Christian Theories of Sexuality
The Church Fathers’ views of sex were dominated by ascetic values, for most of the Fathers were, at one time or another in their careers, monks or hermits. The most important patristic authority on sexual matters, the one whose views have most fundamentally influenced subsequent ideas about sexuality in the West, was St.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Augustine held strong, deep- seated convictions about sexual relationships and the role of sex in human history, convictions that flowed from his own experience and his reflections upon it, convictions that brooked neither denial nor dissent.[335]Sexual desire, Augustine believed, was the most foul and unclean of human wickednesses, the most pervasive manifestation of mans disobedience to God’s designs.[336] Other bodily desires and pleasures, Augustine felt, did not overwhelm reason and disarm the will: one can be sensible while enjoying a good meal, one can discuss matters reasonably over a bottle of wine. But sex, Augustine argued, was more powerful than other sensual attractions; it could overcome reason and free will altogether. Married people, who ought to have sex only in order to beget children, can be overwhelmed by lubricious desires that blot out reason and restraint; they tumble into bed together simply in order to enjoy the pleasure of each others body. This, Augustine thought, was not only irrational but sinful.[337] Augustine’s underlying belief in the intrinsic sinfulness of carnal desire and the sensual delight that accompanied sexual union became a standard premise of Western beliefs about sexuality during the Middle Ages and beyond.[338]
Not only was sexual desire a basic and pervasive evil, according to Augustine, but it was also a vice that no one could be sure of mastering. We are born with it and it lasts as long as we live.
No one, whatever his age or position in life, can confidently claim to have conquered it.[339] “As I was writing this,” Augustine noted in his polemic against Julian, “we were told that a man of eighty-four, who had lived a life of continence under religious observance with a pious wife for twenty-five years, has just bought himself a music-girl for his pleasure. ”[340]Augustine and his contemporaries among the Fathers considered sex a grave moral danger in part because they believed that sexual feelings and urges, particularly the reactions of the genital organs, were not fully under the control of the human will. Since sexual desire was partly ruled by the will, Augustine felt that sexual urges could sometimes be mastered—the wish to have sex, the conscious desire for pleasure, these things required consent of the will before they became sinful. The sexual impulse itself, however, sprang unbidden from the depths of the human psyche and, since its appearance could not be anticipated, it constituted an ever present danger to morality.9
Sex, Augustine believed, was a shameful, sordid business. For this reason, he observed, people always try to carry out their sex functions in seclusion. Even brothels, he noted, provide privacy so that whores and their customers can do their dirty business in the dark. Likewise married couples seek seclusion when they make love: what they do may be perfectly legal, but it is also shameful. The shame of sex resulted from the ritual pollution that accompanied all sexual activity. Augustine and other Fathers argued that the Old Testament requirements for purification after marital intercourse or nocturnal emission meant that Christians, too, must cleanse themselves of sexual defilement before they could participate in religious services. The Fathers were careful to point out that this did not mean that sex was always sinful, but it did mean that sex left a stain of moral contamination that must be removed before entering holy places or participating in sacred rites.
The genital organs themselves were both ritually and morally unclean, according to Augustine. Sexual passion was rooted in the genitals, and our very anatomy proclaimed that the physical sources of human life and reproduction were also the physical sources of sin and pollution.10Christians therefore faced a moral imperative to avoid sex as much as possible, even though repression of sexual desires might encourage other moral shortcomings, such as greed.11 The good Christian, according to Augustine and others, must lead a chaste life, even in marriage. Augustine was keenly aware of the difficulties that this entailed. He recalled in his Confessions his own ado-
haberem, nunciatus est nobis senex OCtaginta et quatuor agens annos, qui religiose cum conjuge religiosa jam viginti quinque annos vixerat continenter, ad libidinem sibi emisse Lyristriam. ” Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 405.
9Augustine, De civitate Dei 14.9, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alfons Kolb, CCL 47-48 (Turnhout BrepoIs, 1955) 48:441; De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.23.25, in CSEL 42:237-38; Contra Julianum 4.2.10 and 4.7.38, in PL 44:741, 757; Miiller, Lehre, pp. 24, 28; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 389.
10Augustine, De civ. Dei 14.18-20, in CCL 48:440-43; De bono coniugali 20.23, ed∙ Joseph Zycha, in CSEL 41 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1900), pp. 217-18; Serm. 151.5, in PL 38:817; Daniel Callam, “Clerical Continence in the Fourth Century: Three Papal Decretals,” Theological Studies 41 (1980) 49-50; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 388.
"Augustine, De bono viduitatis 21.26, in CSEL 41:337-38; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 351.
Iescent yearnings, which had caused him to pray that God would “Give me chastity and continence—but not just yet!” And even as a mature man Augustine reported that he continued to be troubled by vivid erotic dreams and twitches of carnal desire. Nonetheless Augustine taught that, difficult as it might be, those who sought salvation must strive continuously to conquer their sexual passions and to overcome the spirit of lust.12
Augustine wrote eloquently on the theology of sex, but he was by no means the only patristic writer to deal with the subject.
