A Clear Deception

One may appreciate an excellent fabric from different perspectives and at different levels of detail. The fineness of the thread, the richness of the color, and the intricacy of the pattern disclose their qualities to the hand and to the eye in layers and at intervals rather than all at once. Likewise, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, like the finest of textiles, is threaded with meaning both obvious and profound.

“Many years ago” Andersen begins “there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed.” And thus the first thread is sown for a deception so thorough that it would weave a spell over the whole kingdom. For embedded in the emperor’s preoccupation with dress was the rest of the deception in embryo, waiting only for the proper habitat and gestation. The king is, so to speak, already pregnant with the trickery nurtured by the professed weavers and their subsequent chicanery.

The emperor wanted new clothing, and the finer the better, for all his other clothing had worn old and grey so that, when wearing them, he felt exposed and embarrassed. The weavers promised the finest of bespoke suits, which would clothe the wearer with not only beauty but power. The particular quality of the cloth was that it could be seen only by the worthy – by the wise and competent. In the earlier Spanish tale from which Andersen’s was adapted, the weavers claimed the cloth could only be seen by those born within wedlock – those of illegitimate parentage found the cloth invisible. The clothing, then, was a useful tool for rooting out pretenders – whether bastards or fools. The application of such a tool would, no doubt, become clear later on. For the moment, the emperor was content to have secured an empirical test for his administration and advisors. One could imagine in the not-too-distant future this greatest of kings served by the wisest of lieutenants, the detritus of fools and misfits having been systematically sloughed off. Doubtless the emperor had a few suspects already in mind – those attendants from good families whom he nevertheless found insufferable and idiotic. He would finally be able to strip them of pretense on logical and irrefutable grounds. Delusion tastes sweeter when mixed with desire.

The weavers busied about their work, spinning non-existent cloth on their empty looms, all the while pilfering the costly silks supplied to them for their craft. The fraudulent fabric was almost complete. It lacked but one embellishment – one which the weavers could draft, but could not weave themselves. The emperor’s attendants, when sent to inspect the weaver’s progress, do not see the non-existent cloth, but, knowing beforehand the fabric’s power to expose fools and not wanting to be exposed themselves, they pretend to see. Whether they did this because they were fooled or merely because the emperor was fooled is irrelevant; the salient point is that they recognized their own position in society to be an illusion – a vapor built upon a breeze, supported by a scaffolding of haze, swirling in an amalgam of alleged parentage, past favors, and the promise of future services. They realized themselves to be socially naked, and it was only in pretending to see the invisible cloth that they retained the illusion of clothing.

This last deception was by far the greatest. The emperor, too, is ensnared in it, and his terror is palpable as he comes to grips with the possibility that even his own status is an illusion. If he cannot see the cloth, then perhaps he, too, is an illegitimate fool – merely a halfwit in a fancy suit. His rule is shown to rest not on an unshakable heritage and inbred capability but on the thinnest of perceptions, held by the lowliest of peasants. The emperor ruled because his subjects thought him worthy, but take away the thought and the rule would follow. When Hans Christian Andersen was a boy of eight, he stood with his mother in a crowd waiting to see King Frederick VI. When the king appeared, little Hans cried out “Oh, he’s nothing more than a human being!” If the Emperor’s subjects arrived at the same conclusion, his realm might well be lost.

It is, in the end, the emperor himself who chooses to be fooled in his attempt at fooling others. And the only reason the others are fooled by such foolishness is their fear of playing the fool themselves. In the final parade, the king rides naked through the streets as the representative of an entire people fearing exposure.

Andersen and the weavers are, in a conspiratorial collusion, using deception to point out the truth of our societal nakedness, for we, along with the emperor, are the brunt of the story’s moral.

Two Strange Things

In the Genesis account of creation, there are two special trees in the midst of the garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Apparently, Adam and Eve were welcome to eat of the Tree of Life, but they were to stay clear of the Tree of Knowledge.

