Notes about Sexuality and Religion

https://archive.org/details/bodysocietymenwo0000unse/page/n29/mode/2up?view=theater   

page 6

Roman Empire average life expectancy 2nd Century was 25 yrs. only 4% lived beyond 50.

In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives.

Mary Beard: The Sexual Status of the Vestal Virgins

page 19

A powerful “fantasy of the loss of vital spirit” lay at the root of many late classical attitudes to the male body. It is one of the many notions that gave male continence a firm foothold in the folk wisdom of the world in which Christian celibacy would soon be preached.

…

Virile man was the man who had kept most of his vital spirit-the one, that is, who lost little or no seed. Hence the ambivalence that surrounded the figure of the post-pubertal eunuch, such as the self-castrated devotee of Attis. Far from crumbling into a presexual formlessness, as was the case with those castrated when young, the full-grown man who made himself a eunuch, by carefully tying his testicles, became an asporos, a man who wasted no vital fire on others. Galen thought that if Olympic athletes could be castrated in such a way that their reserves of heat would not be disrupted by the operation, they would be stronger. Soranus agreed: “Men who remain chaste are stronger and better than others and pass their lives in better health.”

page 21

Despite its obvious limitations, the evidence that we have considered so far gives little support to the widespread romantic notion that the pre-Christian Roman world was a sunny “Eden of the unrepressed.”

Still less is it possible to explain, and by implication to excuse, the austerity of Christian sexual ethics, and the novelty of the Christian emphasis on total sexual renunciation, as if it were no more than an understandable, if excessive, reaction to the debauchery that prevailed among the cultivated classes of the Empire.

page 22

A severitas, a hard-bitten, manly austerity, that made few concessions to women or to pleasure, was the current coin of public utterance in the third century. The conversion of Constantine to Christianity merely made the hardening of the public mood irrevocable. Pagan and Christian alike, the upper classes of the Roman Empire in its last centuries lived by codes of sexual restraint and public decorum that they liked to think of as continuous with the virile austerity of archaic Rome.

page 27

An unaffected symbiosis of body and soul was the aim both of medicine and of philosophical exhortation. The body must not be permitted to force its needs upon the tranquil mind: it was to be kept well tuned according to its own, intrinsic laws. The mind, in turn, must constantly refine itself, lest, through weakness and uncertainty, it come to participate in the lability of the flesh. [101 Foucault] A man unduly preoccupied with his body was an undignified sight. To spend one’s time “in much exercise, in much eating, drinking, much evacuating the bowels and much copulating” was, quite simply, “a mark of lack of refinement”.

page 28

The boy’s first ejaculation was celebrated by his family at the feast of the Liberalia, on March 17.

page 29

[Young women were] too labile a creature to be allowed the periods of sexual freedom granted to young men, and tolerated even in husbands, her family must guard her carefully. But the physical integrity of her body had not yet become the charged symbol that we now associate with Mediterranean Christian societies.” The girl’s loss of her virginity was, simply, a bad omen for her future conduct. A girl who had already enjoyed furtive love affairs might do the same when married. She was not a “well brought up” girl. From a second-century author, no harsher judgment was necessary.

page 41

I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Mathew 5:28

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder. Mark 7:21

page 48

Paul crammed into the notion of the flesh a superabundance of overlapping notions. The charged opacity of his language faced all later ages like a Rohrschach test: it is possible to measure, in the repeated exegesis of a mere hundred words of Paul’s letters, the future course of Christian thought on the human person.

…

Yet we should not overlook the half-conscious momentum of Paul’s phrases. A weak thing in itself, the body was presented as lying in the shadow of a mighty force, the power of the flesh: the body’s physical frailty, its liability to death and the undeniable penchant of its instincts toward sin served Paul as a synecdoche [part representing whole eg ‘boots on ground’] for the state of humankind pitted against the spirit of God.

…

In all later Christian writing, the notion of “the flesh” suffused the body with disturbing associations: somehow, as “flesh,” the body’s weaknesses and temptations echoed a state of helplessness, even of rebellion against God, that was larger than the body itself.

Romans 7:23 ESV:

page 50

For as many of you who were baptised into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. [85 Galations 3:27-28]

page 51

But once pagans entered the “Israel of God,” Paul had every intention of subjecting them to what he evidently considered to be the ordinary decencies of Jewish life: “Do not be deceived, neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, passive or active will inherit the kingdom of God.

