Sin and Sex
By Robert Briffault, 1931
Intro by Bertrand Russell.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.219285/page/n3/mode/2up
Page 13
… Herakleitos of Ephesos, insisted that the distinction between right and wrong has nothing whatever to do with the authority of divine commandments, for “God,” he said, ” is beyond good and evil. To Him all things are fair and good. The distinction between what is right and what is wrong is a human distinction. It depends upon the evil behaviour which is apt to arise among men. We should not know that there is such a thing as justice if there were not men who behave unjustly. To be just is to abstain from behaving unjustly towards other people.”
P19
Indeed, from the moment that righteousness or morality is regarded, not as intended to promote human wellbeing, but as a dogmatic, categorical law, the authority of which is not to be questioned, there exists no guarantee that to seek after righteousness will not be the most pernicious purpose that can inspire the behaviour of human beings towards one another. And that is in fact the usual and inevitable effect of dogmatic morality.
Absolutism in morals is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way as absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.
P33
When Christianity was first imposed upon European peoples on account of its political advantages, Christian ascetic morality remained for the most part a dead letter. The ruling classes never adopted it. Feudal aristocracies have never shown the slightest disposition to refrain from using their opportunities for enjoyment. They have, on the contrary, always been eager to indulge in as much luxury, festive amusement, and fornication as their power permitted.
Page 34
[Feudal aristocracies have], always been eager to indulge in as much luxury, festive amusement, and fornication as their power permitted. The burgher classes did not as a rule possess the same opportunities. But from the accounts of the life of the burgher classes during the Middle Ages it would appear that they were in general eager to use what opportunities they had of enjoying themselves. They were extremely fond of pageants, feasts, fairs, dancing, sports, dramatic shows, and were addicted in no small measure to good cheer and fornication.
Mediæval documents assert that the English and the Scots were notable for their lecherous and licentious dispositions. The festivities, the dances, the May-day customs which were so violently denounced by the Puritans, were, there can be no doubt, occasions for a great deal of sexual freedom. In the Tudor age Spanish visitors were shocked at the licentiousness of English women. The English burghers’ general disposition to jollity, good cheer and enjoyment has given rise to the endearing expression ” Merry England.”
P36
Thus, through the influence of Voltaire and his fellow infidels, Christian morality was established in Europe for the first time in two thousand years among the ruling classes. The adoption of Puritanism by the English aristocratic classes in the first half of the nineteenth century constitutes what is known as Victorianism.
P38
Puritan zeal for the suppression of anything which may aford pleasure or entertainment is clearly related to the asceticism which is a feature of many religions, but is particularly characteristic of the Christian doctrine of renunciation. Puritan moral zeal differs, however, from the Christian asceticism which indulges in self-mortification and self-torture, in fasting, flagellation and hair-shirts.
P42
One of the most constant and general superstitious anxieties of savages and barbarians is lest they should excite the envy or jealousy of supernatural beings, ghosts, goblins, or gods. They are accordingly rendered uneasy by any unwonted stroke of good fortune, by undue prosperity, or precarious happiness.
P53
The renunciation of all pleasures, the denying of all desires, which had hitherto served to divert the jealousy of malicious super-natural beings on occasions of special danger thus came to be accounted a virtue of universal application.
…
The Jewish theory was, in fact, like that of Hindu magicians, a system of banking. The more economy is exercised in spending our capacity for enjoyment in this world, the greater will be the accumulated treasure in heaven.
Page 55 – 56
CHRISTIAN SEXOPHOBIA
Among the early Christians all measures calculated to secure the maximum amount of unhappiness and discomfort were accounted essential to the practice of virtue.
Self-denial and self-mortification came, however, to be associated more and more with abstention from sexual gratification. Purity, which had originally reference to ritual requirements, acquired the meaning of chastity.
The ” senses ” which religious aspiration aimed at mortifying were identified exclusively with sexual desire. That aspect of the principle of abnegation came to overshadow all others, so that virtue, holiness, goodness, righteousness became in the mind of the Christian but synonyms for sexual continence. Thus has arisen the fantastic paradox of European moral tradition which confines the current connotation of the terms ” morality,” ” morals,” to tabus on the relations of sex.
The reason for that singling out of one order of pleasure for special condemnation and suppression is not far to seek. It is indeed constantly dwelt upon by the Christian Fathers. The desire for sexual gratification is far more difficult to suppress than any other. For all their fanatical and exorbitant ideas the Christian Fathers were realists in psychology. They were far more realistic than most modern writers who affect to regard sex with a superior detachment and frigidity, and defend the old tabus of silence by declaring that undue importance is attached to the subject. Not so the Christian Fathers.
They dwelt upon sex with an insistence compared to which the Freudians are reticent, and they did not hesitate to proclaim the Freudian doctrine that in one way or another the insidious manifestations of sex pervade human activities.
