistake to think that such men as St. Bernard and
St. Odo of Cluny, admirably as they represented the ascetic and even the
general Christian views of their own time, are to be regarded as
altogether typical exponents of the genuine and primitive Christian view.
So far as I have been able to discover, during the first thousand years of
Christianity we do not find this concentrated intellectual and emotional
ferocity of attack on the body; it only developed at the moment when, with
Pope Gregory VII, mediaeval Christianity reached the climax of its conquest
over the souls of European men, in the establishment of the celibacy of
the secular clergy, and the growth of the great cloistered communities of
monks in severely regulated and secluded orders.[51] Before that the
teachers of asceticism were more concerned to exhort to chastity and
modesty than to direct a deliberate and systematic attack on the whole
body; they concentrated their attention rather on spiritual virtues than
on physical imperfections. And if we go back to the Gospels we find little
of the mediaeval ascetic spirit in the reported sayings and doings of
Jesus, which may rather indeed be said to reveal, on the whole,
notwithstanding their underlying asceticism, a certain tenderness and
indulgence to the body, while even Paul, though not tender towards the
body, exhorts to reverence towards it as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot expect to find the Fathers of the Church sympathetic towards the
spectacle of the naked human body, for their position was based on a
revolt against paganism, and paganism had cultivated the body. Nakedness
had been more especially associated with the public bath, the gymnasium,
and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan institutions
Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity with
nakedness was favorable, rather than opposed, to the chastity to which it
attached so much importance, the Church--though indeed at one moment it
accepted nakedness in the rite of baptism--was for the most part unable to
see if it was indeed a fact which the special conditions of decadent
classic life had tended to disguise. But in their decided preference for
the dressed over the naked human body the early Christians frequently
hesitated to take the further step of asserting that the body is a focus
of impurity and that