Most people think nakedness in Genesis means innocence. But the story gives nakedness to both Adam and the serpent.

In Hebrew, "naked" and "subtle/crafty" are near-identical words, used in Genesis as deliberate wordplay. The innocent man and the deceptive devil are both naked in the garden. That does not solve the question, but it does spoil the cheap answer.

It is true that Adam and Eve before the Fall were naked and not ashamed. But the old Christian writers did not think of them as bare in our poor modern way. They say man was clothed with glory. That is to say, there was a rightness in him which made outer covering unnecessary. The body was not a trouble because the soul was not yet at war with itself. St. Ephrem says they were surrounded by glory. One can say it more simply still: grace had not yet gone out of them.

As the serpent is called the most subtle of the beasts, it is the most "naked" and closest to nature. It belongs to the raw pull of undifferentiated matter, the current that drags everything back toward dust. The serpent is not evil because it is powerful. It is dangerous because it is uncovered by any purpose higher than itself. It has not been named and integrated by Adam.

So when Adam and Eve ate, they felt shame because something had been lost. Like the serpent, they were now uncovered, no longer clothed in higher purpose. They had broken the law and, with it, the purpose God had given them. And so they snatch fig leaves.

Then comes that strange and merciful thing. God makes them garments of skin. The world is hard now, and He clothes them for hardness. Leaves are for summer. They will not do outside Eden. Since then men have been making larger and larger versions of the same defense. Clothes, houses, laws, customs, walls, roofs, medicine: all these are ways by which fallen creatures make life possible in a fallen world.

That is why the severe moralist is not always mad. The Puritan was often wrong, and often tiresome. He could be narrow where he ought to have been grateful. But he did see one thing plainly. Desire, after the Fall, does not stay in its place. So he fenced and fastened things. He forbade things and he kept watch.

There is some truth in all that. Clothes, manners, and rules help. Without them, daily life soon becomes ugly and unmanageable. But they cannot save us. A coat may hide a wound. It does not heal it. A law may prevent a sin. It does not make a saint. The Puritan made too much of fences because he thought they could do the work of grace.

This is also why a toddler may run naked on a beach, and nobody thinks much about it. Let a grown man do the same and somebody sends for the police. A small child has not yet become theatrical. He has not yet learned that miserable adult business of standing outside himself, arranging himself, presenting himself. Body and soul are not yet in open mutiny.

But that changes soon enough. We all become divided. We want what we condemn. We praise what we avoid. Then covering becomes necessary, not because the body is vile, but because man is not whole. The man who strips in public is not returning to Eden. He is repeating the trouble, not escaping it. Noah, after the flood, lay naked in his tent, and that nakedness brought no paradise with it.

There's an old promise that if we strip enough things away we shall become innocent. The promise changes its language from age to age, but it is always much the same. Throw off shame. Throw off custom. Throw off restraint. Throw off law. Throw off clothes. Then, we are told, the true man will appear. But in fallen man what appears first is usually not innocence but confusion.

Still, those who talk like that are not foolish. They have at least noticed something real. Civilization can become stale. A custom may survive after its reason has died. A ceremony may continue after all the life has gone out of it. A man may find himself half smothered under forms that nobody remembers how to justify. Then he begins to dream of air and simplicity.

And sometimes, for a little while, he seems to get them. At a camp, a festival, a commune, a holiday, life may briefly feel easier and lighter. But relief is not restoration.

For all that time, somebody else is still bearing the load. Somebody built the road. Somebody grew the food. Somebody made the medicine. Somebody kept enough order for the whole game not to break down at once. The freedom is borrowing from a discipline it laughs at.

Then the old facts come back. Work comes back. Jealousy comes back. Lust comes back. Children come back. Illness comes back. Winter comes back. After all the world to which one is exposed was not a meadow in a songbook but a place of cold, hunger, wounds, disease, and death.

The hippie was not wrong to want wholeness. He was wrong about the direction. He looked backward. But after Eden, what lies nearest to hand is not always innocence. Sometimes it is merely impulse. A man does not become childlike by tearing off his coverings.

Nakedness means, first of all, that a thing stands without human artifact. That can be either blessed or dangerous. It is blessed when the thing already shares in meaning, as with man in Eden or the small child, whose bareness is not a defect but a sign of innocence. But it is dangerous when what stands bare does not already partake of meaning in that way, as with the serpent or the grown man. Such bareness must be covered, though any covering we give it will be a human one, and therefore limited.

So our coverings are not the great good. But neither are they the great evil. They are poor things, but poor things may keep a man alive. Better bandages than a bleeding wound.

Yet Christianity does not end in bandages. It does not say that man must remain forever wrapped up against his own ruin. It says glory may return. Baptism gives a white garment because it points to that. The saints shine not because they are padded over, but because grace has gone into them and lit them from within.

The end is not that we creep back to the garden by undressing. The end, if God grants it, is that man may at last be so restored that he no longer needs to hide.

Resources: St. Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis; G. Elias, The Serpent's Perspective; M. Pageau, The Language of Creation; J. Pageau, Garments of Death and Garments of Light.