Page 57
And accordingly when people spoke of pleasure and of enjoying life, the simple-minded and unsophisticated Christian Fathers took it for granted that what they had in mind was fornication. The suppression of enjoyment therefore meant above all things the suppression of fornication.
That religious exaltation such as inspired the founders of Christian moral tradition is a close transformation of sexual appetites is now generally recognized. Jerome, Origen, Augustin freely avow the lechery of their natural dispositions.
Page 58
The Jews never laid much stress on the meritoriousness of chastity. Like all stringently patriarchal peoples, they looked with great severity upon adultery. Being Orientals and superstitious, they feared nudity, scrupled even to see themselves naked or to be insufficiently clothed while in bed. But the desire to increase and multiply was a part of their fierce nationalistic sentiment, and so strong in their tradition was the ideal of procreation that to remain unmarried after the age of twenty was regarded by them as a mortal sin. Celibacy and virginity were to them utterly abhorrent.
SNIP
With none, however, did the emphasis on chastity acquire the importance which it did later among the Christians. There is scarcely a trace of it in the Gospels. The ferocious war on sex, the concentration of every moral purpose on the suppression of its manifestations, are phenomena which made their appearance only when the Christian doctrine of renunciation spread amid the luxurious cities of the Roman Empire.
It became the haunting obsession of Christian thought. Continence came to be regarded not as a part of morality, but as the whole of morality.
P59
The Christian Fathers declared that the virtue was the supreme revelation bestowed upon the world by the Christian religion. Sex was the specific creation and instrument of Satan; woman was the agent of the devil and the ambassador of hell.
…
But upon those views is founded the moral tradition of Western culture which identifies morality with sexual repression, and sin with sex.
Page 67 – 68
But the above-mentioned social and superstitious grounds for the observance of continence are the only ones known, not to savage societies merely, but to all human societies until the Christian declaration of the doctrine that chastity is intrinsically meritorious and sex intrinsically sinful. Nowhere, either in ancient or modern times, in savage, barbaric, or civilized societies, in the East or in the West, has that doctrine been held outside Christianity. The Church Fathers were strictly correct in their claim: the virtue was totally unknown in the world until they proclaimed it.
Page 72
I have given an account of the passage because it is, so far as I am aware, the only one in Greek literature which, in a restricted sense, exalts chastity as meritorious, and it has often been quoted to suggest that the Greeks had some notion of the virtue. It has even been suggested that the passage may have inspired St. Paul. It will be seen that it is quite irrelevant for the purpose of showing that there was any appreciation of chastity as a substantial virtue in Greek thought. Even had Plato spoken on the subject in terms identical with those of the Church Fathers, the vagaries of his speculative fancy would prove nothing as regards current Greek sentiment. But by his speculation on “Platonic ” love coupled with moderation in food and drink and with sexual communism, Plato himself does not show the slightest inkling of the Christian notion of chastity as per se meritorious.
Page 73
The principles and the standards having reference to sex which are current in modern Western tradition and which have assumed the exclusive connotation of “morals,” are neither the product of accumulated human experience nor of a general sentiment or tradition common to all humanity, but are the outcome of a special religious doctrine which arose under particular conditions in a sect of fanatics, mentally abnormal and diseased, who were in favour of castrating themselves and of abolishing procreation, and most of whom would, had they lived at the present day, have been removed to asylums for the insane. Their views were derived from savage superstitions having reference to averting the envy of ghosts and supernatural beings.
Page 78 and 79 MISSING from scan.
Page 80
Human society is founded on the association of the sexes. That association does not exist in nature; the sexes among animals, instead of associating, usually avoid each other, and only come together for the purposes of sexual intercourse. Human society is thus a biological abnormality or monstrosity. Monogamic patriarchal societies are particularly abnormal and monstrous in a biological sense. The potent biological instinct of sexual gratification, not being adapted to sexual association, still less to monogamic and patriarchal sexual association, is thus profoundly anti-social.
It cannot therefore be wondered at that it is a disturbing factor in patriarchal societies.
P83
The Church Fathers were, as has been noted, a good deal more realistic in their psychology than many modern pretenders to psychological insight. But their psychological knowledge did not go so far as to enable them to realize the hard and fast psychological law that organic impulses are, like water, incompressible, and that whenever pressure is exercised upon them, their power becomes thereby concentrated and increased, and they inevitably spurt forth in another direction. That is true of all repressive action, wherever applied, but it is particularly true of so primal and prepotent a biological force as that of sex.
Page 85
There is clearly no comparison between the sexual stimuli operating on the savage who is surrounded by nude women, most of whom are accessible to him, and those operating on the civilized man who, in the midst of the excitations of art and luxury, moves amongst women adorned with every device of opulent ingenuity for the express purpose of increasing their sexual attractiveness, not one of whom perhaps is sexually accessible to him.