Paul was a Jew, burning to make pagans into children of the true God. Не looked out with undisguised disgust at the tedious prospect of the sins of the gentile world. In that dark landscape, sexual sins cluttered the foreground. By committing the supreme anomaly of worshipping created things rather than their Creator, pagans had brought upon themselves every kind of sexual anomaly. All boundaries had collapsed before their ignorant pride and lust:

page 52

In the spring of 54 A.D., Paul wrote from Ephesus to answer a series of letters from his supporters in Corinth. This letter came to be known as Paul’s famous First Letter to the Corinthians. In it, we can glimpse a church where issues of sexual control and sexual renunciation condensed anxieties about the entire structure of the communities that Paul had wished to found.

…

The women refused to wear veils at the solemn sessions in which prophets and prophetesses spoke to the faithful, drawing from Paul a disquisition on hair and on the natural hierarchy that made men superior to women, so contorted and so heavy with unspoken anxieties, that modern scholars remain at a loss as to how to unravel it. Either Paul himself (or a follower so close to him as to be able to place the passage in the text of Paul’s letter at a very early stage in its circulation), attempted to solve the dilemma by brusquely ordering married women to remain silent in church: “For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the Law says. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

page 53

They saw no reason why the newly founded community should be content to replicate, within itself, the tension-laden compromises of the ordinary world. They would undo the elementary building blocks of conventional society. They would renounce marriage. Some would separate from pagan spouses, others would commit themselves to perpetual abstinence from sexual relations. The growing children for whose marriages they were responsible would remain virgins.

…

men and women together would await the coming of Jesus “holy in body and spirit.” Only by dissolving the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency associated with a new creation. It is the great hope which, in all future centuries, would continue to flicker disquietingly along the edges of the Christian church.

page 54

In coming down firmly on the side of allowing marriage to continue within the Church, Paul acted as he usually did whenever his converts were tempted to erect excessively rigid barriers between themselves and the outside world. As in his tolerant attitude to the eating of “polluted” pagan foods, so in his attitude to marriage, Paul sided with the well-to-do householders who had most to lose from total separation from the pagan world. For it was they who would support his ambitious mission to the gentiles most effectively.

page 55

The dangers of porneia [prostitution, unchastity, fornication, etc], of potential immorality brought about by sexual frustration, were allowed to hold the center of the stage. By this essentially negative, even alarmist, strategy, Paul left a fatal legacy to future ages. An argument against abandoning sexual intercourse within marriage and in favor of allowing the younger generation to continue to have children slid imperceptibly into an attitude that viewed marriage itself as no more than a defense against desire. In the future, a sense of the presence of “Satan,” in the form of a constant and ill-defined risk of lust, lay like a heavy shadow in the corner of every Christian church.

page 60

This was the situation that Justin found at the time of his conversion, in the first decades of the second century. As his Apology made plain, strict codes of sexual discipline were made to bear much of the weight of providing the Christian Church with a distinctive code of behavior. Sexual prohibitions had always distinguished Jews, in their own eyes at least, from the sinister indeterminacy of the gentiles. These were now asserted with exceptional vigor.

page 61

It is not altogether surprising that, at just this time, we hear shocked rumors that esoteric Christian groups had turned to free love. Their enemies claimed that these explored, through promiscuity, the nature of “true communion.” The rumor was apposite enough. It is not altogether unthinkable that some believers, baffled by so much diversity, should have used the common bedrock of their shared sexuality to explore the potent ideal of an utterly undivided and truly universal religious community.

…

Continence, in particular, carried with it associations of an elemental simplicity. Sexual renunciation was a carrière ouverte aux talents. As Christians, women and the uneducated could achieve reputations for sexual abstinence as stunning as those achieved by any cultivated male. Total chastity was a gesture that cut through the silken web of decorum that swathed the public man: here was “philosophical” restraint at its most drastic, now made open to all.

