Lower than the Angels – A History of Sex and Christianity
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which also involved reducing the status of lesser gods whom the Judaeans recognized as deities, albeit below the level of God himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_than_the_Angels_(book)
[Borrowed from Library]
Setting Out
Looking at past attitudes to sexuality, we will find that over centuries they have been startlingly varied. A theme of this study is that after weighing the witness of history and gathering historical evidence over three thousand years, there is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex.
Words and the Word of God
Despite the selectivity, Christians regard Old and New Testament as inseparable, after a painful row in the second century CE when a talented early theologian called Marcion asserted that the God of the Hebrew Bible was not the God who was the Father of Jesus. Marcion and his followers did not convince the mainstream body of the Mediterranean Church, and their movement has long since disappeared.
Some of these books were actually added to the Hebrew Bible by Jews in Greek-speaking settings such as Alexandria, so early Christians who were also Greek-speaking regarded them as having the full status of God’s Word. During the fourth century CE, some Christian commentators began to voice doubts and gave them the description apocrypha (‘hidden things’). In the sixteenth-century Reformation of the Western Church, Protestants resolved to exclude the books defined as Apocrypha from what Christians term the ‘canon’ of recognized scripture. Roman Catholics did not, since they included some Catholic doctrines that were otherwise difficult to justify from scripture, such as the existence of Purgatory.
The Song of Songs is unlikely to be a single work but gathers together love-poems or songs in which around two-thirds of the texts are presented as the voices of women, very active in their pursuit and enjoyment of their male lovers. Majority opinion among modern scholars is that at least some of the anthology does indeed have female authorship
In law and legal prohibitions (and not just those stemming from the Church) it is always worth remembering that a command to cease some practice or behaviour generally indicates how common it is.
Word complexities: sex and gender
The continuing sexual revolution of our present world offers another series of puzzles: how historians should talk about both past and present, what words to use. Bliss was it in that dawn of the 1970s to be alive, when one leading historian of sexuality could blithely assert that, ‘for the first time in Western culture, we have the potential of coming to terms with human sexuality’, including a language to describe it ready to hand, as in his own massively judicious survey
The term ‘heterosexuality’, for instance, is now so commonly used as to seem a basic part of our vocabulary on sex, gender and the family. It is nevertheless logically secondary to another word coinage in 1869 by the same German-Hungarian journalist (Karl Maria Benkert/Károly Mária Kertbeny): his innovative term ‘homosexuality’ sought to describe same-sex behaviour, newly regarded in Kertbeny’s time as arising from medically defined behavioural disorders
Like ‘homosexuality’, the early use of ‘heterosexuality’ described a medical pathology, an abnormal appetite for the opposite sex – an origin likely to surprise most of those who casually use the word today. Indeed, the etymology of ‘heterosexual’ is even more unsatisfactory than ‘homosexual’, for to the literal-minded pedant it should imply a sexual being who enjoys multiple potential means of enjoying sexual congress across a variety of genders. That possible form of ‘heterosexuality’ seems a far cry from what has been a dominant Christian model of sex: a binary system in which God initially created humankind ‘male and female’ (Gen. 1.27) and subsequently sanctioned only one set of sexual transactions between them, solely within marriage
In fact, the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish text possibly of the second century BCE that did not make it into the Hebrew Bible but was widely influential in both ‘Second Temple’ Judaism and Christianity, even claimed that angels had been created with circumcised penises, just as Jewish men were circumcised as a sign of God’s Covenant with Israel.
in Syriac, ‘Spirit’ is likewise the feminine rukha. Some early Syriac texts suggest that in such a context, it was not considered at all shocking to think of a Divine Trinity composed of Father, Mother and Son.38 As the Hebrew religion embraced Greek speakers, and later went on to shape the Greek-speaking Christianity of the Mediterranean, Spirit became the grammatically neutral Greek pneuma, but Wisdom remained strikingly female as sophia
Greek: a language and its legacy
His discourses did include analyses of abstract matters such as logic, meaning and causation in texts which bear the functional label ta meta ta physica, ‘After The Physics’, simply because they were placed in his collected works following his treatise on physics and the natural world. So, the name of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, was born in an accident.
Israel: placing a people in the land
Most significantly, for centuries the God of Israel enjoyed a wife, Asherah, a fruitful deity who had long been paired with leading west Asian male gods. She emerges as an active consort and object of Hebrew devotion in, for instance, a series of inscriptions from different Judaean sites dateable to the eighth century BCE. A fragment of poetry has survived in the Hebrew Bible, embedded in later material, in which the divine couple bless the sons of Jacob/Israel.
What is noticeable about the prophetic literature even in its earliest surviving phase is the emphatic connection it makes between sexual misconduct, more often than not on the part of women, and infidelity to the God of Israel. It is not surprising that this eventually led to the ejection of God’s wife from her place of honour (though, of course, the causality might be the other way round). Hosea was a prophet of the eighth century whose diatribe is one of the earliest to survive in written form. He shaped his bitter denunciation of the people’s betrayal of God around what he at least claimed was his own personal tragedy: a direct divine command to marry a woman he already knew to be promiscuous, and soon to be the mother of illegitimate sons and daughters – ‘children of harlotry’.
Equally extravagant on the theme of promiscuous unfaithfulness was the later prophet Ezekiel, both prophet and sometime priest in the last years of the Jerusalem Temple at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. The sexual theme in the collection is not as all-consuming as in Hosea, but when the denunciation of sexual and religious faithlessness does emerge, it is startlingly and brutally uninhibited. At what is now Chapter 23, verse 20, for instance, a harlot is portrayed in nostalgic mood for her time back in Egypt, and ‘her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions’.
Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which also involved reducing the status of lesser gods whom the Judaeans recognized as deities, albeit below the level of God himself.