This second tree is one of two strange things about the creation account. The name of the tree is strange to us. We don’t see anything wrong with that kind of tree. We eat of that kind of tree all the time without tasting evil. Was not the Lord so pleased with Solomon’s request for wisdom that he gave him riches also? What could be bad about knowledge? For the most part, we accommodate this strangeness by assuming that it was a test. In other words, we assume that there was nothing wrong with the tree other than the fact that God forbad it. The tree was good, we say, and the knowledge it gave was good, but God asked them not to eat it out of principle (one must set boundaries somewhere) and it was therefore the disobedience rather than the fruit itself which caused the trouble.

The second strange thing is the embarrassing emphasis in Genesis 2 and 3 on nakedness. The first instance is in 2:25 after the creation of Eve:

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Another mention occurs in chapter three after they have eaten the forbidden fruit:

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Then, when God comes into the garden in the cool of the day, the fact becomes central:

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

One explanation is simply that, like the writer of cheap romance, the scriptural author is attempting to make the account a little juicier, but this will not do. Those who believe in scriptural inspiration may reject such an idea out of hand, but even to one who takes Genesis to be mythology it is obvious that this repeated nakedness is no mere embellishment. The inquiring mind wants to know why Achilles was “swift-footed” and why Adam was nude; we should not pass by naked people without taking notice. If the writer thinks the fact that Adam and Eve were naked is important to the account (he keeps pointing it out in different ways) then we need to understand why.

I believe that these two strange things are not independently strange, but collectively strange. In other words, the nature of the tree makes sense of all the nakedness on parade. Perhaps God’s forbidding of the tree (that particular tree) was not coincidental. Something about knowing Good and Evil exposed an embarrassing fact.

Nakedness and Ignorance

In our mature adult understanding we see nakedness as the companion of ignorance. The ignorant child and the ignorant tribesman both stand exposed due to their lack of knowledge. One expects to find the delirious, the unconscious, and the insane in a state of nature, but once the fit has passed and cognizance returns, they had better get dressed.

Even the nakedness of erotic dancers and actors involves an implicit ignorance. Both would be embarrassed to walk through the grocery store naked, but the artificial environment of the striptease or the movie studio forces them to ignore the fact that it is the same audience in either case. If the actress retorts that she can indeed walk naked through the grocery store without embarrassment it may be asked why, on very hot days, she does not. The reason is that her nakedness in the studio is only excused by willfully taking on the aspect of ignorance and pretending she is alone. She may be able to stroll through the store in the same way, ignoring the awkward stares, but it too is only an act. As soon as she is fully conscious of herself as a human being among other humans, she puts on her cloths. No one attends the Oscars naked.

One may see a version of this principle in action when, in the artificial environment of the beach or the swimming pool, people frolic about nearly naked, willfully ignoring the stares of others. If one was to stumble in on the same people dressed in their pajamas, they would be more likely to be embarrassed although twice as clothed. As soon as knowledge is grasped, so too must clothing.

Another Look

Following this thread, our correlation of ignorance and nakedness seems to fit the Genesis account. After all, the man and his wife were both childish and ignorant, and it was only after taking to themselves the knowledge of good and evil (becoming, as it were, like God) that they realized with humiliation that they had been walking around naked their whole lives. Is not the whole account rather like a bad dream in which, at a cocktail party, you discover you have forgotten an important part of your wardrobe?

But something about this explanation falls flat, for it seems, if anything, to run contrary to the flow of Genesis 2 and 3. When Jesus casts the demons out of the man from the Gerasenes, the restoration of the man’s reason leads to the restoration of his clothing. But Adam and Eve do not cast the demon out of the garden but accept his leading. And when they grasp the fruit with its wisdom, the result is a loss of coherence even as they gain clothing. It is as if Adam and Eve wake out of a good dream, in which they were happy, secure, and clothed, into the nakedness of real life.

Nakedness Hides

It may seem at first blush as though nakedness and dress are empirically binary. One may ascertain through various tests whether or not another person is wearing clothing. The person is or is not although he may be bordering on one end of the spectrum or the other. However, this sort of scientific scaling ignores the fact that nakedness is not a fact at all but a concept which does not exist in material reality.