[“LA CARRIÈRE OUVERTE AUX TALENTS” Thus the famous boast of Napoleon Bonaparte, who claimed that under his rule, talent, not inherited rank, would determine who advanced and who did not. The principle lies at the core of what is widely thought to be the American value system, and it underlies as well the foundations of capitalism.]

page 62

A later legend speaks of how the Sages of Palestine once captured the sexual drive. Fully aware of its disorderly nature, they were at first inclined to execute it. But they relented. They maimed it, so that it could never force an Israelite, against his will, to commit incest or sins against nature. But the impulse itself must be allowed to continue in Israel: “for if you kill it, the world itself goes down.

page 63 [Jews promoted marriage and breeding]

“Concerning the man who loves his wife as himself, who honors her more than himself, who guides his sons and daughters in the right path, and arranges for them to be married around the period of puberty, of him it is written: Thou shalt know that thy tent is at peace.” [Babylonian Talmud]

page 67

…contemporary Jews and pagans. Both believed that abstinence from sexual activity, and especially virginity, made the human body a more appropriate vehicle to receive divine inspiration. Possession was an intimate and dramatically physical experience. It involved a flooding of the body with an alien, divine Spirit. Hardly surprisingly, such an experience was thought to exclude the warm rush of vital spirits through the same body, traditionally associated with intercourse. Philo of Alexandria had presented Moses in that light: after his encounter with God on Sinai, he had come to disdain sex.

…

Some second-century Christians considered themselves called to be prophets “from their mother’s womb,” and so maintained a perpetual unmarried state. The strong emphasis on the virgin birth of Christ in the Gospel of Luke points to a mentality where virginity and the gift of prophecy were closely linked. A man could be spoken of with esteem as “a eunuch.” Virgin girls appear as prophets.

page 76

A man of robust idiosyncrasy, Tertullian was also one of the most skilled rhetors of his age. Не knew exactly how to create an audience for his own, admittedly extremist, views by appealing to the unquestioned prejudices and the shared anxieties of literate Christians. Thus, far from representing the morose outpourings of a lonely genius, Tertullian’s writings enable us to glimpse the conglomerate of conflicting notions on sexuality, and on the meanings that might be attached to its renunciation, that circulated in a major Latin church at the beginning of the third century.

page 77

Tertullian had to look elsewhere for a criterion of true prophecy that could apply to those who had not yet come to live under the majestic shadow of a martyr’s death. His answer was magnificently, insistently simple. Continence, the suspension of all future sexual activity, brought down the gift of the Spirit: “By continence you will buy up a great stock of sanctity, by making savings on the flesh, you will be able to invest in the Spirit”.

“Look to the body.” This was Tertullian’s brilliantly, deceptively simple formula. The body was a “unified organism. Tertullian was a Stoic, and like so many of his contemporaries a voracious reader of medical literature. Не was not a “dualist” in any way. Indeed, his insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete “body,”

page 78

With Tertullian, we have the first consequential statement, written for educated Christians and destined to enjoy a long future in the Latin world, of the belief that abstinence from sex was the most effective technique with which to achieve clarity of soul:

Let us look at our own inner world. Think of how a man feels in himself when he abstains from a woman. Не thinks spiritual thoughts. If he prays to the Lord, he is next door to heaven; if he turns to the Scriptures, he is all of him present to them; if he sings a psalm, it fills his whole being with enjoyment; if he exorcises a demon, he does so confident in his own strength.

page 81

Tertullian was the first, but by no means the last, Latin writer to create, with a rhetor’s mastery of the ad hominem argument, the cunning artefact of an unchanging and unchangeable human nature, forever subject to the facts of sex. Не sunk sexuality deep into the human body. Mulieritas, [female puberty] the state of a woman aware of her own sexual feelings and capable of inspiring sexual feelings in others, was a state that began, ineluctably, with puberty. It was not possible for a mature girl to “virginify herself” simply by leaving her head bare in church.

Social convention, therefore, was the same inside as it was outside the church. It was based on a commonsense reaction, shared by pagans and Christians alike, to the palpable menace of sexual desire among all human beings, and, most especially, to the known seductiveness of women. The misogyny to which Tertullian appealed so insistently was, in his opinion, based on unalterable facts of nature: women were seductive, and Christian baptism did nothing to change this fact.

page 93

There were even radical disciples of Tatian who ascribed Adam and Eve’s original loss of the Spirit directly to a sexual act. They asserted that Eve had met the serpent, who represented the animal world, and that the serpent had taught Eve to do what animals do – to have intercourse. Joined to the animal kingdom, therefore, by being “sexualised,” Adam and Eve found themselves on a slippery slope that led, through sexuality, to the animal kingdom, and, hence, to the grave.

page 95

page 118

The accusations of sexual immorality made against almost all Gnostic teachers made plain that this was a matter of no small importance in the second-century Christian church.

page 133

As for the charis, the “graciousness” created by intercourse – that indefinable quality of mutual trust and affection gained through the pleasure of the bed itself – which even the dignified Plutarch took for granted: Clement’s stark insistence that intercourse should take place only for the begetting of children caused the delicate bloom of such a notion to vanish forever from late antique Christian thought.

page 140

To its pagan critics, Christianity was a religion notorious for close association with women:

They recognize each other by secret signs and marks; they fall in love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religious lust, a promiscuous “brotherhood” and “sisterhood.”