Cultural conversations: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem
Israelite identity was socially recognized by genital mutilation: male (and never female) circumcision, particularly remarkable in a society which otherwise fiercely condemned bodily modification, including tattoos.8 Circumcision was an ancient attribute of some among the male gods in Mesopotamia who preceded Israel’s recognition of its God: Judaeans
Temple liturgy was here expressing theological prejudice. Women from Eve onwards were catalysts for male faithlessness and spiritual impurity: worse still if they were women from outside the nation.11 The evident Judaic anxiety about women and purity was particularly concentrated on menstruation, that aspect of female physiology that has always puzzled and intimidated men, and which is treated with considerable care in the Book of Leviticus
There was a distinct mismatch between everyday life and the mythology and literary portrayal of Greek or Roman goddesses. Female divinities were notably active in initiating events, breaking every gender stereotype in the normal range of classical clichés about women;
One key battleground concerned sexual intercourse, an occasion on which men do have intimate contact with women, and which often results in children. The experts did not agree here. Aristotle considered the production of children from intercourse to be primarily a male achievement: a man provides the seed; a woman is merely an inert incubator for the foetus.
Aristotle led the pack through his discussion of animal and human biology, discussion that later Christians came to see as authoritative. He spoke bluntly of a woman as a deficient male; five centuries later, the widely revered medical authority Galen of Pergamon could still echo him in speaking of the imperfection of women.
Women, by contrast, lacked self-control. The observable abundance of female moistness in the excitement of sexual intercourse revealed that women possessed a more intense sexual desire than men: a latent and potentially chaotic power that needed a proper masculine governor to rein it in.
The skewing of Classical society towards male privilege naturally expressed itself in conventions of sexual behaviour. The prime criterion was who should take the initiative in sex. To penetrate was a right and privilege, indicating superior social status. It was enjoyed by adult freeborn males: citizens, householders. Those penetrated might be women, teenage boys, or slaves of either gender
One symptom of this, remote from modern social taboos, was a deep horror of dishonourable indulgence in fellatio or cunnilingus, which was particularly pronounced in Roman society. These practices represented the ultimate denial of the male prerogative of penetration. The Roman satirist Martial even claimed that some who indulged in such perversion tried to disguise it by masquerading under the lesser stigma of being passive males in intercourse.
When Jews turned with relief from problematic same-sex to male–female relationships, they could contemplate the Hebrew Bible’s wholly extraordinary anthology of love-poems gathered with the formal title of Song of Songs or Song of Solomon (introduced above in Chapter 1). The collection is all the more strange because, despite the general Jewish insistence on the uniqueness of marriage and unthinking Christian assumptions often made about the text today, it does not concern itself at all with weddings or marriage. Its picture of male–female love is entirely the reverse of the obsessive theme of female betrayal in Hosea or Ezekiel: it consistently proclaims that the woman yearns desperately for her lover, who is quick to respond.
Judaism was happy to allow the frank eroticism and sensuality of the Song to colour its view of marriage, but Jewish literature brooding on the whole message of the Hebrew Bible increasingly emphasized that marriage was the only permissible setting for such physical delights. The prophets and the Deuteronomistic tradition in biblical writing had inextricably linked fornication and adultery with spiritually equivalent behaviour towards God, particularly if God’s people looked to any other god or any other temple than that of Jerusalem. All forms of sexual pleasure outside marriage were thus linked to the first commandment of the Ten that God had given Moses on Mount Sinai/Horeb to be the foundation of the elaborate structure of Law in the Hebrew Bible: ‘You shall have no other gods before Me’ (Deut. 5.7). The tradition of Hellenistic Judaism that grew up around the Alexandrian achievement of the Septuagint translation further emphasized this horror of sexual crime. The Greek word porneia resounded through the text of the Septuagint. In Greek usage before contact with Judaism, porneia had simply signified prostitution. In the Septuagint it was given a spiritual dimension and extended in its meaning to include both fornication and adultery, because they constituted acts of prostitution which were rebellion against God. All other sexual behaviour outside marriage was collateral damage in the crafting of this metaphor – same-sex activity, masturbation, bestiality.
Marriage: Greeks, Romans and Jews
What Christians find less easy to deal with in their inheritance from Judaism is the fact that the Jewish emphasis on marriage and the family long included the option of polygyny – as, indeed, is the case in the great majority of human societies in history.36 Husbands can find multiple wives expensive, and so polygyny is generally a practice for elites
A thousand years more passed before rabbis prohibited polygyny, a ban first recorded in the German city of Mainz, and hence no doubt a defensive reaction to the unsympathetically monogamous eleventh-century Christian society surrounding European Jewish communities. Jewish polygyny could linger later still in Muslim-ruled territories.
The theme of marital love simply has to be seen as a different set of organizing beliefs about men and women
Graeco-Roman tomb sculpture and inscriptions also form part of the very widespread evidence that Graeco-Roman families (certainly elite families) were generally small, like the nuclear families of modern western Europe or America, with no more than one or two sons being considered a desirable norm. This is in sharp contrast to Judaism’s emphasis on marital fertility and large families. After considering all the factors that might accelerate mortality such as war or disease, that can only indicate a resort to methods of family limitation, including contraception and abortion.
Infancy and family
his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention.
The teaching of Jesus
Jesus can be disconcerting, as in his careful interest in classifying eunuchs (Matt. 19.12): ‘there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.’ The other Gospel writers, who do not record this thought, may have found it unhelpful; though not much discussed in modern Christian focuses on the family, it has in the past been of great interest to Christians for a variety of reasons
John the Evangelist is responsible also for the theme that there was one special male disciple whom Jesus ‘loved’. It sits untidily beside the motif recorded in the Synoptics that Jesus sternly rebuked some of the Twelve for seeking a special place in Heaven
Jesus condemns divorce, which under existing Jewish custom was easy to obtain. To justify his condemnation (Mark 10.10; Matt. 19.9; Luke 16.18), he quotes the Creation narratives in the book of Genesis (Gen. 2.24): ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.’33 He uses this proof-text not simply to forbid divorce, but, by implication, polygyny as well. He thus significantly decouples this central Jewish text on marriage from Judaism’s previous history and practice of marriage.
Indeed, Paul’s very contradiction of Jesus is a testimony to the authenticity of Jesus’s original saying about divorce in its stark form; it is also a rare reference in Paul’s writings to what Jesus actually said, rather than to what Paul thought Jesus signified to faith.
The story is presented as being a test by the conventional enemies of Jesus’s preaching, ‘the scribes and Pharisees’, to see how he would deal with the Deuteronomic mandate for death by stoning for adulterous women. Jesus is teaching in the Temple when they drag before him a woman ‘caught in adultery’ (notably, not accompanied by the man who was presumably caught with her). What would Jesus do? they ask. His first reaction is to squat down on the ground and write with his finger. It is ironic that the only reference in the Gospels to Jesus writing is in their most textually insecure section, and what he might have written has been a source of inevitably fruitless speculation over the centuries.43 Rather than disclosing the meaning of his doodles, Jesus observes, ‘Let him who is without sin among you, be the first to throw a stone at her.’ They will be forced to recognize that sin encompasses much more than sexual sins.
