Spiritual significance
The importance of bodily beauty has also varied through times and across societies. In Western culture the distinction between the material and the immaterial body, body and soul, and the values that have been attached to them have been central to how beauty was regarded. To the ancient Greeks a beautiful body reflected a beautiful soul and proximity to the gods. To the Gnostics (largely covering the first three to four centuries ad) the divine psychic body was caged in a physical body made by beastly creatures from the underworld. They renounced the material body and sexual drives, and strove for asceticism. In the early Christian era, where a dualism between soul and body prevailed, beauty was considered good if its appeal was spiritual and internal, but evil if its attraction was sexual and carnal. In medieval times the body and the flesh were associated with sin and women, and the immaterial soul with the divine.
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