Pagan conviction that Christians met in order to indulge in sexual promiscuity died hard. This was hardly surprising: by the year 200, every Christian group had accused its own Christian rivals of bizarre sexual practices.

page 168

Origen was widely believed to have practiced what he preached. It was always said of him that, as a young man of about twenty, around 206, he had discreetly gone to a doctor to have himself castrated. At the time, castration was a routine operation. Origen’s supporters were prepared to believe that he had undergone the operation so as to avoid slanderous rumors about the intimacy that he enjoyed with women who were his spiritual charges.

page 177

Faced by such withering indignation, Origen, the Christian Platonist, made the gran rifiuto [great refusal] that separated him forever from the “Ancient Wisdom” of his pagan colleagues. Christians, he replied, “have already learned … that the body of a rational being that is devoted to the God of the Universe is a temple of the God they worship.

page 230

Regrettable though they were, sexual lapses were a fact of desert life. Monks were known to have become the fathers of sons: the hero of one such anecdote eventually brought his child back with him to the cell, resuming his handicraft just as he had left it before his escapade into the world.” Older men harassed the novices: “With wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them. Bestiality with the monastery’s donkeys could not be ruled out.

What mattered, rather, was a sharpened awareness of the permanence of sexual fantasy. Because of this observed quality of permanence, sexual desire was now treated as effectively coextensive with human nature. Abiding awareness of the self as a sexual being, forever subject to sexual longings, and troubled-even in dreams-by sexual fantasies highlighted the areas of intractability in the human person. But this intractability was not simply physical. It pointed into the very depths of the soul. Sexual desire revealed the knot of unsurrendered privacy that lay at the very heart of fallen man. Thus, in the new language of the desert, sexuality became, as it were, an ideogram of the unopened heart. As a result, the abatement of sexual fantasy in the heart of the monk-an abatement that was held to be accompanied, quite concretely, with a cessation of the monk’s night emissions – signaled, in the body, the ascetic’s final victory over the closed heart.

page 236

A monk’s relations with his sexual fantasies brought his baffling relationship into exceptionally clear focus. What was most enduringly physical about him – his sexual needs and lingering sexual imagination – seemed most intimately interwoven with the state of his soul. The ebb and flow of sexual energy was consistently presented, by Evagrius and John Cassian, as a symptom that reflected, in the obscure but crucial frontier-zone between body and spirit, changes that happened deep within the soul. Speaking of the way a novice’s growing capacity for the love of God could even take sexual forms “akin to the passion of fornication”…

page 242

In the fourth and fifth centuries, the ascetic literature of Egypt became a repository of vivid anecdotes concerning sexual seduction and heroic sexual avoidance. In this new monastic folklore, the body leapt into sharp focus. Women were presented as a source of perpetual temptation to which the male body could be expected to respond instantly. For a nun simply to pat the foot of an elderly, sick bishop was considered enough provocation to cause both of them to fall instantly into fornication.

page 243

Faced by the perpetual threat of an asceticism so radical that it blurred the distinction between city and desert, even between men and women, the leaders of the churches, in Egypt as elsewhere, fell back on ancient traditions of misogyny in order to heighten a sense of sexual peril.

page 250

The world of the novices was a narrow one. It lay at a distance from the life of the normal Christian congregation. It is exceedingly difficult to know how much and in what manner the sexual codes, elaborated to such a pitch of caution in the desert, trickled back into the churches. We must be very careful not to exaggerate their immediate effect on the sexual conduct of the average Christian. Studies of modern societies where the ascetic still enjoys great prestige have taught us to be prudent:

page 345

Many aristocratic women threatened to dispose of their wealth in favor of the clergy and the monks. In Roman society, the most significant transfers of wealth had always happened through legacies: by frequenting the palaces of devout women, priests joined in the time-honored Roman hunt for bequests from the childless. In the Italy of Ambrose, treatises on virginity no longer circulated as exhortations to a sheltered piety. They were written so as to change upper-class opinion – to persuade emperors, prefects, and provincial governors to allow wealthy widows and virgins to remain dedicated to the Church, and to tolerate the redirection of parts of the wealth of great families, through such women, to pious causes. No Latin writer saw the implications of this new situation more clearly than did Ambrose.