Including, excluding
Accordingly, we can reconstruct much of how the first Christians moved away from their Jewish origins, taking with them the already countercultural pronouncements of Jesus on marriage and sex.
To reject universal male circumcision for Christians was therefore to attack basic Jewish assumptions about masculinity, and the rejection had wider implications for Christianity in the Hellenistic world. As a theme in Paul’s thought, it rides alongside a repeated rhetorical construction of himself that reverses the normal priorities of being a man in Hellenistic society. He tells us that he was physically weak (indeed suffering an unspecified ‘thorn in the flesh’); lacking in rhetorical skill (an essential quality of a good citizen); willingly a labourer alongside women and even slaves; all this alongside a readiness to suffer ill-treatment and even imprisonment at the hands of worldly powers.6 Moreover, Paul is only imitating the example of his Saviour and Lord, Jesus, who had surrendered all power in order to hang in weakness and humiliation on the cross. That reversed every aspiration of a successful Graeco-Roman man,
It is clear from Paul’s authentic letters that he was writing to assemblies where Christian women exercised as much local leadership as men; locally, some of these women may have been seen as superior in authority and social position to the visitor Paul as he travelled round the Mediterranean. That was inherent in the way that these new communities were constituted; many converts to Christianity were no longer welcome in the synagogues or had never been associated with them. If they were to gather as an ekklēsia, it would have to be in a generously sized house, hosted by someone with the appropriate resources. The household was female space more than it was male; and it could indeed be headed by a woman, particularly if she were a widow. All this puzzled and embarrassed later generations of Christians, who would have to face the fact that the courtesies in Paul’s letters include greetings to a great many women, some clearly in positions of authority alongside men,
Marriage and beyond: a new departure
The result in Paul’s texts is downright incoherent. His hierarchical gender definitions in 1 Cor. 11 are followed by a long discussion condemning long hair in men (‘degrading’) and insisting that women should publicly pray or prophesy only when veiled, among the justifications being that this is ‘because of the angels’ – a cryptic argument, but dependent on the common assumption in Judaism of the propensity of angels to lust after mortal women
As a result, Pauline Christianity was a rare example of a religious culture which did not make the appropriate expression of sex a priority in marriage. Paul gives the overriding reason for this half-way through his essay on marriage, with a proclamation of the approaching Last Days echoing teachings of Jesus: ‘the appointed time has grown very short; from now, let those who have wives live as though they had none … For the form of this world is passing away
The intellectual genealogy between Philo and Paul is clear from Paul’s central justification for getting married: the avoidance of porneia, Philo’s catch-all word for any form of impermissible sexual activity. The spiritual meaning that Philo had given this word tied it into the tragic metaphor crafted by the Hebrew prophets: faithlessness in the people of God was like the fornication committed by a bad wife.
From Jewish Sect to Christian Churches (c.70–c.200)
One could argue indeed that Mediterranean Christianity was essentially a rebranding of Hellenistic Judaism, and eventually so successful that it is not surprising that its parent culture atrophied.
Alternative voices
In the fourth century, Epiphanios, a busily unlikeable Cypriot bishop and heresy-hunter, described gnostic rites that parodied the Eucharist using semen and menstrual blood.28 Accordingly, one of very few supposedly gnostic texts of such a nature, involving Jesus deliberately indulging in illicit sex, now only survives in a deeply unpleasant small fragment preserved by Epiphanios himself, supposedly from ‘The Greater Questions of Mary’.
comparing them to dwellers of Sodom, ‘which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust’. The Revelation of John in this respect sides with the settled ministry against ‘the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess’ in the Church of Thyatira in Asia Minor; he threatens her and encourages her local opponents in appropriately apocalyptic terms (Rev. 2.20–25). John has revived the name Jezebel from one of the Hebrew Bible’s most picturesque villainesses. In either case, as with Epiphanios’s pornographic musings on gnostics later on, sexual insult performs its habitual task of belittling opponents.
What did the Eucharist signify, with its talk of eating flesh and drinking blood? Cannibalism? What happened in ceremonies of Baptism, when adults went nude into water? Was there incest involved?
It witnessed a growing moral seriousness among the Graeco-Roman elite, exemplified by their fascinated disapproval of supposed sexual excesses among Roman rulers in the previous century; we may follow their prurience in Suetonius’ lurid and still entertaining second-century account of the Twelve Caesars from Julius Caesar to Domitian.44 So little did most outsiders know about this obscure, small-scale and often deliberately secretive religious organization that it was easy for them to project prurient sexual fantasies on to what they did know about unconventional Christian behaviour
Monasticism: an unexpected arrival
Indeed, over the next thousand years, from the second to the twelfth century, Christians wrote a very great deal more about celibacy than marriage.
Philo of Alexandria’s description in the treatise On the Contemplative Life of an ascetic community of philosophers – not attested in other sources – whom he calls the Therapeutae. They consisted of both male and female communities, the two sexes joining together in common worship, so one consideration in accepting Philo’s story as genuine has been his generally low opinion of women’s piety or spirituality: would he have invented such a positive account of female community life? There are nevertheless good reasons to doubt the reality of Philo’s account
Among Syrian ascetics, the loudest encratite voice was Tatian, who had been a student in Rome with Justin Martyr. His conversion to Christianity after an immersion in Hellenistic philosophy and thought involved his dismissing the Graeco-Roman divine pantheon not as fictional, but as active current enemies of the Christian God. The combat was most dramatically expressed in Tatian’s rejection of the whole Graeco-Roman construction of sexuality that we have surveyed (above, Chapter 3), for among the worst of all the Gods of Olympus was Aphrodite, promoter of sexual attraction throughout creation. Caught up in Tatian’s loathing of Aphrodite was the ancient Greek poet Sappho, not for any understanding of her as lesbian, but because of the general eroticism of her verse. ‘Sappho, the sex-mad and cheap little whore, sings licentiousness about herself,’ he snarled.11 Accordingly, Tatian radically developed his reading of Paul of Tarsus into statements that all those indulging in sexual acts, even in marriage, are ‘enslaved … to sexual fornication and to the devil’. Adam’s disobedience to God was a direct result of his sexual coupling with Eve.12 Tatian’s influence was immense in Syria; his greatest scholarly achievement, his ‘Harmony’ or Diatessaron of the four Gospels, was used liturgically as Gospel text in the Syriac Church from the second down to the fifth century. Not surprisingly, therefore, his views on the literally Satanic nature of sexual intercourse had a considerable following in Christian west Asia.
