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........

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