Animals, for instance, can be neither naked nor clothed, or (more precisely) they are not less naked when wearing clothing or more naked when going without. Animals are merely themselves, and to them clothing or the lack thereof is the cause of neither pride nor shame. Even the most prudish of victorian societies, for whom an exposed female ankle would be scandalizing, did not consider it necessary to cover any part of their dogs, horses, or chickens. One at first may contend that this is because the animals are a lower order of being – they are not conscious, at least not in the way we are. However, this fails to explain why we humans feel it necessary to cover up even those of our own kind who are not conscious of their own nakedness whether because of illness, insanity, or youth. Somehow, we feel as though the state we call nakedness can exist for a sleeping man but not for an alert house cat. In this sense, we infer nakedness even to those humans who cannot be aware of it themselves.

This is particularly so in the case of our children. It is plain to those of us who have spent considerable time among young children that for them nakedness does not exist. A boy of two years old may be aware whether or not he is wearing clothing on a hot day, but he is no more embarrassed to bare all than to cover up. Neither what you put on him nor what you take off matters at all. If the boy is considered to be naked, it must be inferred from his elders. For his part, he is merely himself, and cooler for being so. Knowing this, even our inferences of nakedness pardon the condition in those unconscious of it themselves even while condemning it in those who should know better. It is funny when a toddler streaks across the living room when company is over; it is not funny when a man does so.

There are, likewise, times and places in adult life in which nakedness does not exist as such. A woman of sixty who would be mortified to be found naked on main street among strangers may give no thought to nakedness in the bedroom with her husband of forty summers. And it is almost non-sensical to speak of a mother becoming naked in order to nurse her newborn child. It would seem, rather, with naked baby at naked breast, that mother and child are less naked to each other than at any other time. They are merely themselves, to themselves, unjudging and unjudged – naked and yet somehow clothed.

Compared to the mother and child, the man stumbling into the formal dinner wearing sneakers or the bridesmaid who wears orange when the rest are wearing pastels is far more naked. And here, at last, we get a sense for what this idea called nakedness actually is. Rather than the presence or absence of clothing, it is the presence or absence of judgement – of our bodies first, and then ourselves.

Maturity and Judgment

There comes a time in a child’s life when she realizes that she, too, is a self and must therefore judge matters for herself. At first, these matters may be small – whether she likes her greens or wants to go to sleep – and then later she must decide in large matters – whether she thinks she is beautiful and whom she chooses to love. Before the point arrives at which the girl is judging for herself, her judgement is shaped by her parents. The reason children are aware of their own nakedness at the age of four rather than the age of eight is because their parents have supplied their own judgements in place of the child’s. The parent’s judgement may grow overbearing as the child ages, but at first they are essential. With each small gesture of parental kindness, each gentle word and thoughtful caress, the child is judged and found worthy, and beautiful, and loved. Without knowing it, the child’s world (her conception of herself) is shaped through the affirmation of her parents. She does not and cannot judge herself because her father and mother have already told her that she is herself and it is that self whom they deeply love – down to her skin, down to her heart.

Reaching maturity – the point at which the parent’s conception of the child is called into question and the child seeks to judge for herself – is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we might well mourn the loss of childhood innocence and confidence. On the other hand, the radical self-awareness and self-judgement of maturity is necessary for the child to become an adult and take her place alongside her parents. The scaffolding of a parent’s assurances which undergird a child would never suffice to hold up an adult.

A Brave New World

It is here that the strange and gargoyled shapes of Genesis three begin to take a form that we can understand, for Adam and Eve were God’s children, and as such were formed by God and judged by his being and affirmation. Their lives, their selves, were a reflection of his life and self and with each small gesture of parental kindness they were found worthy, and beautiful, and loved. They did not and could not judge themselves because their father had already told them that they were themselves and that it was those selves whom he deeply loved. Amid such love, what need had they for clothing?

But they were not content as children, and this is where the analogy with our own lives and our own families must end. If one is the child of human parents, then one grows to be their equal. But if one is the child of God, then one remains a child forever – or is cast out.

As in Andersen’s story, the initial deception came from the outside – from the serpent – but the final deception was of the self. The fruit symbolized for Adam and Eve a maturity of sorts, one they had never dreamed of and could not comprehend. The fruit enabled one to judge for oneself what was good and evil, and in the process cast off the judgement of God. If their world had, heretofore, been anchored by the gravity of their creator, it would be so no longer, for now they would be their own Gods, cut loose and able now to chart their own course as the self-proclaimed creators of a new world. It was, we would say now, brave, even audacious, and it was also flawed.