Marriage: against and for
reading must have included Cynic admirers of the outrageous ascetic Diogenes.30 Epiphanes saw conventional marriage as a confidence trick designed to protect property rights: it should be replaced by arrangements for communal sexual activity alongside a general communalism. His blueprint for a just society, ‘sharing in common on the basis of equity’, might be seen as a logical, if unusual, deduction from the picture of community sharing in the Jerusalem Church in the Acts of the Apostles, as much as an expression of Platonism or Cynicism. Epiphanes does explicitly echo Paul’s cry in Galatians 3.28, urging Christians to end the division between ‘female and male, slaves and free persons’. His extension of that into a ban on marriage and the conventional household nevertheless makes a rather radical leap beyond Paul – not to mention his ridicule of the tenth of the Ten Commandments that forbids coveting one’s neighbour’s wife.
His Latin prose did incline towards untrammelled vigour, and he has rather unfairly been remembered for one extreme verbal sally that women were ‘the Devil’s gateway’, for which he has earned reproof from no less a patristic authority than Simone de Beauvoir.32 In fact Tertullian never repeated this remark anywhere else; it occurred in the course of a discussion of modest female clothing, referring back to Eve’s part in the Fall, and if anything, it was a criticism of men for their lustful efforts to enter the vagina, that gateway of female desirability.
Christianity could be a counterculture, which the married state was not. Monastic communities paid no respect to any of the traditional hierarchies of the Mediterranean: maleness, ancient lineage, wealth. For women opting into monasticism, it provided an honourable escape route from both marital life and perhaps unwelcome sexual expectations. It is wise not to elevate this into the still often-advanced claim that early Christianity had an especial appeal to women, a thesis for which there is very little evidence beyond assertions in some early Christian polemical writings.
In the mind of emperors
The Emperor made clear his revulsion that a soul enshrined in a body of male sexual characteristics should turn that masculine body to female sexual positions. This was taking traditional Roman disapproval of passive male intercourse and giving it a new spiritual dimension. In its condemnation of ‘the poison of shameful effeminacy’ enfeebling Roman society, Theodosius’s decree left far behind the assumptions about masculinity that once had constituted the rationale behind the heroic same-sex Theban Band.
Ascetic Christianity in imperial society
It is probably significant that these two charismatic pioneers emerged from the regulated single-sex life of the imperial army. Originally the Church had frowned on Christian men joining the imperial army, largely because of the regular religious rituals involved in swearing loyalty to the Emperor. That consideration no longer applied now that emperors were Christians. Effectively Pachomios and Martin were redeploying and remodelling military discipline for their communities, although their campaigns were now waged by prayer against the Satanic spiritual powers surrounding Christians.
This was not the only way in which Christians twisted the ancient structures of the Empire to accommodate their bundle of social and theological suppositions; society now had to accommodate a growing institutional celibacy and asceticism. Mainstream Christianity had already tilted the balance between, on the one hand, marriage and the family, and on the other the practice of celibacy for both men and women. Christian bias towards celibacy was accompanied by a general negativity about sexual activity inherited from Philo of Alexandria’s variety of Hellenistic Judaism; by contrast, traditional Roman society took marriage to be the foundation of civic and imperial order, regarded sex as for recreation as well as for love and relationships, and found little cultural space for celibacy. At most celibacy had been an aspiration for a tiny minority of would-be philosophers, and, with vanishingly rare and partial institutional exceptions like the Vestal Virgins of Rome, Graeco-Roman culture produced nothing like a monastic community, any more than did mainstream Judaism.
It is noticeable that a major concern of early ascetic literature is how to cope with nocturnal emissions: depressing symbols of the uncontrollable nature of the human body to which the celibate is particularly liable despite the best spiritual intentions. Likewise, Christian texts do not seem to have discussed masturbation at all before the time of John Cassian in the late fourth century.31 Not all would have followed the fifth-century monk Pachon
Angels, eunuchs, saints
In the fourth century, Christian angels remained visually just like adult males: one sarcophagus shows several of them with beards, and at least one of them is balding. From the end of the century came a dramatic shift: not only were later angels invariably clean-shaven, but for the first time they virtually all sprouted wings, and they have done so ever since. We are so familiar with this convention that it comes as a surprise to learn that there is no scriptural or ancient Jewish basis for it; in the Hebrew Bible, cherubim and seraphim have wings, but they are a different class of celestial being. The winged models for angels were from non-Christian Classical art; moreover, those models were specifically female, particularly the winged figure of Victory (Nike). Angels were henceforth a good deal less masculine than they had ever been.
It is ironic but also telling that, in the era we have visited, the Church evolved two different liturgical procedures for celibates in East and West, adelphopoiēsis and the velatio respectively, before it showed any great interest in creating liturgies for marriage in church, or even exerting much energy in getting the faithful to come to church for their weddings. That was a much more long-drawn-out process: the late arrival of the church wedding on the Christian scene is one of the chief forgotten facts about the Church and sex
From Jovinian to Augustine
Some of the greatest names in fourth-century Western Christianity were impresarios of the newly intensified celebration of celibacy: who were the voices on the other side? Most notorious is Jovinian, a monk from Asia Minor, who, though a celibate himself, nevertheless took it on himself to stand up to Jerome’s relentless denigration of marriage and the developments in doctrine encouraged by Bishop Ambrose. Jovinian’s reward was to be condemned as a heretic in 393, both in a Synod at Milan dominated by Ambrose and by a similar assembly in Rome under Pope Siricius
From Jerome’s treatises and many letters, even in some measure in phrases of his supreme achievement, the ‘Vulgate’ version of the Latin Bible, there emerges a tangle of personal loathings coupled with fascinations: notably about the nauseating physicality of marital sex and the general physicality of women (who are also among his closest correspondents). One attentive modern reading of his Vulgate admires the care and accuracy of his translation of ancient Semitic texts, with one exception: irregularities and mistranslations cluster round passages relating to women.
