Are souls in heaven naked? If not why? Are they ashamed to be naked? God created man and woman naked. And before committing sin, they did not feel ashamed.

Souls in heaven will be neither naked nor clothed, because souls have no physical form! This is something which may be hard for us to imagine, because we are so accustomed to perceiving and envisioning the world through our bodily experience. The soul is the source of our intellect and our free will, but it does not have a physical form. This means that the soul is imperceptible to the senses: the soul is not something you can see, hear, touch, etc. Sometimes in various media, the soul will be portrayed as a ghost flying out of a person’s body–but as mentioned, this is not the soul because it has no physically detectable appearance! We know through sound philosophical arguments and religious truths that the soul really exists, but it does not present itself in a way that we could detect it using our bodies. When we do describe the soul using physical language, we are using these as analogies. So in heaven, souls will have no physical appearance–and therefore they will not need to be clothed!

However, we also know that at the Last Judgment there will be a resurrection of the dead and our souls will be reunited to our bodies. What happens then? Will we be clothed then? The simplest answer is that we don’t know exactly–but we can make some educated guesses. Scripture describes us wearing white garments, washed in the Blood of the Lamb (referring to our purification by the Blood of Jesus through our Baptism). We’re also told we will wear a victorious crown. Will these be real physical objects we wear? It’s quite possible!

Whether we are clothed at the resurrection or not, it is good that we recognize that clothing has a few main purposes: (1) to protect the modesty of the wearer and those who see him/her; (2) to adorn and enhance the natural beauty of the body; (3) to visibly express some aspect of the person’s identity. The first reason I mentioned, about modesty, is something which came about as a result of a need after Adam and Eve fell into sin. Before the fall, nudity was not an occasion of sin for Adam and Eve, because they had mastery over their senses and their desires. They could look at each other with peace, love, and total gift–this is what Scripture means when it says they were “naked, yet without shame.” After the fall, concupiscence has weakened all of our hearts. We have a tendency toward sin which we need grace and virtue to overcome. Clothing helps protect our modesty. In heaven, though, we won’t need to worry about concupiscence. In heaven, God’s grace perfects us and our hearts have been purified from this tendency toward sin. A perfectly clean and loving soul doesn’t need to fear or feel ashamed seeing a naked body, because that soul has self-mastery and will not let himself/herself fall into sin. Therefore, if we are to be clothed at the resurrection, it will be for one of the other reasons mentioned: to adorn the human body’s natural beauty (to the glory of God, not for our own vanity), or to express visually some aspect of our identity before God (as the white garments and crowns would do).