The flaw, so inconspicuous as to be unnoticed in the excitement of that one bold step, was that if God was the only creator, then he could be the only father also, and to be set loose from his orbit and seek to grow into fathers ourselves was not to be free but to float aimlessly and pointlessly – to be lost. In a universe with but one center, Adam and Eve’s attempt to establish a new center failed and its failure was both catastrophic and banal.

Knowledge and Nakedness

The fall was so widespread and destructive that all of creation groaned, and yet its implications were first felt in the most common of places. The man and his wife – who had lived together among the rest of creation in full view of the creator without a hint of shame –  make it their first official function upon achieving deity to inspect their own bodies – and what they see they find mortifying. Forced to judge for themselves – looking at themselves for the first time not as the selves born of the creator but as selves by themselves, standing on their own merits – they are ashamed and want nothing so much as something to hide behind.

It is, ironically, the man’s and the woman’s newfound knowledge which created their nakedness and insecurity, for before the fall, while there were no clothes, there could be no shame and therefore no nakedness. It was only afterwards, with a self-judgement separated from the father, that they formed the conception of nakedness – that somehow their selves were not sufficient in themselves, and must be covered, must be clothed. Their nakedness revealed an insecurity caused by separation from a knowing father to pursue knowledge for themselves.

It is possible, from this inauspicious starting point, to chronicle our battle with nakedness from the fall until now. It has been, from start to finish, a fabric formed of knowledge, although woven in various materials. One runs out of things in the world before one runs out of ways we seek to cover our insecurity – masking discomfort with ourselves in various and ingenious ways. One might even say that the rise of human culture, with all of its glory, is really just an accumulation of loincloths, cleverly disguised so as to be invisible to bastards, fools, and (as we shall see) to children.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

In Andersen’s version of the old story, it is a little child who finally points out that the emperor has no clothes. His father hushes him in order to cover his own nakedness, but the child has nothing to hide. What is ironical about the choice of this little hero is that to the child, the emperor was not naked but merely without clothing. It did not matter to the child what the man on the horse wore or did not wear. He spoke because the spectacle was unusual and interesting, not because it was embarrassing or scandalous. He might have gladly ridden the horse naked himself if his father had let him and it was only because of this that he could see through so clear a deception.

We have grown older and more mature, and the quaint story of Genesis is no longer sophisticated enough to impress us. Are we not indeed our own gods, directing our time on this spinning world as we see fit? We are secure in our knowledge, for our knowledge has given us power – power over the world and power over ourselves.

And yet we wear clothing – clothing to hide our bodies and clothing to hide our souls – a series of masks which we are constantly putting on and taking off as the moment and the audience dictates. We are afraid, and what we are most afraid of is that we might be found out – revealed at last as a fraud and a no-account, as a pretender and a phony, as naked and ashamed. Dressed like an emperor, and seeming confident, we are horrified when anyone or anything threatens to lift the edge of our garments. Our self-assurance is but a wisp and a shadow; any bright light and it is gone.

When the light shines we find ourselves standing naked like a child and yet so unlike a child in our consciousness and shame. It is only then that we can perceive the wisdom of strange and ancient texts. We may then follow the words upstream, as it were, from our present catastrophe back to the life of humanity’s childhood. We find upon doing so that it is impossible to go back; the way is barred. But the way forward, although through our wrecked attempts at shelter, is open. For in barring the way to the Tree of Life (which, if we had eaten from it might have made an eternity of our lostness), our ancient Father prepared the way for a new childhood by way of a new child. The child would be borne into the world naked as a baby and leave the world naked and bleeding as a man, and by his nakedness and by his bleeding, he would take on all our shame like a garment and clothe us with his love. If we would follow this child, we must stoop low and become as children ourselves. Only then – despairing of every fine covering our wisdom has fashioned – can we stand exposed –  unclothed, and yet fully clothed – in the love and imparted gravity of our father.