Jerome’s emphatic feelings about sex and marriage led him into an interesting logical trap around the always tangled theological status of Jesus’s family. He was drawn into the question of what constitutes a Christian marriage, already a matter of contention in his time. Is it defined by an act of consent, or by the beginning of sexual relations
was that uncomfortable thought that led to the writing of one of the most influential early Christian texts on marriage: De bono coniugali, ‘On the good of marriage’. Probably written in 401 and deliberately paired with a consideration of virginity (De sancta virginitate, ‘On holy virginity’), it dominated Western Latin Christianity’s thinking on marriage for a millennium and more, because it was the work of the key theologian in the Western tradition: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa and a celibate presiding over celibate communities in his diocese.
The Western Church was thus launched on an inescapable association between shame and sex, not excluding marital sexuality, and for many commentators over the last three centuries that has earned Augustine a dark reputation for shaping Western Christianity’s variety of the ancient Christian negativity on sex.
The contrast between traditions on marriage stemming respectively from Augustine and Basil underlines the fact that, otherwise, our marital journey from Jovinian via Ambrose and Jerome on to Augustine has been our first sexual adventure experienced almost exclusively within Latin Western Christianity. Augustine, so crucial in shaping the life and thought of the West, himself spoke little Greek and was not greatly aware of what his distinguished Greek theological contemporaries were saying. Even his knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy, the ocean in which Greek theologians unselfconsciously swam, was mostly at one remove, through the writings of ‘Neo-Platonist’ philosophers of the second and third centuries CE. That did not stop Augustine praising Plato and commenting in his mammoth discussion of God’s purposes in The City of God that Platonists were esteemed among Christians ‘above the rest of the philosophers’. Perhaps surprisingly, it was his Platonism that opened another gulf between West and East.
Julian had read his Augustine, notably Confessions, and in its narrative he discerned not only personal experience that led his opponent into a negative view of sexuality, but a lurking Manicheism, denying the goodness of creation and seeing evil as a substance created by the Fall. That may seem unfair to Augustine, whose writings resound with fascinated reference to the Creation stories in Genesis, but Julian pointed to his insistence that original sin stemmed from the Fall, of which sexual desire appears one of the chief symptoms (Julian had some fun with Augustine’s speculations about Edenic sexual intercourse).
Variations on a marital theme
Crucial in the debate was a flat contradiction in the way that Julian and Augustine understood both sex and the saving work of Christ. Julian believed that a truly human Jesus Christ would also experience sexual desire as part of the totality of his humanity; otherwise, he observed, if one followed Augustine’s arguments, Christ was no better than a eunuch.
Their attacks on syneisactism made great play with a biblical passage precisely (though more generally) on the theme of men tempted by women: ‘can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned?’ (Prov. 6.27). Unsurprisingly, Jerome was one of those seizing on this rhetorical question and answering in the negative. In one of his most sexually charged letters to the Lady Eustochium, he coined another of his horridly memorable phrases, in describing the women involved as one-man whores (meretrices univirae).
but his trump card was to ridicule men embarking on syneisactism as feminizing themselves: sitting beside women as they spun and wove, absorbing their various little feminine ways, running errands for them. All that was a Graeco-Roman man’s worst nightmare.
From the twelfth century, Western Christians began to have second thoughts, as we will discover, but Eastern Christians remained much more enthusiastic for marriages without sex. It was a remarkably long-lived rejection of the procreational principle for marriage that Clement had imported into Christianity from Pythagoreanism and which lurks amid much modern theology about marriage, Catholic and Protestant.
Despite the central importance of marriage for Zoroastrians, their practice of it was disconcertingly at odds with Christian custom. The Church did not have the advantage it had enjoyed in entering Graeco-Roman society where the dominant culture was monogamous; Zoroastrians allowed polygyny, and they also made close-kin marriage not merely an honourable custom but a religious duty, whereas as we have seen the Romans particularly detested it (above, Chapter 3). One can sample Syrian Christians wrestling with the resulting difficulties in their relations with the Zoroastrian authorities through an extraordinary Syriac text entitled The Cave of Treasures, probably composed in the sixth century.
Eastern Christianity: Enter Islam (600–1200)
In his pioneering analysis of attitudes to sex across the great world faiths, Vern Bullough was prepared to classify Islam as a ‘sex-positive religion’, unlike the Judaeo-Christian tradition or the ascetic tradition in Greek philosophy on which Christianity had drawn. Muhammad ‘regarded sex as a good rather than an evil aspect of life’, for both men and women, and indeed marriage was the highest good, including the traditional Arabian institution of polygyny.5 In symmetry with this, the Qur’an is not positive towards the ascetic celibacy that we have seen become so central to Christianity; it veers between denouncing monks as greedy charlatans and admiring the piety of some Christian ascetics, so accordingly the relationship of Muslims with celibate communities remained uncomfortable and untidy.
Unintended consequences: Islamicate lands and church weddings
This was an emphatic statement of marriage primarily as a transaction between one paterfamilias and another, according to the general custom in west Asia, but it was also an unequivocal bid for the Church to insert itself in the process: a startlingly radical move in the history of Christianity. Indeed, it is perhaps only after 676 that we can speak unequivocally of a thing called Christian marriage affirmed by the Church,
It is worth setting these moves in a wider context to see what an important turning point 676 CE represents in the history of Christian marriage. It is one of the greatest forgotten realities of Christian history that for centuries, from the first years of the Church, there was no such thing as a church wedding, and when church weddings did start appearing, patchily, in the fourth century, the Church did not offer them to all the faithful. When in 2020 the Church of England, after great effort and community discussion, published a study of sexuality entitled Living in Love and Faith, in none of its 482 pages and its eightfold-repeated assertion that there is a ‘Christian understanding of marriage’ did it get round to mentioning this really rather important historical fact.