page 352

With Origen, however, the widespread sense of the incongruity of human birth had hardened into the notion that conception and birth were inevitably associated with a series of “stains,” of contagia. Jewish strictures on the “unclean” nature of the blood and debris of the womb, a sense of the “anti-spiritual” nature of the act of intercourse, and the fact of widespread infant baptism in the churches came together to form an ominous complex of contagia. They suggested to Origen that some deep, original “taint” must surely lie at the very beginning of human existence.

…

The sense of pollution conveyed by the stain of birth did not weigh very heavily upon Origen. Like a thumbprint on clear glass, it was visible only in the growing light of the glory that lay in store for the transformed body. It did not speak of “original sin,” as this was later understood in the Latin West: it was not the sign of an irrevocable fall of all mankind in Adam.

This was not so for Ambrose. The sheer sweep of Origen’s cosmic view largely escaped him. The one transformation that riveted his attention was that brought about by conversion and baptism in the Catholic Church. Не had no wish to consider the prospect of a long, slow purification of the soul, as it journeyed through a mighty universe.

For him, human sexual feeling stood out in dark silhouette against the blaze of Christ’s untouched body. Human bodies, “scarred” by sexuality, could be redeemed only by a body whose virgin birth had been exempt from sexual desire. It was a heady antithesis, with a long future ahead of it in the Latin Church. A generation later, those writings of Ambrose which stressed the contrast between the virgin birth of Christ and the birth of ordinary human beings would provide Augustine with what he took to be irrefutable support of his own views on the intimate relation between the act of intercourse and the transmission of original sin: arguments on the virgin birth, taken from Ambrose, enabled Augustine to inject “a powerful and toxic theme into medieval theology.”

page 371

In the Holy Land, the somewhat marginal colonies of upper-class Latins and the crowded retinues of great ladies on pilgrimage offered opportunities for the flowering of spiritual companionship between male and female ascetics that were unique in the Mediterranean world. By a readily understandable paradox, those ascetics who profited most, both spiritually and (we must always remember) financially, from close contact with devout women deplored such companionships when practiced by anyone except themselves. Jerome attacked one distinguished lady for having “mixed insouciantly” with male clergymen  when traveling in the Holy Land. Не poured scorn on a rival who had remained active in Rome, “running around the cells of virgins and pious widows and discoursing gravely on the Scriptures.

page 376

The human body remained for Jerome a darkened forest, filled with the roaring of wild beasts, that could be controlled only by rigid codes of diet and by the strict avoidance of occasions for sexual attraction. No amount of ascetic labor, no shared intellectual enthusiasms could overcome this fact. Writing letters of advice to distant ladies, Jerome placed the sayings of Jesus Christ on the same footing as the authors of Roman Comedy: both the Creator of human nature, and the Roman authors, sharp observers of humanity’ coarser antics, agreed that men and women were irreducibly sexual beings, and a constant source of temptation to each other.

…

Faced by the letters of Paul, Jerome caricatured himself. In his exegesis of the Apostle, he contributed more heavily than did any other contemporary Latin writer to the definitive sexualization of Paul’s notion of the flesh. An unrelieved sense of sexual danger, lodged deep within the physical person, swallowed up all other meanings of the flesh:

page 379

But, after 393, Origen came to be touched by the fatal stigma of heresy. The “face of the dragon” was unveiled. On issues that touched on the nature of the human person, and most particularly on the extent to which the differences between the sexes could be regarded as transcendable, Origen was shown to have belonged to a very distant age. Не stood before the men of the late fourth century with all the chilling majesty of a great, long-extinct creature. Jerome was forced to choose. Не could no longer base his persona as a spiritual guide to noble ladies on so unpopular a figure. After 395, he came down firmly on the side of views that stressed the lasting differences between the sexes and the irremovable risk of sexual temptation between men and women.

page 382 – 383

By meeting women as equals in their study-groups, they anticipated a future age when the ache of sexual division would be abolished. Almost without knowing it, Jerome had betrayed his own past as the mentor of Marcella, Paula, and Eustochium. In rounding on what he took to be the views of Origen, he declared that an ancient Christian image of transformation, by which male and female became one in Jesus Christ, was irrevocably inapplicable to his own times.

