Early Christianity incorporated some of the ideas on self-mastery already present in Late Antiquity, but reworked them to formulate a radically new sexual ethics. Whereas in Late Antiquity, sexual renunciation was valued as part of a male ethics of self-mastery, by the 5th century ad, Christian ideals promoted virginity and sexual abstinence for men as well as women. In the context of a shift in political power towards church authorities, sexual desire came to be blamed for binding humans to their worldly obligations to spouse or children. It prevented them from concentrating on spirituality in furtherance of the coming of the kingdom of heaven, and preparation for the afterlife. Christian hostility towards sex reflects this wider religious project of freeing humans from their worldly ties and desires. Celibacy and purity came to be valorized, whereas sex and desire became policed.
A key influence in this development was Augustine (354-430 ad), one of the founding fathers of Western Christianity, whose gloomy teachings developed the influential doctrine of ‘original
sin’ which presented sex as the cause of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden narrated in Genesis. Augustine declared that sexual intercourse in paradise would have taken the form of ‘a gentle falling asleep in the partner’s arms’ had Adam and Eve not fallen prey to carnal desire, and that ‘lustful sex is the enemy of God’. In contrast to the classical age, for Augustine sex was not produced by the heating of the body, but by ‘concupiscence’ — sinful desire. Man’s fall from grace expressed the victory of the ‘corruptions of the flesh’ over moral will power, and intercourse was tainted by original sin. Consequently, Augustine promoted sexual abstinence even though he himself had not found the struggle against ‘the filth of concupiscence’ easy, as reflected in his autobiographical work Confessions, in which he famously described himself as a youth praying to God to ‘give me chastity and continence, only not yet’.
Christian ethics therefore developed a notable hostility towards sex and, more generally, towards carnal desire, which it saw as an obstacle to spiritual salvation, chaining humans to their animal lusts. The taint of sin was thought to pollute humans from the moment of birth. As Calvin put it, a newborn baby is ‘a seedbed of sin and therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God’. Whereas for the ancient Greeks and Romans, the erect phallus was a symbol of power, for Augustine it incarnated man’s enslavement to concupiscence. Women were presented as even greater ‘slaves to lust… worse than beasts’, in the words of Origen, a Greek theologian of the 3rd century ad.
Christian attitudes towards marriage were ambivalent. Following Jesus’s cue that ‘if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters — yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14: 26), early Christians saw families fundamentally as obstacles to religious devotion. Marriage was all the more viewed with suspicion due to the dangers of the temptations of the flesh, which reflected the works of the devil. As Pope Innocent III formulated
this dilemma in the 13th century: ‘everyone knows that intercourse, even between married persons, is never performed without the itch of the flesh, the heat of passion and the stench of lust’. The Protestant theologian Martin Luther shared this distaste for marital intercourse, declaring that ‘had God consulted me in the matter, I would have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay’. However, Church fathers recognized that the majority of believers were unlikely to adopt the Christian ideal of the celibate life. Marriage was therefore seen as an acceptable compromise with the material world, and praised as a building block for society by theologians such as Paul who argued that spouses owed each other the ‘marriage debt’ of sexual intercourse as long as procreative motivations were their main purpose, and they observed monogamy and fidelity. This put a greater onus on the procreative aspects of marriage than in the ancient world, where adoption of children or adults had constituted a socially acceptable alternative to the production of heirs through reproduction. Sexual consummation of the marriage became consequently of crucial importance in the Christian world, and non-consummation was declared legitimate ground for divorce in Gratian’s textbook of canon law (1140 ad). However, Church authorities generally viewed requests for dissolution of marriage with suspicion, since unscrupulous spouses might use false claims of impotence as a way of freeing themselves of a marriage. For this reason, various regions, including England, introduced the examination of husbands by ‘honest women’ in the service of Church courts.
In his book Impotence: A Cultural History the historian Angus McLaren reports an account of such an examination provided to the courts of York and Canterbury in the 15th century:
The same witness exposed her naked breasts, and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she hid and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John. And she embraced and frequently kissed the same John, and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him that for shame he should
 |
|
then and there prove himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long, … remaining without any increase or decrease.
