How Patristic and Scholastic Teachings Have Influenced Western Ideas on Sexuality

George S. Garwood (Sept. 2007, rev. Nov. 2019)

Introduction

Religious teachings of all types prescribe and proscribe many beliefs about sexuality and
sexual practises. However, I have decided to focus my discussion essentially on the
Judaeo-Christian religious culture and some of the principal religious exponents of this
culture. I will discuss how some of the teachings and pronouncements of several early
Christian thinkers and writers about morality and sexuality have influenced and shaped
much of past and present sexual behaviour of a significant number of people in the
Western World. I will also argue that those who are called Christian Fathers and
Schoolmen have interpreted certain aspects of the Judaeo-Christian religion in ways, that,
when their religious teachings have been adopted by their followers, that these teachings
have become detrimental and debilitating to a healthy functioning of human sexual
relations.

I have chosen to explore this topic of religion and sexuality because for a long time
now, I have been puzzled, intrigued, surprised, amazed, and sometimes even dismayed at
society’s confused and conflicted attitudes towards sexual morality and sexual behaviour;
that now finally, with my intellectual curiosity being aroused, I have chosen to investigate
and apply an academic gloss to some of the underlying structures supporting some of the
sexual beliefs and practices in the West. In this study, I hope to enumerate the names of
some of the main religious patristic and scholastics players; to adumbrate and critique their
teachings, and to show how they have impacted the belief systems of important segments
of Western Christian communities.

I shall also demonstrate that other thinkers, poets, religious reformers both in
medieval and relatively more historical times have had more positive views of human
sexuality in relation to religion. I shall also show that despite or in spite of the
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psychological, religious, and cultural angst that some of those earlier patriarchal figures
had about sex, that the source for their unease was misplaced, and that the Bible, contrary
to their interpretations tends to be positive towards human sexuality. I shall use a
diagrammatical representation to show how sex and religion are interrelated. Likewise,
practices or issues like chastity, sex education and others that are listed in the religion-
sexual diagram will be briefly discussed either directly or tangentially in relation to sexual
conduct. I shall hope to show that there are cultural, religious, psychological and other
biases that shape people’s understanding and behaviour towards sexuality, and I will posit
the notion that if there is to be a better understanding of sexuality vis-à-vis religion, then
there will need to be a reinterpretation of the sacred texts.

I have chosen to discuss this topic of religion and sexuality, first to clarify my own
views on the topic, and second, to open up the area for further public discussions. I
proceed on the assumption, or intuition that human sexuality is a religious experience.
However, I realise that such an assumption may not find ready acceptance in many
religious circles because of any one, or any number of dissenting views that many people
may have towards sexuality. Many people’s attitude towards sex might range, for example,
from one of disgust, to a feeling that it is a necessary evil, and such views may arise
because of an association of sex with ‘lust’, ‘shame’, ‘guilt’, or ‘sin’. Many important
religious fathers and doctors of the church seemed to imply, or characterised sex as
something to be apologised for; to be excused; to be banished to the secret recesses of our
minds and bedrooms; to privatise it; to treat it as if it were on the same level as disposing
in utter privacy - in utter shame - the waste products from our bodies. Generally, it seems
that the Judaeo-Christian religion or an influential segment of it, grudgingly view sexual
activity, although natural, as, regrettably necessary; that although sex is socially and
religiously desirable – as sanctioned by the biblical injunction be fruitful and multiply;
however, where sexual activity is engaged in, or when it is talked about, then extreme care
must be exercised in dealing with it, so that by whispers, silence, or ignorance about the

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subject, it will be sanitised. It is hoped that within this conspiratorial–like linguistic
lexicography, that the grammar and vocabulary of sex, plus its non-verbal cues – its
gestures and so forth - will become so veiled that all references to it are made only by
euphemisms; by strange illusions and allegories, e.g. Adam ‘knew’ his wife. (Gen.4:1) She
was found with child (Matt. 1:18). Babies come from heaven or the stork brought them;
that metaphors like the birds and the bees and other such folklorist babble will be
employed to mask the reality of sexual encounters. I shall hope to dissolve some of the
mystiques about religion and sex.