It was important for Jerome’s readers in the West that men should remain men, and women should remain women.

…

The drift in theological attitudes, though limited to sheltered circles of monks and scholars, coincided with a marked hardening of official attitudes.

For the first time in history, in 390, the Roman people witnessed the public burning of male prostitutes, dragged from the homosexual brothels of Rome. The Emperor Theodosius’ edict… shows clearly, in the very incoherence of its moral indignation, the slow turning of the tide.

page 387

In the late August of 386, a thirty-two-year-old teacher of rhetoric, recently arrived in Milan from Africa, had begun to face the personal consequences of his wish to seek baptism at the hands of Ambrose.

For Augustine, commitment to the Catholic Church had come to арpear inexorably, over the previous months, to imply that he must also commit himself to a life of perpetual continence. In the garden in Milan, where Augustine struggled to reach a decision, the baleful shimmer of the “hope of this world” (that alluring and diffuse conglomerate of predominantly social expectations associated with success, with status, with comfort and security, against which so many young men and women touched by the ascetic movement had set their face in the course of the fourth century) had narrowed down to a choice of merciless precision; Augustine had to abandon an active sex life:

page 388

As he wrote the Confessions, Augustine wished to convey a sense of the sharp contrast between his sexual needs and his longing for clear, unproblematic relationships. Не plainly regretted that both the strictly nonsexual ties of intellectual friendship and the sober concord of a legitimate Roman marriage had eluded him as a young man. The clear blue sky of unsullied love – the serenitas dilectionis – had been all around him; but it had remained forever distant. Swirling mists of sexual desire had clouded his vision, as he attempted, in the serious manner of a sixteen-year-old, to tread the luminosa limes, the radiant knife edge, of intimacy.

[COPILOT: Here, “luminosa limes” represents the delicate and precarious boundary between intimacy and vulnerability. It’s like walking on a sharp, radiant edge—the fine line between emotional closeness and potential hurt.]

page 392

Standing with his fellow auditors around the [Manicheean] Elect, Augustine doubtless listened to their exalted hymns in praise of virginity; but he felt sure that such stirring sentiments did not yet apply to himself: “and I, an unfortunate young man would pray: ‘Lord, give me chastity and continence, sed noli modo, but not now.’ “

…

[In 384, his mother] Monica found him such a wife – a girl not yet old enough to marry, possibly, even, a twelve-year-old, some nineteen years younger than himself! She had hoped that her son might become a baptized Catholic as a result of the match.

Augustine’s concubine did what was expected of her on such осcasions. She returned to Africa, bound by a vow to have no further sexual relationship.

page 394

We should not underestimate what that first experience of “sure, sweet delight” meant to Augustine. It abruptly deflected his attitude to sexual joys. Through Ambrose and, possibly, through his Neo-Platonic readings, Augustine was brushed, for a crucial moment, by the “wild” Platonism that we have met with in the mystical thought of Origen. Direct experience of the sharp joys of the spirit made physical pleasure seem shadowy, even repugnant, to him. “Limbs asking to receive the body’s embrace” mirrored the enduring sweetness of the touch of God with disturbing congruence.

page 399

A man like Gregory of Nyssa would have found the Bishop of Hippo’s Literal Commentary on Genesis (a long work, begun around 401, and not completed until 416) a highly idiosyncratic book. So, even, would have Ambrose and Jerome.

page 406

Far from vanishing, sexual fantasy, in the form of dreams accompanied by pleasurable nocturnal emissions, still lingered within him. Such sexual dreams may not have caused him great revulsion in 397; but they did point, in no uncertain fashion, to a disjunction between his conscious image of himself and a mysterious inability to follow his own will.

page 408

For Augustine, it [sexual intercourse] was, in itself, a miniature shadow of death. Like death, the onset and culmination of sexual sensation mocked the will. Its random movements spoke of a primal dislocation. It betrayed a discordiosum malum [discordant evil], an abiding principle of discord lodged in the human person since the Fall.

page 412

[Julian] realized that Augustine’s notion of the abiding corruption of human nature since the Fall was intimately linked to his conviction that this corruption was made explicit by a permanent derangement of the sexual urge. It was not enough, therefore, to insist, as other Pelagians had done, that sexual needs could be renounced without insuperable difficulty. Julian had to go on to demonstrate that, in strict theory, sexual desire did not have to be renounced at all. It was in no way corrupted. It was both irrational and impious to suggest that the sexual urge, as now used in married intercourse, was in any way different from that which God had first placed in Adam and Eve.

