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When is a body—or a kitchen, or a pair of blue jeans—clean? The story of people's evolving standards of cleanliness is told in three entertaining, informative, and at times disturbing books: Kathleen Brown's Foul Bodies focuses on cleanliness in early America, while Katherine Ashenburg's The Dirt on Clean and Virginia Smith's Clean trace changes in thoughts about and practices of cleanliness from antiquity to the present.
The books are filled with interesting tidbits. We read about Napoleon getting turned on by body odor ("I will return to Paris tomorrow evening," he once wrote Josephine: "Don't wash"); about stain-removal strategies in 18th-century Philadelphia; about the efforts of advertisers in the 1920s to promote Kotex without offending readers' delicate sensibilities. In addition to the curiosities, Brown, Smith, and Ashenburg treat numerous important topics—the connections between cleanliness and empire, for example, and the difficult-to-shake association of cleaning with women. One theme that threads throughout all three books is the relationship between religion and cleanliness, and in particular the relationship between Christianity and the clean body.
Many Christians in the first millennium castigated a preoccupation with cleanness, and practitioners of other religions—Muslims and Hindus, for example—viewed Christians as peculiarly indifferent to bodily hygiene. Ashenburg reads Christians' vexed relationship with cleanliness as one example of their vexed relationship with the body. Furthermore, early Christians were uncomfortable with the pagan licentiousness of the Roman baths. Finally, some ascetics embraced the discipline of alousia, the state of being unwashed, arguing that after the spiritual cleansing of baptism, one ought to spurn the superficial project of washing one's skin and hair. Often, Christian ascetics' renunciation of cleanliness was, as Smith notes, linked to the cult of virginity and chastity: to wit, Saint Melania the younger, who, in order to persuade her husband to make a vow of chastity, stopped bathing. (Her efforts were the flip-side of Napoleon's instructions to Josephine!)
All this reading about the ancient discipline of alousia prompts me to wonder about contemporary North American Protestant enthusiasm for recovering lost or forgotten spiritual practices: fixed-hour prayer, fasting, Sabbath-keeping, and so forth. What guides our selective retrieval of spiritual practices? How do we determine which practices we recover and which we do not? I haven't noticed anyone mounting a campaign to recover the spiritual practice of being dirty.
But why not? Perhaps because what was at first a revolution in Christian attitudes toward cleanliness is now deep-seated and, indeed, taken for granted. Christians long ago embraced cleanliness, attributing moral and spiritual virtue to the clean body. The change began in the Middle Ages but wasn't dramatically apparent until the early modern era. English Puritans' views of cleanliness could not have been more different from those of Melania and Co. Reversing the early ascetics' contrast between baptism and more quotidian washing, English Puritans urged Christians to wash because washing was a reminder of baptism. Writing in the late 16th century, the polemicist Philip Stubbes explained that he washed because "as the filthiness and pollution of my bodie is washed and made clean by the element of water; so is my bodie and soule purified and washed from the spots and blemishes of sin, by the precious blood of Jesus Christ … . [T]his washing putteth me in remebrance of my baptism." (Apparently Stephanie Paulsell was not innovating when, in her 2002 book Honoring the Body, she suggested that Christians consider bathing an opportunity to reflect on our baptism, "making each bath a baptismal act" that could remind bathers "that they were children of God, made in God's image.")
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