Icons and the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’
Marriage in northern Orthodoxy therefore had nothing to do with love – nor indeed had sexual desire much to do with marriage. There is a grim realism in an anecdote about the celebrated thirteenth-century royal couple of the Kyivan principality of Murom, David and Euphrosyne; in later years they both entered the religious life and took monastic names as Peter and Fevronia, after which they showed their mutual devotion by dying on the same Easter day, 1228. Fevronia once contemptuously rejected the adulterous sexual advances of a married nobleman by ordering him to draw two buckets of water and taste samples of both: was there any difference, she asked? When he admitted that there was not, she commented that, in the same way, all women are sexually alike, so a husband should stick to the wife he had married
Predictably, Jerome’s principle derived from the Pythagoreans that too much marital affection was as bad as adultery continued to flourish amid the general Orthodox pessimism about marriage. One thirteenth-century text of moral instruction advised men to ‘separate from your wife, so you don’t become attached to her’. It was common to find in Russian Orthodox guides to what confessors should ask of their penitents that the questions grouped excessive sexual intercourse between married partners alongside serious sexual offences like anal intercourse or association with prostitutes.
Britannia supplanted: Anglo-Saxon Christianity
Nevertheless, the penitentials do suggest the rich variety of potential sin available to early medieval Irish folk and their successors, in sexual matters as in much else. They also offer to a violent and unpoliced society a good deal of common-sense regulation of cruelty and general public misbehaviour, seen through the prism of the seven Deadly Sins: a new framework for organizing human affairs that transcended the intricacies of Ireland’s existing structures of power and lawmaking, reassuringly entrusting the anxious to the care of a universal Church. If this Irish/Welsh innovation had not proved to have wide appeal as part of the package of Irish Christian mission in mainland Europe, the institution of private confession would not have enjoyed such power over the following millennium, for good or ill. It has to be recognized, nevertheless, that in all eras from the earliest days a major part of that power was directed towards the regulation of sexual behaviour, even though it constituted only one-seventh of the quota of deadly sin.
The Carolingian moment: monastic cities of God
Above all, northern Europe did not partake in the Mediterranean custom of exclusive monogamy. The evidence is lacking for Anglo-Saxon society even before its Christianization, but elsewhere it is clear that those who mattered in society, while opting for Christian faith and practice, showed as little sympathy for the Christian principles of monogamy as they did for the idea of indissoluble marriage. Existing northern European practices of elite polygyny blended with the presence in Roman law of an institution of concubinage alongside marriage – a stable relationship, but one where the female partner was of lower status than the man, often indeed a slave.
Pilgrimages, Crusades, a militant society
In the late tenth century, Carolingian abbots and bishops began appealing to the consciences of their communities to secure peace. They convened large gatherings of laity and clergy; the Bishop of Le Puy in southern Francia provided the first known precedent in 975, threatening violent wrongdoers with excommunication and demanding that the crowds in front of him swear an oath to keep the peace. Other bishops imitated his initiative, drawing on their churches’ various collections of relics to reinforce their threats with the wrath of the saints. Eventually they even brokered formal agreements defining on which days fighting might legitimately take place.
A ‘persecuting society’
The authorities in the Frankish Church and its royal allies first introduced the drastic penalty of burning for intellectual or theological adventurousness in the 1020s, amid some murky political manoeuvring. Ironically the origin of burning heretics was not Christian but began with burnings of Manichean believers by Christianity’s last great imperial foe, the Emperor Diocletian, back in the late third century. The Latin West probably revived burning now because it neatly sidestepped ancient prohibitions stopping Churchmen from shedding blood.5 It was a distinctively Western Latin development. In the Byzantine Empire there had been previous burnings at the stake but they ceased soon after the West took up the practice
Certainly, contemporaries made this connection with the East: the English word ‘bugger’ and its French cognate are derived from ‘Bulgarian’, and reflect the usual canard of mainstream Christians against their opponents as far back as the New Testament that heresy, by its essentially unnatural character, leads to deviant sexuality.
This was not the Western Church’s finest hour; the Crusade became a two-decade war of conquest in southern France on behalf of the French king and northern European nobility. Mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the Crusaders’ retribution against their enemies, who were by no means all identified as Cathars. This warfare was also the first significant laboratory for ‘inquisitions’: from the end of the twelfth century, a new institution of ecclesiastical enquiry and discipline authorized by the Catholic Church. Inquisitions with various regional jurisdictions remained a constant part of the Church’s structure of regulation throughout European society into the eighteenth century. Their residual formal presence still endures in Roman Catholic bureaucracy under another name, as the Vatican’s ‘Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’.
in general, female monasticism suffered constrictions during the twelfth century. The problem was the conviction of twelfth-century men, particularly those learned men trained in medicine, canon law and theology in the new universities, that females had greater sexual energy and urges than males, needing the protection of strict segregation within convent walls, even when they were consecrated celibates.17 That was coupled with a suspicion of female celibacy inappropriately practised in the world: a dark irony followed. Since Cathars were accused of rejecting physicality, and therefore sexuality, in their dualism, it was possible to be burned at the stake accused of Cathar-style heresy merely for protecting one’s chastity.
Not only ‘heretics’ were its victims; so were Jews. They first suffered systematic murderous violence from Christians while armed crowds were gathering in Germany for the First Crusade; they have never been entirely free of it thereafter. England, in the twelfth century the leading component in a transmarine empire under the French Angevin dynasty, has some unenviable firsts in the persecuting society: the first European example of the infamous ‘blood libel’ against Jews, in a Norwich Cathedral cult following the supposed ritual murder of a local boy in 1144; the first mass victimization of accused Christian heretics in 1165–66; a particularly ghastly massacre by fire of the whole Jewish community at York as a ‘flagship’ of nationwide massacres in 1190, and finally, exactly a century later, official expulsion of the kingdom’s entire Jewish population, the first such expulsion in the whole continent.
Plural voices in a united West
The most famous love story of the period is the thwarted marriage of the theologian Peter Abelard to the intellectually gifted Heloïse: mutual love arising out of his tuition of her, which led to the birth of a son, a short-lived marriage and his forcible castration by her furious relatives before both parties were sent to monastic houses. After experiencing traumatic suffering for mutual passion, Abelard broke with the general Christian tradition since the second century CE and proclaimed the moral rightness of sexual emotions: ‘It is clear, I think, from all this that no natural pleasures of the flesh should be counted as sin nor should it be considered a fault for us to have pleasure in something in which when it happened the feeling of pleasure is unavoidable.’ Abelard said this as a married priest, so for the moment it looked as if history was not on his side. The Western world, let alone Western Christianity, would take a great many centuries fully to catch up with his opinion – or indeed his passionate defence of the ordination of women.
