The Olympic games are filled with athletes whose beautiful bodies inspire admiration and awe. Their amazing physiques reflect the ideal of the human body held by the Greek originators of the contests. That ideal was nobly realized in ancient sculptures such as Myron’s Discobolus. Poised just as he is spinning around about to release the discus, the athlete’s form is poetry in motion.
Other Greek sculptors such Polykleitos and Praxiteles also portrayed the ideal human form, male and female. Their art became an inspiration for Michelangelo’s David, which combines the beauty of the male physique with nobility of spirit. The Athenian ideal met the faith of Jerusalem.
In view of the ideals the Olympics is supposed to represent, it was a great shock to millions of people who watched the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics to see an actor’s body dished up as if a meal.
The human served up on a domed silver platter was presented as if he were a piece of rancid and decaying meat to be devoured in a quasi-cannibalistic rite. The bloated, blue, corpselike entity’s writhing suggested a swinish sexuality as well as a decayed spiritual and emotional life — the exact opposite of the celebration of the human body. Certainly, the actor’s puffy body was the antithesis of the Greek ideals that inspired the reintroduction of the games by visionary Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin.
The ceremony managed to achieve a twofer, mocking both the Greek ideal of the human form and the Christian belief in the beauty and sacredness of the human body, particularly the body of Christ as represented in the Last Supper.
The entire spectacle also was meant to be a profanation of the sacrament of the Eucharist, which for devout Christians is the real presence of the body and blood of Christ. It was meant to be an ugly and vicious parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s sublime painting, “The Last Supper.” It mocked the beauty of Christ’s sacrifice, distorting the sublimity of his expression and even his identity as the Son of Man. A porcine persona of indeterminate sex was substituted for Christ’s divine image.
There should be no surprise that the person of Christ was represented by a debauchée with a diadem, for the Marquis de Sade had a character describe Christ as follows: “He was a seditious influence, an agitator, a bearer of false witness, a scoundrel, a lecher, a showman who performed crude tricks, a wicked and dangerous man.”
The creators of the spectacle served up to consumers of Olympic feats admittedly found their inspiration in the cult of Dionysus. Thus, the ceremony was meant to present Christ in a Dionysian/Sadean context. But the postmodern cuisine had a particularly French odor arising from the works of de Sade and his twentieth-century supporters Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, both of whom are admirers of de Sade’s philosophy.
The depraved de Sade wrote, “Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.” For him, nothing was off limits when it came time to worship the body. Whatever lust wished to feed on the body was permissible, indeed capable of raising one to transcendence. The beautiful bodies of Olympians would have been offered up to lust, personified by Dionysus. As John Attarian puts it, for the Sadean, beauty exists only for “incitement of lust and profanation.”
Christian or not, nearly every viewer knew precisely what was being represented. No Christian or indeed any other thinking observer is deceived by the sorry non-apologies offering the opening line: “We’re sorry if you are offended.” No Christian is fooled by Thomas Jolly’s statement: “I did not intend to be subversive or to mock or shock.” Not one believer accepts his lame claims to the “right” of “artistic” expression.
The profanation and degradation clearly bear the stamp of the Marquis de Sade, who obsessively hated anything Christian. As Attarian put it some ten years ago in his essay “Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade,” a dynamic of evil is a characteristic of de Sade and those who follow his philosophy. He writes,
It is this dynamic of wickedness and Sade’s value-inverting views of cruelty and murder indicate, nihilism is ultimately Satanic. Rabid denunciations of God and Christianity, obscene sacrileges, and Satanic practices including the Black Mass pervade Sade’s novels. The central fact of the Sadean universe is not matter in motion but rebellious egoism’s demonic impiety, seeking transcendence through evil.
The cult of Dionysus, which the creators of the opening ceremony used as their platform, was characterized by orgies and human and animal sacrifices. It was well known to Christ, who traveled with his disciples to Caesarea Phillipi, where the rites of Pan were practiced by the mouth of a cave called “The Gates of Hell.” There, babies were thrown into the waters and drowned in ritual sacrifice, and orgies were devoted to the god Pan. Christ stated that those “Gates of Hell” ultimately would not prevail against the Christian church.
While the gates will not prevail, it is noteworthy that Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic church, thus far has remained silent. However, Carlo Maria Viganò, the archbishop Francis recently excommunicated, has not.
In his short and fiery letter “Vade retro Satana,” Viganò called on Catholics to vigorously protest the deliberate debasement of the Christian faith, most especially the profanation of the sacrament of Lord’s Supper:
Tolerance cannot be the alibi for the systematic destruction of Christian society, a society by which billions of honest and hitherto silent people identify themselves. This prevarication must end! And it must end not so much and not only because it hurts the sensibilities of believers, but because it offends the Majesty of God. Satan does not have the rights of God, evil cannot be put on the same level as Good, nor can lies be equated with Truth. This is what our civilization is based on, a civilization that some would like to bury under the physical and moral rubble of a world in shambles.
Condemning the complicity of civil authorities in financing and supporting the attack on Christianity, Viganò called on Christians to act, saying that Christians should boycott the Olympic games and hold the sponsors and the creators of the opening ceremony responsible. “We must expect and demand that those responsible for this intolerable bullying be held accountable for their actions, as well as for the corruption that also accompanies this event.” Viganò closed his remarks by suggesting that the set designer “who gave birth to this blasphemous and vulgar spectacle must repay the fee that Macroniades charged French taxpayers.”
The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who read de Sade and rejected his philosophy, once wrote in his notebooks, “Beauty will save the world.”
Perhaps beauty alone is not salvific, but certainly beauty of the human form and spirit can help us focus on that which leads humanity higher.
In the meantime, those who reduce beauty to ashes must not expect that new life for the Olympics, France, and the world will arise phoenix-like from the destruction of either the Greek or the Christian worldview. In such a world, there will be no winners.
Fay Voshell holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
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