His contemporaries by and large shared Augustine’s negative attitudes toward the role of sex in Christian life. A few were even more certain than he that sex was a root cause of sin and corruption. St. Jerome (ca. 347-419/20), for example, maintained that sex and salvation were contradictions. Even in marriage, coitus was evil and unclean, Jerome thought, and married Christians should avoid sexual contact whenever possible. St. Gregory of Nyssa was still more emphatic: he taught that only those who renounced sex completely and led lives of unblemished virginity could attain spiritual perfection.13Such views as these owed as much to philosophy, particularly to Stoicism, as to religious teaching, and St. Jerome explicitly acknowledged in his treatise against Jovinian that he was drawing upon Stoic sources.14 But although fourth- and fifth-century patristic writers borrowed heavily from pagan sexual ethics, they nevertheless sought to legitimize their borrowings by finding support for their conclusions in the Scriptures. This sometimes required ingenious feats of imaginative interpretation, but a Scriptural foundation for their ideas about sexuality seemed essential.
True, not every reference to sex in every passage of the Fathers was wholly disapproving. Some patristic writers commended married love as a virtue, and others praised procreation as a virtuous goal. It would require an artificial manipulation of the patristic texts, however, to fabricate from these scattered and fragmentary references a tradition of Christian tolerance toward sexual desires, much less a school of Christian eroticism, either in the patristic period or in the Middle Ages. Overwhelmingly the Fathers of the Church and their medieval successors saw sex as a danger to be combated, not a pleasure to be praised. Indeed it was the pleasurableness of sex that alarmed them most. But sex, un-
'2Augustine, Confessiones 2.2.2, 3.1.1, 8.7.17, and 10.30.41, ed.
Pius Knoll in CSEL 33 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1896), pp. 29-30, 44, 184-85, 257.13Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum 1.13, 1.26, 1.28, in PL 23:229-30, 246, 249; Gregory of Nyssa, De virginitate 2, in PG 46:323-24; Bailey, Sexual Relation, pp. 45-46; JoAnn McNamara, “Cornelia’s Daughters: Paulaand Eustocium,” Women’s Studies 11 (1984)12-13. “, „
14Jerome, Adv. Jov. 1.49, in PL 23:280-81; Aries, “L’amour dans Ie mariagc,” pp. 118-19; Philippe Delhaye, “Le dossier antimatrimonial de YAdversus Jovinianum et son influence sur quelques ecrits Iatins du X∏e siecle,” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951) 68. Jerome found some strands of Stoic ethics so congenial that he numbered Seneca among the saints; De viris illustribus 12, in PL 23:662. But his use of the Stoics was highly selective; Colish, Stoic Tradition 2:70-81.
like other pleasures, was not something that a Christian ascetic could take in moderation. Although those who vowed perpetual virginity might be said metaphorically to be socially dead, even the most austere ascetic could not completely forego eating and drinking without courting physical suicide as well; that, it was agreed, was immoral.[341] But, as St. John Cassian pointed out, it is quite possible to forego sex (at least overt genital sex) completely and still continue to exist.[342]
If fourth- and fifth-century patristic writing about sexuality was almost exclusively negative, the Church Fathers were emphatically positive in their praise of virginity. The notion that virginity possessed singularly powerful, almost magical, virtues was, like deprecation of sexual pleasure, a belief with pagan antecedents. Patristic writers diligently searched the Scriptures in quest of support for their exaltation of virginity. Not surprisingly they found what they were searching for, especially in certain remarks of St. Paul. Relying on Paul’s authority, patristic authors created a theology of virginity that portrayed the asexual life as the summit of Christian perfection.[343]
But patristic sexual theories also owed more to heterodox teachings than orthodox writers cared to acknowledge.
