Thoughts on Modesty

Concerning Paul, Aristotle, and the smell of daffodils in Spring.

Portrait of a Girl in Pavlovo-Posad Shawl by unknown Russian artist (19th century)

One of the greatest yet simplest of virtues, the modernistic neglect of which has wrought consequences far weightier than was likely ever expected, is modesty. I’ve spoken on this in part before, but I want to flesh it out a bit further. That this virtue is of importance to Christians, and that this virtue is similarly neglected, can be seen in several verses of Scripture, all of which are explicitly spelled out imperatively and also glazed over habitually. The most recognized and apparent of these should be 1 Timothy 2, wherein Paul writes that “women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works” (v. 9).

I’ve heard learned and lifelong men of the faith express the sentiment that Christianity adores the beautiful woman (it does), and that it’d never “hinder” her from expressing herself. I laugh, albeit with concern, over these unwitting proclamations of heresy.¹ How could we see certain words strung together, words that combine to mean something, with our very own eyes and somehow perceive them in a completely abstracted manner? Some potent psychological complexes are at work, I know that, but it’s an intriguing thing to contemplate nonetheless, how we can get so clouded by sinful desire.

In any case, what I want to get at in this article is a reasonably speedy discussion of what grounds standards of modesty, why God demonstrates concern over it, and what exactly standards of modesty are (or how we can come to know them). Most of what I have to say here was inspired by thoughts I had while reading

Sanfedisti

’s article “Conservative Dad’s Empty Vessels,” a disheartening exposé on how utterly vacuous modern, post-Christian “conservatism” has become. It’s not truly conservatism, but libertarianism, and not the good libertarianism, but the parasitic “modal libertarianism” long-bemoaned by leading intellectuals. I digress. Sanfedisti’s article concludes with a short reflection on this arcane notion of “modesty,” which includes a lengthy excerpt from another post of his derived from the thought of Sir Roger Scruton (particularly his The Soul of the World). This is an excerpt I wish to make use of myself:

Feminine modesty is a powerful and misunderstood virtue, a feminine virtue. Everyone understands that sex appeal and promiscuity give women power; they capture male attention. But the woman who masters both modesty and beauty creates infinitely more power.

The ability to capture men’s attention is undoubtedly a source of power, and it is also the source of the truth in the phrase that ‘sex sells’. But eyes are drawn to beauty, and insofar as the promiscuous woman draws attention to her body, that attention comes to that body as much as it reflects what is beautiful about the form of women’s bodies. Many women are able to capture the attention of men this way, and even their infatuation, but never their respect. As uncomfortable as this fact may be, it is a fact. 

A woman who exposes herself to all manner of lustful gaze is not merely putting herself on display, but is in fact putting merely her body on display. This means that when the eyes meet her, they meet first her body and not first her as her. When the mind behind the eyes then thinks of her in romance, they are trapped to say “Do I like her enough for her body?” The body, her body, then, becomes the goal of the suitor, and the woman, far from empowered, is measured against herself. In the man’s mind, she becomes trapped in competition against herself. 

Modesty by contrast produces a relationship between body and soul that is complimentary.

You look forward to seeing more of her, that which is already given and established and cherished, and already you appreciate the opaque beauty of modesty and look forward to seeing her more clearly as a reflection of more of her, not of disjunct body parts.

Attention to the promiscuous woman is directed at her but not at her as her, but merely at her as means towards the body. This will be in conflict with all immediate sensory experience the woman will receive; she will be flooded with compliments, and so on, but this is a mismatch. 

What aids in this cultivation of her as her is that through modesty she may be feminine and beautiful without being merely a body to be gazed at. This grabs your attention and lifts it up to the eyes. To her as her. This declination to receive the gaze of men on her mere body, and her declination therefore of the power it would deliver to her, is what generates in men respect; genuine respect. That kind of respect is what today women clamor for from men, who increasingly treat women in bizarre ways because of the psycho-social problems of encountering all women as first body and then person.

This is a very thought-provoking train of thought which makes a number of wise philosophical observations. However, I do want to draw out what he says here a bit further.