…

Julian was careful to point out that he wrote to defend the sexual urge, “not as some outstandingly good thing, but as a drive in our bodies made by God-a drive which you claim has been placed deep within us by the Devil, making your whole doctrine stand or fall upon little more than the discreet behavior that surrounds the sexual act.”

page 414

Even the most austere Greek Christians had tended to agree that as long as men and women had to have children so as to overcome death, sexuality was indispensable for the majority of Christians.

…

The only Christians who seemed to think otherwise were those who had inherited the radical traditions of Encratite Syria-the Manichees and the Messalians. Unlike Augustine, Julian knew Greek well.

…

The Messalians were said to have cut the link between sexuality and society. The sexual instinct, for them, was not a merciful adjunct, granted by God to a fallen Adam, so as to overcome death. It was a demonic intrusion, a terrible force that had come to possess men and women, and that lingered deep in the heart, like an evil spirit, even among baptized Christians. Messalians were said to have dismissed Christian baptism as a mere “shaving” of sins: the stubble of lust would soon grow again. Julian accused Augustine of saying the same.

page 416

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

In marked contrast to most Greek and Syrian writers Augustine identified this moment with an instant of clearly felt sexual shame. Не went on to insist that such shame was “more than just;” it was “utterly appropriate. As soon as they had made their own wills independent of the will of God, parts of Adam and Eve became resistant to their own conscious will. Their bodies were touched with a disturbing new sense of the alien, in the form of sexual sensations that escaped their control. The body could no longer be embraced entirely by the will. A tiny but ominous symptom – in Adam’s case, the stirring of an erection over which he had no control – warned them both of the final slipping of the body as whole from the soul’s familiar embrace at death.

page 426 – 427

To beget children with a certain, medically approved zest, as a duty to the earthly city, was no longer enough. The Christian married couple must “descend with a certain sadness” to that particular task: for in the act of married intercourse itself, their very bodies spoke to them of Adam’s fall. In Augustine’s piercing vision, the Roman city and the walls of the married household within it – those solid, magnificently self-reliant creations of an ancient Mediterranean way of life – were now washed by a dark current of sexual shame.

page 429

We should, however, remember that we have followed the destinies of a small and vociferous minority, in an ancient society that changed very slowly. Even the minority was divided in its opinions. The Early Church was so creative largely because its most vocal members so frequently disagreed with each other. As in the history of all great revolutions brought about by the militant few, room must also be found in any history of sexual renunciation in the Early Church for tragedy, for disillusionment, and for sheer boredom on the part of the unheroic majority of believers. The reaction to Jerome’s Against Jovinian, to mention only one example, shows Christian congregations baffled and angered by the fashionable radical stances of one of their more articulate leaders.

page 432

Christian notions of sexuality had tended to prise the human person loose from the physical world. The calor genitalis, the fiery spirit unleashed in the sexual act, was no longer treated with an ancient reverence. Sexuality was not seen as a cosmic energy that linked human beings both to the fertile herds and to the blazing stars. Nothing is more marked than the severity with which the bishops of the Latin West now censured those occasions on which the animal and the human might be seen to join.

In the early sixth century, Caesarius of Arles was genuinely appalled that human beings should dance through the streets of his city, bearing the great horns of the stag and uttering the calls of wild beasts. The pagans of the first century A.D. had not been greatly disturbed by the presence of an animal nature in the act of love: the gods themselves had joined the human and the wild in their amours. What had worried ancient Romans was that a free man might upset the stern civic hierarchy that separated him from a woman by indulging in oral sex with her, or by offering himself, like a woman, to be penetrated by his lover.

In Dark Age Ireland and Frankish Gaul, by contrast, it was also the animal world that had to be kept away from the marriage-bed: intercourse “from behind, in the manner of dogs” was one form of sinful act, among many others, for which married persons must do penance.

page 433

Christianity brought from its Jewish background the distinctive flavor of a view of the human person that tended to peer past the body, that restless reminder of man’s enduring kinship with the beasts, into the heart. Sexual motivations and the abiding, protean force of sexual fantasy attracted the attention of Christian ascetic thinkers: their very privacy and persistence spoke more resonantly than did other forms of human cunning and malevolence, of the black shadow of self-will that lay at the very back of the heart.

