Jennifer Benedict - Uncovering the Nakedness of Parents: Gregory of Nyssa on Nudity, Shame and the Resurrection Body

In the Life of Saint Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa recounts that when it came time to inter his sister in the family mausoleum, he was fearful of transgressing the injunction of Leviticus 18:7 against “uncovering the nakedness” of his father and mother, whose bodies reposed in that same tomb. In this text, Nyssen equates “nakedness” with physical decomposition, although in other texts his allusions to Lev. 18:7 retain a sense of the body as the locus of sexuality. This paper demonstrates that Gregory views the physical body’s “nakedness” (Greek aschêmosunê) as the loss of its proper psycho-somatic organization incurred in the Fall and that he understands both sexuality and material corruption to be inherent in post-lapsarian “disorganization” of the self. Scholars have noted that, for Gregory, the resurrected body seems to have little purpose since in the eschaton God will be “all and in all” sustaining humanity and the metabolic functions of the physical body would seem to be obsolete. This paper contends, however, that Nyssen’s conception of the physical body’s eschatological purpose and function can be understood by attending to the imagery of shame and clothing that he employs in describing the Edenic, post-lapsarian, and eschatological body.