Catholics often worry about depiction. Are there limits on what may be depicted (or represented), whether visually or verbally? Should we be careful not to look at (or read) depictions of a certain sort, or depictions of certain kinds of thing? There is a tangled web of issues here, about which Catholics in the US have often been vocal and politically active. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, provides ratings of current movies as an aid to Catholics in thinking about what they might or might not want to see. These ratings are based in considerable part upon what a movie depicts: the more it shows sexual activity, or nudity, or violence, the closer it moves toward the Conference’s lowest rating (O, for morally offensive). The ratings also pay attention to other matters, such as the tone of the movie, whether what is depicted seems to be approved or not, and what the intentions of the makers appear to have been. But attention to what is depicted, rather than how or for what purpose or with what degree of visual beauty, seems to be the main factor.
There is a historical story here, too: we Catholics were among the principal forces behind the establishment of the National League of Decency (originally the Catholic League of Decency, founded in 1933), a group instrumental in establishing the Motion Picture Production Code, which effectively constrained what might be depicted in Hollywood movies from 1934-1968. The Code, like the current rating system of the US Catholic Bishops, was concerned mostly with what might be depicted in movies, and very little with how or for what purpose.
I’m prompted to think about the question of depiction by having yesterday looked at an exhibition at Duke University’s Perkins Library of photographs by Jennette Williams. The photographs will shortly be published in book form by Duke University Press, as The Bathers. The photographs are of women, many naked and some partly clothed, in steam-baths in Budapest and Istanbul. Many of the images are posed in conscious echo of paintings by Ingres, Renoir, and others; and they (both the women and the images of them) are saturated in the beauty of the physical. The images are, to me, more sensual than erotic, though certainly not without erotic overtones. I am delighted that Ms. Williams made them, that the women she photographed participated willingly in that making, and that they (images and women) can now be contemplated.
And yet I suspect that many Catholics, and perhaps the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, might be less delighted. It is certainly true that depicting or representing the naked human body has been something more pleasing to, and frequently done by pagans than Christians or Jews or Muslims. Why? Why should or might a Catholic be made uneasy by such depictions? Does it not follow from the goodness of the created order in its physicality that nothing in it should be barred in principle from depiction? I think, with only slight reservations, that it does. Anything that is, to the degree that it is, is good; and anything that is good may rightly be represented, depicted, and contemplated. This includes human nakedness, human sexual activity of all kinds, birth, and death. It includes, too, anything of which human beings are capable, including the infliction of pain upon others, and including the most horrible acts of violence and mutilation imaginable. If this were not so — if such things were excluded in principle from depiction — then, for example neither the Iliad nor the Canterbury Tales nor Gargantua & Pantagruel could any longer be read. As soon as that conclusion is reached, it’s clear that the argument has gone wrong somewhere.
What governs the propriety of a depiction, then, is not what it depicts but rather a vast and endlessly complex range of variables, including but by no means limited to: the intentions of the maker; the condition of those looking at the image; the relation of those being depicted to the image (if it includes people); and the degree of beauty belonging to the depiction. Attention to those matters would produce a more nuanced and more defensible Catholic response to the interesting questions surrounding depiction than a single-minded focus upon the content of depictions.
While you’re thinking about those questions, I recommend that you look at Jennette Williams’ bathers.