Or she was all too attainable: not simply in the school textbook sexual assault by Pamphilus, but in the adulterous tales of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere – both first emerging in twelfth-century francophone texts.
Her revelations, a form of spiritual diary created between 1291 and 1294, were recorded in Latin by her confessor, a male Franciscan friar (who prudently did not perpetuate his name). When first put into print in the eighteenth century their content was found so shocking that the scholarly edition was suppressed. A great deal of nudity cavorts through Agnes’s more than two hundred visions of heaven, embracing both herself and Christ. Boldest of all, even through the filter of Latin, is her especial devotion to one feast of the Church’s year, the Circumcision of the infant Jesus, innocent of the Catholic anti-Semitism then developing. ‘About a hundred times’ at the Mass of that feast day, she would feel a sweetness on her tongue, and described herself as swallowing the foreskin (‘prepuce’) of Christ.
The city; the family
The same cluster of attitudes is revealed in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Venice, where most rape trials were increasingly relegated to become the business of minor courts in the Republic’s legal system, and where it is plain that authorities accepted rape as one way to begin a long-term sexual relationship, even as a preliminary to marriage.
and it has been estimated that between 1459 and 1502, one in every two young Florentine males between twelve and twenty years old had been named before the ‘Officers of the Night’, characteristically as passive partners of older men.
the ‘Mediterranean’ pattern of unequal-age sexual activity is not nearly so apparent in fifteenth-century northern European cities, where the cases revealed (in what is also a much smaller overall number of prosecutions) were more a matter of partners of equal age, many of whom returned repeatedly to their desires.
Indeed, throughout the Italian cities of the period an astonishing and steadily increasing number of young elite women were sent off to nunneries, to save the rising cost of marriage dowries – in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Milan it would eventually comprise three-quarters of their number. The picture was similar in other southern Mediterranean societies concerned to stop family resources being dissipated in marriages; that often resulted in a great many reluctant and discontented young nuns, as well as many frustrated young men.
The family: triumph and transformation
There was good reason for this Lutheran U-turn, after the most alarming demonstration of both polygyny and Anabaptism in a horrific episode in the western German city of Münster. In the early 1530s, groups of excited radicals began converging on Münster, convinced that it was the New Jerusalem. Arriving in their thousands, in 1534 they seized control of the city’s Reformation, which had begun in conventionally Lutheran mode. A joint expeditionary force of Lutherans and Catholics besieged Münster, and under pressure, with the city running short of food, the radicals’ revolution became ever more bizarre in its biblicism. In July 1534 they instituted polygyny on the basis of the Old Testament, provoking horror and opposition in the city that needed savage armed force to suppress. Girls as young as eleven were forced into polygynous marriages. The final Anabaptist leader, a charismatic young Dutchman Jan Beuckelszoon (known to generations thereafter as ‘John of Leyden’), announced that he was the biblical King David reborn. His personal harem, living in bizarre luxury as the citizens starved, eventually numbered fifteen, although when hunger eventually reached even his Court, Beuckelszoon sent fourteen of them to seek refuge outside the city. When in June 1535 the besiegers burst into Münster after eighteen months, their revenge on the Anabaptist leadership was as grotesque as the events they were punishing. The iron cages in which the tortured bodies of Jan and his companions rotted are still displayed high up on the belfry of the parish church of St Lambert.
Radical Reformation in northern Switzerland in the 1520s had included ecstatic sexual promiscuity beyond even any polygamous framework: women who felt liberated from all popish restrictions on gospel freedom offered themselves sexually to the men in their devotional circle. ‘Why do you judge?’ they replied to appalled townsfolk in St Gallen. ‘We have passed through death. What we now do is against our will in the spirit.’
The papal Church: defence and recovery
The sorry tale is worth setting out at length because it illuminates two separate Catholic ideals intertwining with toxic results: the enforcement of clerical celibacy, and the provision of education for all. There was nothing new about child abuse in a clerical context as we have seen in Egypt and early medieval Ireland, but the Counter-Reformation brought a new structural problem without precedent in the Church. Catholic priests faced a new reality of celibacy, leaving many struggling to cope with the emotional consequences in their own lives. Some took out their frustrations and anguish on vulnerable young people. Piarist expansion of schools for the poor offered the opportunities – far more than ever before. Power over the young was there for clergy to misuse, filling emotional chasms.
Common concerns: the Reformation of Manners
Protestant and Catholics were, after all, at root arguing about the best way to understand a shared inheritance: the complex theological legacy of the single most important theologian in Western Christianity, Augustine of Hippo. In a bon mot of the American Presbyterian historian B. B. Warfield (oft-remembered among historians at least), ‘The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.’
There were encouragements to sexual discipline. In the 1590s serious economic stress and bad farming conditions across Europe disrupted many wedding plans; in this decade England was probably typical in registering the one noticeable spike in its bastardy rate (and consequent need for parishes to support illegitimate children), which probably frightened the tax-paying population. It was the beginning of a period of cooler weather in the northern hemisphere
lasted till the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘little Ice Age’, during which agricultural shortages always threatened social cohesion. A further background alarm had emerged a century before: an apparently brand-new disease that spread frighteningly quickly across Europe from south to north and which was soon observed as connected to sexual intercourse. The coincidence of Europe’s first contacts with the Caribbean and the Americas by the expeditions of Christopher Columbus after 1492 has suggested an origin, but we have experienced a recent example of a killer disease suddenly emerging from insignificance through some accidental change of behaviour; the origins of this fifteenth– sixteenth century epidemic remain controversial. Certainly it had not figured in the consciousness of Graeco-Roman doctors, so inconveniently it lacked a widely recognized name until taking the title of a Latin poem of 1531 by an Italian doctor, Girolamo Fracastoro: Syphilis
Few public statements about such closures admitted the connection with disease: Henry VIII for instance gave moral rather than medical reasons in his proclamation closing down the Southwark brothels. But at the same time public bathhouses also disappeared across Europe, outside Finland and the eastern areas dominated by the Ottoman Turks. Not all baths had the dubious sexual reputation that is their prevailing memory and there was no plausible religious justification for closures: general fear of close contact must have been paramount.95 Ironically, their disappearance must have produced generally lower standards of personal hygiene. Anxieties about catching syphilis did affect people’s sexual behaviour, for instance keeping the future Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier a virgin at university
As we have already observed, Christians have had a long-standing impulse to ascribe sodomy to the Other. That label could be applied to Muslims and aboriginal peoples overseas: it provided a handy reason for seizing their lands and possessions and enslaving them, just as did frequent accusations that such peoples were cannibals. That did not stop the contrasting sexual mores being a reality.