What

Sanfedisti

says here is that modesty, the concealment of feminine (but, yes, masculine as well)² beauty invites a deeper contemplation of the woman as herself. By your visual perception being relegated to only select, typically nonintimate parts of her, how you see her is not just as her (to be crude) “bits,” but more purely as her. We can think of how animals behave to further ruminate on this. Animals have no themself, which is to say I won’t be getting into any philosophy of mind in this article. As Aristotle explained, grounding his anthropology on the nature of speech, “man alone of the animals possesses speech [logos]. The mere voice [phônê], it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far is to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and indicate their sensations to one another), but speech [logos] is designed to indicate the advantageous and harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong.”³ Put another way, while a dog instinctively yelps if harmed, only a human will cry out and reflect on the reality of having been put into a state of pain. Put another way, humans are the only beings that can exist in the meta, in self-reflection, self-awareness, introspection. This is why you’ll hear some philosophers explain that animals don’t necessarily suffer, they only produce certain physiological outputs (cries, yelps, hisses) for certain environmental inputs (pain). The dog will yelp and scamper away, the human alone will devise the concept of “theodicy.”⁴

This digression serves to demonstrate an important thing about humans that differentiate us from the beasts: again, our existence in the meta. To rework a recent analogy, while all animals are instinctively aware of the laws of physics, only humans have ever pontificated on metaphysics. Tying this back into modesty, let us admit this is a fundamentally sexual matter; what we are trying to see more/less of in (im)modest behavior are bosoms and derriéres (to give men their equal due: johnsons and glutes). Accordingly, we must realize, then, that human sexuality is profoundly different from animal sexuality.⁵ 

 While we can profit from some analogical employment of animalkind, at the heart of all analogy is disanalogy, so we are always comparing apples to oranges (insofar as they are both fruits, but not citrus fruits). Following from Aristotle, human sexuality is distinguished from it being logical, while animal sexuality is phonic. The stallion sees a mare in heat (input) and approaches to mount her (output). There is no metacognition, the stallion doesn’t pause to think, “Oh my, how lovely this Spring daylight reflects in her mane,” or, “By Jove, I ought to bring her a daffodil to swoon her.”⁶

So, given all this, let us understand what modesty is: acknowledging the female is a human being with basic intrinsic value. To be immodest, or to promote immodesty, then, is to dehumanize, for it denies that there is a “her” to know, rather only a “that” to breed. Modesty forces a suitor to acknowledge the person, not the flesh, to engage in metacognition, to appreciate and engage with her as her.⁷ As

Sanfedisti

said, “Attention to the promiscuous woman is directed at her but not at her as her, but merely at her as means towards the body.” Humans don’t mate, we don’t even merely pair bond, we marry. As marriage is the union of souls, there must be something more to our reproductive behavior, the logos that exceeds our basic animalistic phônê.⁸ Aristotle said that to live well (be eudaimonic) is to achieve the fullness of humanity (as my own understanding of it would agree), and since immodesty seeks to make us behave or regard others as animalistic, immodesty then works to render us less human, less eudaimonic, and thus deprives us of virtue. No worse crime could be committed in the eyes of the classical philosophers.⁹

Accordingly, God, Who made us to be humans (logical), despises when we work to dehumanize each other (i.e., undo His “very good” work). We are not to flaunt our heehos or hoohas, opening ourselves to just any wandering stallion, but to invite the suitor to know us, to not just seek out our flesh, but to seek out the entirety of our being, to know us as a soul.¹⁰ Here you can see why sexual modesty is so important, for even if you know your one-night stand is named “Sarah” you don’t know Sarah, not logically at least. You know Sarah’s body, and it may be a very nice body, but her body will decay one day (as will yours), yet she will remain just the same amount of a person as before.¹¹

As for how this relates to cosmetic modesty, understand two things: first, modesty means “to moderate” or “to properly measure,” so it’s not completely getting rid of something (such as sexuality, à la caricatures of the Victorians) but putting it into order or right arrangement, so note that Paul doesn’t say women should “adorn themselves in hideous” or “unbecoming apparel,” but “respectable apparel”; second, overly ostentatious cosmetics masks a person, it distracts from who they truly are, it’s a very personalized albeit similarly vacuous way of “[laying] up for yourselves treasures on Earth” (Matt. 6:19), and thus Paul commends women to adorn themselves in good works instead, for those actually communicate who a person really is—you can be stunningly gorgeous, but profoundly hideous all the same in character (exhibits of which Hollywood mass produces).¹²