The transparency that John Cassian associated with the gift of “purity of heart” was shown in the body by the ebbing of the sexual drive. But the gift was won only through a struggle with the heart itself, in the slow and intricate un-twisting of the private will. If Augustine disagreed with Cassian, it was not because he believed that the body’s instincts were any stronger or more corrupt: rather he held that the most humble details of the body’s experience of sexuality – erection, impotence, orgasm, and instinctive shame – mirrored a failure of the will more drastic and irrevocable than Cassian had been prepared to admit.

…

When he wrote in 601, to answer questions raised by the first monks from Rome to settle among the heathen at Canterbury, Pope Gregory I showed surprisingly little sympathy for their concern with ritual prohibitions that had to do with blood and semen.

…

page 433-434

Temporary denial of access to the altar, due to menstruation and childbirth among women and to ejaculation among men, had underscored the position of human beings as creatures perched between nature and the city. They had protected human sacred space from the formless, purely biological, products of the body that periodically reminded the faithful of their indissoluble connection with the natural world.

A follower of Augustine in his magnificent obsession with the will, Gregory turned his back on that tradition. Neither the woman’s blood nor the man’s semen counted for anything. The “primitive nation of the English” must be told that what kept human beings away from the sacred had nothing to do with their physical bodies. It was the subtle, impalpable flaw within the human will that stood between them and God.

The dislocation of the will caused telltale eddies of “illicit delight” to form in the wake of every act of married intercourse. Such delight was no longer seen as an eminently physical experience, caused by the exuberant rush of vital spirit through the veins; it lingered, rather, as a sharp, sweet flicker in the heart. Pious Romans, Gregory added, usually kept away from church until such feelings had subsided in their minds. They did not do so because their bodies had emitted seed.”

Will and memory, topics of absorbing interest to thinkers of an introspective turn of mind, and not the body, were at stake: “Such matters must be weighed with the utmost subtlety.”

“For, behold, this is what it is to be human… a creature with a will, at once bound and free.”

page 436

Yet the town may have sheltered no more unmarried males than did an Egyptian village of the second century, where about ten percent of the men had no wives. What matters is that unmarried men and women were now effectively dragooned into a distinct and privileged class: as monks and nuns, they might produce no children for their city; but, at least, they would not compete for private land.

page 437

Christian attitudes to sexuality delivered the death-blow to the ancient notion of the city as the arbiter of the body. Christian preachers endowed the body with intrinsic, inalienable qualities. It was no longer a neutral, indeterminate outcrop of the natural world, whose use and very right to exist was subject to predominantly civic considerations of status and utility.

God had created the human body and Adam had brought upon it the double shame of death and lust. The new sensibility to nudity showed this slow change in the collective imagination of the late antique world.

page 438

Christians were as appalled as Jews had been by the indeterminacy of the body. The body of young males might no longer enjoy the time of the ludus, that period of frankly bisexual free play, before the city set the young man firmly in place as a married statesman. Spiritual guides now asked a young man whether he had lost his virginity – a question which would have concerned only his sister three centuries earlier.

Men were now expected to derive from the body itself the laws that limited their love-making. The body was a “sacrosanct temple,” intended by God to be joined, if at all, only to members of the opposite sex, and then, ideally, only so as to produce children. Indeterminacy of any kind was disturbing to late antique persons. In the fourth century, the soft, tumbling locks and the haunting, godlike ambivalence of a head of Antinous, the Emperor Hadrian’s true love, was recarved so that his smooth cheeks and heavy hair now represented an Imperial lady!

Nor did the products of sexual intercourse lie any longer in a neutral zone, waiting for the family to decide whether they were relevant or not to human society: contraception, abortion, and the placing out of children were equally condemned. By the sixth century, the ancient right of the Roman father to decide whether or not he would accept a newborn child was spoken of as a custom that belonged to a distant, pagan age.

page 442

From the age of Valentinus and Origen to that of Jerome and Evagrius, the delicious suspicion that even the rigid boundaries between the sexes might trickle away in the liquid gold of a “spiritual” body, caused disturbing gusts of freedom to blow, intermittently, among the intelligentsia of the church. For Augustine, the bondage of the will to sexual desire spoke of the postponement of that great hope to the end of time: though tragically deferred, the yearning for transfiguration still remained.