What was Enlightenment?
In 1787 the British Parliament abolished the right of Church courts to prosecute pre-marital fornication. Simultaneously, advocates of moral discipline tried to make Parliament do what the Church no longer could, but many in the governing elite were not prepared to see new meddling in their lives when the old interference had atrophied: successive parliamentary bills against adultery foundered, albeit usually by small margins of votes, and efforts ceased after 1800.
The chance to choose: sexuality in society
Over the next three centuries, that produced successive waves of what is now called ‘feminism’. The roots of feminism are unmistakably pre-Enlightenment, firmly planted as we have seen in female self-assertions independent of male initiative in both Reformation and Counter-Reformation, from Ursulines to women prophets to the perceptible skewing of religiosity towards women during the seventeenth century
There is nevertheless no doubt that ‘effeminacy’ also completely reversed its meaning as a description; previously, Catholics had mocked Tudor Protestant bishops as ‘effeminate’ for their excessive interest in women, rather as John Chrysostom had mocked male partners in chaste heterosexual relationships. A century after the Reformation, the same mockery was applied for the same reason to England’s Charles II, that most ebulliently heterosexual of monarchs, so the subsequent switch in meanings after 1700 was very sudden.
Equally difficult for Enlightenment writers was the universal and ancient human activity of masturbation. It is intriguing that masturbation should suddenly seem a huge and threatening problem in eighteenth-century Europe. It had not been a particular concern for Graeco-Roman medicine or society generally
significant feature of the masturbation panic is that it began in the same places and at much the same time as the public emergence of homosexuality and the furious reaction to that phenomenon. In a similar fashion, it united Church and Enlightenment society in outrage, together with a third, distinctly less horrified, constituency in pornographic publication
Amid all this continent-wide obsession with masturbation as a threat to human health and morals, it is startling to find the practice turned into a recreational group pursuit within men’s clubs in eighteenth-century Protestant Scotland. A century and more previously, Scotland had pioneered the all-male societies of Freemasonry, rich in myth-making and carefully bounded masculine socializing. The ‘Beggar’s Benison’ founded in Fife in 1732 with satellites in Edinburgh and Glasgow represents a bizarre turn in the Masonic ethos. These societies determinedly concentrated group efforts on enthusiastic and onanistic contemplation of females hired for the spectacle, compiling wearisomely innuendo-laden minute books and the like for their programmatically heterosexual though inescapably homosocial activities. Members of the Beggar’s Benison included ministers of the Church of Scotland and at least one future bishop of the early Victorian Scottish Episcopal Church, David Low. It is astonishing that any archives or artefacts from these organizations survived the club’s eventual disbanding on the eve of the Victorian era in 1836, but they have.
The chance to choose: Evangelicalism
Many activists in the Unitas Fratrum were very young to be placed in positions of leadership. Among them was Count von Zinzendorf’s son Christian Renatus, just out of his teens when made a presbyter in the Church, together with von Zinzendorf’s son-in-law Johannes von Watteville, regarded by many as the major actor in the disaster. Not for the first time in Christian history, many believers framed their perception of Christ’s forgiveness of sins as an absolute gift that included sins still to be committed – an ‘antinomianism’ (freedom from moral law) which was a dangerously logical extension of Martin Luther’s rejection of good works in salvation. They experienced union with Christ not merely through the joys of marriage, but in extramarital sex as well – their stripping-away of gender in mystical joy further extended to same-sex kisses and embraces. Young people plunged with delight into this proof of their freely given salvation. This was a repeat of the mystical promiscuity of Swiss radicals in the 1520s, and it has not proved the last time that new groups of Christians have improvised ethical codes encouraged by leaders with more charisma than self-discipline, threatening institutional and personal collapse. In
Polygamies and more
In this spirit, and in disgust at the hypocrisy of slave-holding Protestant Christianity, the wealthy Scots emigrant Frances Wright created a utopian anti-slavery community in Tennessee in the 1820s, where the races not only mixed but placed no boundaries on their voluntary sexual activity, in contrast to the sexual coercion of the plantations. In 1848, four years before Brigham Young announced the late Joseph Smith’s revelation, an even larger commune at Oneida, New York State, constituted itself in a regulated system of swapping heterosexual partners: ‘complex marriages’.61 Smith was positioning the future of his growing community amid all this, with the aim of creating true polygamy for this life and the next: some of the first plural Mormon marriages involved a woman with multiple husbands
Kondratii Selivanov, emerged in western Russia from an earlier dissident Orthodox group characterized by penitential flagellation. Outdoing their rigorism and extending the Orthodox tradition of negativity about sex, he founded a sect devoted to eliminating sexual lust from the human race through very specific and literal forms of self-mutilation. Selivanov based his teachings on particular proof-texts crafted out of his own misreadings of the Bible in Russian. He read a command of God to the Israelites as plotites’ (‘castrate yourselves’) rather than plodites’ (be fruitful), and he rendered Iskupitel’ (‘Redeemer’) as Oskopitel’ (‘Castrator’) where the New Testament speaks of Jesus. As a result, to achieve purity his male followers, the Skoptsy (‘castrated ones’), cut off their genitals, and women their breasts. The tsarist authorities were no less horrified or baffled than their Soviet successors after the 1917 Revolution, but persecution and punishment were not going to have much effect on people who had punished themselves so drastically; reports of them persist even after the Second World War
A Story Without an Ending
It can never be too often emphasized that through most of recorded Christian history, and in the societies that preceded Christianity, marriage was a contract between two men: the fathers of the bride and groom respectively. Paul of Tarsus introduced a Christian complication into this by speaking in one of his letters to the Corinthians of the mutuality and sexual equality of a couple in marriage: that emphasis has continued to thrust itself into subsequent Christian discussions of marriage, though as a result it has frequently been written out of the theological picture. Here medieval Western canon lawyers deserve salutation for their efforts to ensure that at least the Western Church remembered what Paul had said