Thus we can also understand why the Christian burqa is not a thing, and conversely why the face is the thing left untouched by our standards of modesty, for it’s the perfect storm. A face at once conveys all the beauty one needs for a phonic attraction, but a face is also essential to a logical attraction, for a face is through which (the mouth, ears, eyes, lips, and even nose) the human logos is expressed: it is the same face that sees stimuli as well as the sublime, the same face that speaks philosophy as well as flirtation. The face conveys the entire person, it needn’t be suppressed, it’d be a shame to suppress it, and accordingly Scripture does well to only call for the veiling of the head, never and not the face.¹³

I leave you with these thoughts, then, as well as profitable readings by Tertullian and others, as well as the admonishment to seek to do better, by yourself, by women, and by God, in how you treat others, seeking always and everywhere to build up the Other, and not to use her as a vehicle for your gratification, as an Echo to your Narcissus. 

“O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the crannies of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom. My beloved is mine, and I am his; he grazes among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on cleft mountains.” ‭‭(Song. ‭2‬:‭14‬-‭17‬) ‭

1. The definition of “heresy,” as derived from the original Greek word, is someone who forms a sect of understanding that runs against the grain of what Scripture says. As the Catholics see it, there is certainly a distinction between “material” and “formal heresy” (unwitting vs. purposeful) and “canonical” and “non-canonical heretics” (those formally condemned vs. those uncondemned), but what places all these in the realm of heresy is the same thing. Going against the clear grain of Scripture which proclaims the importance of “respectable apparel” in Godly women is, simply, heretical.

2. The matter of women will be dealt with more primarily here because this is simply often the case, that the role women play in these matters tend to be given the most attention. Of course, the same standards are applied to either sex (while women need to be instructed not to apply make-up, men aren’t because it’s presumed from the outset, especially in Paul’s culture, that men would never do such a thing…how things have changed).

3. Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a7-16.

4. Hence why “the problem of evil/suffering” is the more appropriate wording, as “pain” is merely a physiological stimulus. To suffer is to be aware of the existential and cosmic burden of pain. This doesn’t render C.S. Lewis’ book any less magisterial.

5. The esteemed Austrian School economist and sociologist Ludwig von Mises makes a comment relevant to this matter in his treatise Human Action (p. 167), saying:

The animals too join together in mating, but they have not developed social relations. Family life is not merely a product of sexual intercourse. It is by no means natural and necessary that parents and children live together in the way they do in the family. The mating relation need not result in a family organization. The human family is an outcome of thinking, planning, and acting. It is this fact which distinguishes it radically from those animal groups which we call per analogiam animal families.

It should be easy to see that what von Mises says here is relevant, because he’s drawing a distinction between the nature of what humans do and what animals do (logical vs. phonic), and how “at the heart of all analogy is disanalogy” (see below). Both humans and animals come together to create offspring, sure, but what humans do goes a step further, and concretely distinguishes us from the animals. Thinking, planning, and acting, as von Mises enumerates them, are uniquely human faculties, or, as we could say (in Aristotelian terms), they are logical faculties.

6. “But what of mating rituals!” As far as I know, horses don’t have mating rituals, and for those animals that do engage in that behavior it’d still be phonic: female oestrus (input), male courtship (output).

7. Accordingly, genuine romance is a beneficial relationship, for it humanizes the loved and makes the lover more aware of humanity, which, as will be discussed, will lead to more virtue.

8. For an exploration of how marriage qualitatively sets apart the wedded, primarily through the lens of Anglican liturgical service, see Jeremy Neill, “Biological Transformation: Does Marriage Change Your Relational DNA?,” in Venus and Virtue, eds. Jerry Walls, Jeremy Neill, and David Baggett, 49-63.

9. Save murder, which completely and irreparably deprives one of life in general, and the good life in particular.

10. A crash course in the integrated biblical vision of the human being would be profitable to truly appreciate this.

11. Perhaps not as virtuous of one as she could be, given her promiscuity, but she has the capacity, inherent as a human. Also, on the personally and emotionally vacuous state of modern “hookup culture,” reflecting these observations, see Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 117-54.

12. Boethius’ brief comments on ostentation and materialism I’ve noted before as relevant to this subject. See my essay “Whose Eye Beholds Beauty?” as well as Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Douglas Langston, 26.

13. And even then, it could be argued, only in the church. See my “Why Paul Tells Women to Cover Their Hair” and Mike Winger’s “All The Head Covering Debates (1 Cor 11): Women in Ministry part 10.”