On the grounds that ‘to many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation’, as Augustine put it, Christian marriage was presented as second-best to celibacy and other ascetic practices. Some early Church fathers such as Origen were said to take the fight against spiritual pollution from lustful desires so far as to have castrated themselves. Although never very popular with the wider population, by the 4th century self-castration as an expression of Christian chastity had sufficiently alarmed Church authorities for them to condemn the practice in various Church regulations and to declare it heretic. Others, such as the Desert
Fathers Anthony and Jerome in the 3rd and 4th centuries, retreated into the Egyptian desert, a practice of withdrawal from the material world which later became institutionalized in the form of monasteries.
Given the emphasis on reproductive sex within marriage and the disapproval of other lustful sexual practices, same-sex relationships between women were consistently condemned and suppressed by Church authorities, though rarely subject to legal prosecution. Church attitudes towards male same-sex relationships seem to have been more contradictory. Although the extent to which relationships between men were tolerated is a topic of controversy among historians, the medieval historian John Boswell records examples of same-sex unions between men that seem to have been sanctioned by religious ceremonies, arguing that such partnerships were ‘commonplace’ in early medieval Byzantine society and that it was only from the 14th century onwards that such practices were repressed by the Catholic Church. It is certainly the case that practices of repression of male-to-male sex varied widely across different regions and time periods. Christian ethics condemned sodomy as a sinful act against nature, but until the 18th century sodomy remained a catch-all term which included a variety of ‘unnatural’ (in the sense of non-procreative) practices performed by men or by women such as bestiality, masturbation, anal and oral sex, sex between two men or two women, or intercourse between a man and a woman with the aim of avoiding conception.
Renaissance Florence had a reputation for being a sinful city where the vice of sodomy flourished, and in 1432, the city created the Office of the Night, a magistracy whose sole purpose was the prosecution of sodomy. The historian Michael Rocke describes how during a period of 70 years, 17,000 men (from a total of 40,000 inhabitants) were investigated at least once for sodomy. His legal evidence reveals both that the majority of male inhabitants of Florence seemed to have engaged in such
 |
 |
3. A memorial at Caius College, Cambridge, dated 1619- It commemorates the Master of the College, Gostlin, and his male friend Dr Legge. Below the image of the flaming heart, the inscription says: ‘Love joined them living. So may the earth join them in their burial. Oh Legge, Gostlin’s heart you still have with you’
practices, and that their punishment consisted in most cases of light fines. In contrast, in many other medieval and Renaissance cities across Europe such as Augsburg, Venice, or Geneva under Calvin, religious and secular authorities enforced more drastic punishments for sodomy, ranging from imprisonment and
castration to beheadings, starvation, and burning at the stake. Prosecution of sodomy intensified in the 18th century, when it also shifted meaning to refer solely to sexual acts between men.
Christianity took over 1,000 years to firmly establish itself in Europe, and many different sects persisted on the fringes of the Church both during and after this period of consolidation of religious and political power. Not all of these shared the same emphasis on sexual asceticism. Groups such as the 2nd-century Egyptian Gnostic sect the Carpocratians, for example, were said to believe that in order to leave the material world, human souls had first to go through every possible earthly experience, and they were consequently notorious for their sexual libertinism, which was said to include wife-sharing and public nudity.
More generally, it should of course be remembered that the spread of Christian values did not necessarily mean that populations lived their lives in ways approved of by the Church. Christianity produced, however, a highly influential normative model of sex, which elevated virginity and celibacy as the highest spiritual ideal and a means of freeing oneself from worldly obligations, in contrast to, for example, Judaism which disapproved of abstinence as an obvious impediment against God’s directive to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. The idealization of sexual abstinence, worldly renunciation, or procreative sex and fidelity within marriage gave new cultural meanings to sex as the primary site of the work of Satan, and therefore as something that needed to be feared and avoided. Whereas most classical medical knowledge considered lack of sex as damaging to health, the Christian idealization of virginity and abstinence promoted a sexual order in which non-sex was presented as the highest spiritual ideal.
Chapter 2