Gnostics and Manichaeans deeply influenced patristic theories of sexuality. The Manichaeans, whose beliefs Augustine had embraced as a youth, held that Adam and Eve knew no sexual desire, nor did they engage in intercourse, while they lived in Paradise. Human sexual organs are capable of coitus only when aroused by lust, they argued, and lust is a product of sin. Before the first sin, therefore, either there had been no sexual intercourse at all, or else arrangements for conceiving children must have been different than after the Fall from Grace.[344] Jerome and many other patristic writers agreed with this analysis. Jerome understood the “innocence” of Adam and Eve primarily in sexual terms. Before the first sin there was no sex. The human race s first experience of sexual pleasure took place after expulsion from the Garden of Delights.Sex thus came after sin and was its product.[345] Fulgentius of Ruspa (ca. 468-533) adopted a similar line of thought: the libido is a punishment for sin, a consequence of the Fall from Grace, and the root of all evil. John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa enunciated similar views.[346] According to Augustine, however, Adam and Eve had known sex in Paradise, although it was a different kind of sex from the sort that we experience, for the very physiology of reproduction changed as a result of sin. Prior to the Fall the sexual organs had been under conscious control; but just as our first parents rebelled against God, so after the Fall our genitals rebelled against our will. Humans then became incapable of controlling either their sexual desires or the physical reactions of their gonads.[347]
The Churchs struggle against heretical sects, especially the Pelagians and the Manichaeans, as well as the followers of Jovinian and the Stoics, did much to shape the marriage doctrines of St. Augustine and the other Fathers. Against the Pelagians Augustine defended the reality of the Fall from Grace and its dreadful consequences. Against the Manichaeans, the Abelonians, and the Priscillians, Augustine and other patristic writers upheld the holiness of marriage.[348] The Stoics presented special difficulties for patristic defenders of Christian orthodoxy, for while the Fathers certainly adopted some of their most dearly held beliefs from the Stoics, and were conscious that they did so, they also felt compelled to reject other Stoic teachings, such as the contention that all sins are equally serious.
Conversely, the Jovinians agreed with the Stoics in considering all moral faults equally grievous, but also denied that the ascetic life had any special claim to be the preeminent Christian path to salvation. The Jovinians thus denied that monks and other ascetics were more virtuous and deserving than ordinary married Christians who had frequent sexual intercourse and even enjoyed it.[349] Jovinians doctrine called forth one of the most blistering denunciations in all of patristic literature, the Adversus Jovinianum, in which St. Jerome savagely attacked Jovinians beliefs. Indeed Jerome defended the celibate life so vigorously that he came close to condemning marriage. He also furnished generations of misogynist writers with a battery of elegant vituperation and ferocious mockery directed against the foibles and follies of women.[350]
Patristic discussions of the place of sex in the Christian life are shot through with a fundamental ambivalence about the place of women in the scheme of salvation.[351] Augustine agreed clearly and emphatically with other patristic writers in requiring that men observe the same norms of sexual conduct as women.[352] At the same time, however, Augustine, like other patristic authors, considered women frankly inferior to men, both physically and morally.
Women, he believed, were created by God in order to help men by bearing children. If this was not women’s primary role in the scheme of creation, he asked, what reason could God have had for creating them? They were not as useful as men for agricultural work, and if God had intended Eve as Adam’s helper in the fields, he would surely have created another man. As for the notion that women were destined to be man’s companion, Augustine would have none of it. A man would have been better for that purpose, too.[353] “I fail to see what use woman can be to man,” Augustine concluded, “if one excludes the function of bearing children.”[354] Not only did women have no value aside from child-bearing, but they were, even worse, a source of sexual temptation, and had been ever since Eden. Eve’s principal positive contribution there had been to sew together fig leaves to make the loincloths with which our first parents hid their shame at finding themselves naked.[355]
The notion that women were valuable only as mothers raised further questions about the role of females in a scheme of life that placed the highest value on sexual abstinence. If sexlessness was a requirement for perfection and virginity the surest credential for those who wished to be saved, as some patristic writers clearly thought, then what relevance did reproduction have for Christians who aimed at perfection? And if childbearing, the womanly virtue above all others, was ultimately inappropriate for Christian women, then what other function ought they to play in the plan of salvation? Patristic writers generally preferred to avoid these questions and gave no clear, unequivocal answers to them.[356]
They were clear, however, about the need to combat sexual desire and to avoid sexual sins, even if their designs for achieving these goals were far from consistent. The most common scheme involved strategies that limited marital sex to certain permitted times and situations, but otherwise advocated complete sexual abstinence, both in thought and deed. St. John Cassian (ca. 360-435) devised elaborate strategies for systematically avoiding situations that might bring sexual fantasies to mind, so as to achieve a totally asexual regime that monastic writers liked to refer to as the angelic way of life.[357] Cassian and others elaborated schemes of discipline to ward off dangerous sexual impulses. These plans regulated diet, clothing, social contacts, sleeping habits, posture, and other aspects of daily living with the aim of eliminating physical, mental, or emotional stimuli that might trigger sexual responses and sexual desires. The influence of such schemes upon the quality of spiritual sentiment, as well as the psychological and social well-being of Christians, is difficult to determine. Men and women who adhered to these plans would certainly be deprived of many kinds of human contact and would be subject to physical, social, and sensory deprivations that were likely to produce isolation, social maladjustment, and depression, to aggravate neurotic problems, and perhaps to precipitate even more serious disturbances. These possible outcomes, however, seemed lesser evils to those who devised such regimens than sexual lust would have been.
The one means of fighting off sexual temptations at which practically all authorities drew the line was castration. Although one or two extremists—Origen was the best known—had advocated and even practiced this radical method of combating sexual temptation, orthodox opinion held that this solution carried a good thing too far. Both the so-called Canons of the Apostles and the genuine canons of the Council of Nicaea (325) prohibited the practice.[358]