Page 108
As soon as the logically uncompromising view that sex is unmitigated evil, that it is the abomination of abominations, that it must be completely stamped out, is qualified by the Pauline concession that the evil and the abomination must needs be conditionally tolerated as necessary, that necessary evil, which retains the values of baseness, vileness, impurity, sinfulness, becomes a state, not of logical contradiction merely, but of irreconcilable conflict.
Page 109
The sexophobic dementia, the archaic mythologies of third-century Christianity, have evaporated from the intelligent modern mind. But they have left behind them a deposit of values, their damnatory, vituperative, values, the ” slime,” which, in the language of Puritanism and of post-Puritan tradition, is the denotative symbol of the baseness and vileness of sex.
Page 110
The effects of infantile religious education are, like those of syphilis, never completely eliminated from the system. Puritan tradition, combined with the Christian management of adolescence, has converted the sexual life of civilized men and women into a neurosis.
Page 111 – 112
Moralistic values, baseness or nobility, have as much to do with the psycho-physiological functions of sex as mathematics. The effect of the combination is, in fact, the disease of the age. As a result of it modern men and women are sexual valetudinarians.
The infection of the emotional life with moralistic values has in post-Puritanical cultures begot a secret and shameful disease which is spreading like a plague over those cultures. It made its appearance when the French Revolution compelled the immoral ruling classes to capitulate to bourgeois ideals by adopting bourgeois moralistic values. The Puritan Byron, bred in the midst of Aberdonian Presbyterianism, prostrated under the sense of sin, shocked and infuriated by the discovery of the fact that women possess biological functions, affords the earliest historical instance of the hitherto unknown blighting malady. The sexual palsy of Puritan culture is far from constituting the triumph of the Christian plan for obliterating sex. The effects of the surgical sterilizations which the ancient Christians favoured would be vitalizing compared to the devitalization and unhappiness of which their victims do not know the cause. One finds it actually assumed in Puritan civilization that the consummation of the sexual functions in joint fruition, regarded as normal in every culture of pagan tradition, is exceptional. A literature even exists upon the controversy as to whether the fault lies with men or with women, the fact being, of course, that it lies with both. The erotic infantilism of English men and women is a byword in Latin countries.
The anthropologically debated question whether the condition of frigidity, or feminine impotence, is atavistic, is disposed of by ethnological evidence. It is wholly unknown in savage races; it appears to be equally unheard of, or at most exceptional, in non-Puritan countries.
An incidental manifestation of post-Puritan feminine sexophobia is the undoubted spread, in England at least, of tribadism [lesbian sex].
Page 120
The question is not whether sex should be regarded as base or noble, whether people should be chaste or unchaste, but whether they should be healthy or morbid. Both continence and lubricity, chastity and unchastity, may be healthy or they may be morbid.
As in every other function of life, health and sanity lie in moderate activity. Whether a man or woman is continent or the reverse, his or her sex life will be healthy so long as it is not artificially over-stimulated or over-repressed. And that sexual life will be not only unhealthy, but hopelessly diseased which is at one and the same time unnaturally stimulated and unnaturally repressed.
Page 131
The suffragettes who asked for the vote and got it went, then, very much farther than the obscene novelists or the German nudists. While obscene literature and public nudity are really entirely innocuous, female suffrage, which people regard as quite reasonable and proper, is really a far more horribly subversive enormity. Most of the women who demanded the abolition of monosexual legislation would have been scared out of their wits if anyone had demanded the abolition of clothes, and most women who vote are quite unconscious of the fact that, while it would not make the slightest difference, so far as the social order is concerned, if they went to the polling-booth naked, their voting at all strikes at the very roots of that social order.
Page 157
Love being in its origin the very spring of that social life, is, if anything is, good and noble. That lust is therefore base does not follow. But it is, at any rate, the psychological opposite of love. Every expert in matters erotic knows that tenderness, affection, and even respect are sentiments opposed to the full biological operation of the predatory and pugnacious masculine sexual urges. Their fulfilment requires, in whatever measure, a reversion to the brutal, dominating attitude of the animal male. It requires in some degree the elimination of love.
Page 199
The passing of the only form of sexual coercion which has been hitherto possible and effectual throws the whole determination of the trend of sex behaviour and marriage upon women.
Patriarchal marriage and Christian sex-morality have hitherto been enforced, in a more or less general manner, by coercing women and by taking precautions to prevent them from becoming intelligent. This can no longer be done. There is no other alternative than to persuade them.
Page 214
It rests on the tabu upon sex as sinful. That tabu has its root in savage conceptions of magic so primitive and gross that they are no longer generally understood and in the equally exotic doctrine of certain Jewish theosophical sects of two thousand years ago that the object of life is to accumulate treasures in heaven by abnegation. Those savage conceptions and that doctrine are not to any appreciable extent held at the present day.