Although I believe that sex is a religious experience, I also recognise the fact that
some people are very troubled with this view, and find this notion ridiculous or even
scandalous: because for many people, religion is a sacred experience, but sex on the other
hand for them has all the trappings of carnality, profanity, and eroticism. Therefore for
such people, there is an incompatibility or incongruity between the ‘holy’ life and the
‘carnal’ one. Others might find the notion that sex as a religious experience absurd,
because religion is supposed to bring about lasting happiness and a taste of the divine, but
for them, sex is diametrically opposed to religion because it deals with purely pleasurable
and bestial sensations, which are inimical to divine affection.

To compound the problem further, sex is the process of begetting life, yet ironically,
it presages our physical demise – it leads to death. So because of the apparent
contradictions between the nature of religion and sex, it seems to be impossible for many
people to accept the spiritualness or religiousness of sex. So because they can see only the
animality or carnality of sex it is hard for them to accept its religious or spiritual
dimensions; and, because of this inability, even a resistance to accepting the notion of the
sacredness of sex, many eminent early Christian and medieval theologians, and even some
present day religious leaders and thinkers seem to display more than an ambivalence
towards sex, but perhaps even worse, an obsessive-compulsive disorder over it, which
seems to border on the pathological – witness the current plethora of sex scandals that have
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plagued some mainline churches, religious personalities and others – and that this
ambivalence towards human sexuality seeks reconciliation and explication which is done
by the creation of a theory of Original Sin, and within the context of this theory, original
Christian theorists have constructed mytho-religious schemas, on one hand, to obfuscate
the raison dêtre of human existence, and on the other hand, to tell people how they must
reconcile their divided self – by the rigours of chastity, continence, abstinence - to their
real or natural selves.

Chapter One

1. Relationship between religion and sex (a diagrammatical representation)

Now, at this point, I would like to introduce a chart which shows in a generalised
fashion the relationship between religion and human sexuality. But this model is not
exhaustive or all-inclusive of all religions, and it must be narrowly confined to the topic
under review that deals with religion and sex in the Judaeo-Christian context. I shall make
a few initial comments about the diagram and later expand on certain aspects of it in more
details.

Religion
Laws Morality/Ethics

Original Sin/Fall Love for God Chastity

Condemnation/Judgement Concupiscence Virginity/Celibacy

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Law and Sacrifices/Penitence Flesh is evil
Widowhood/Eunuchism

Redemption/Salvation/Restoration Lust/Carnality
Candidates/Priesthood
Sexuality

Monogamy/Polygamy Romantic Love Modesty

Adultery/Divorce/Remarriage Sexual Pleasure

Dressing/Nudity

Menses/Ritual Purification Fornication/Masturbation Pornography

Procreation/Barrenness Birth Control/Abortion Other sexual

taboos

Cultic/Ritualistic Sex/Bestial sex Public Sex

Sodomy/Homosexuality Heterosexuality/Bisexuality

Circumcision/Female genital Sex Education

Pederasty /Incest/Paedophilia

Religion and Sexuality Chart

At the top of the superstructure is Religion. However, laws, morality and ethics
have some relationships to it, but observe that these relationships are connected to religion
by dotted lines signifying that not all laws, morals, and ethics gain their legitimacy from
religion. For instance, there are elements of constitutional or civil laws that have no

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connection with religion, e.g. voting; also, some type of ethics or morals are not
necessarily derived from religion, e.g. animal experiments, or types of human punishment.
In contrast however, most of the other elements, e.g. sin, love for God, chastity are linked
by a continuous arrow to religion, and if they are not directly linked to religion, e.g.
pornography or sex education, ideas surrounding them are often dictated by religion. Those
elements then that are connected to religion also have an input into sexuality.
Subsequently, some of the particular elements that are included in the Religion and
Sexuality chart will be discussed in more details, for they inform the kerygmatic and
dogmatic teachings and practises of the patristic and scholastics’ practitioners whose
religious ideologies have been significant in shaping the belief system and behaviour of
many people in the West towards sexuality.

Chapter Two

Teachings of early Christian fathers on morality and sexuality

1. Tertullian.

Several early church fathers took some forthright positions on morality and sexual
conduct on the basis of their interpretation of Sacred Scriptures, and having bequeathed
their stances to us, have influenced much of the Western World’s sexual beliefs and
practices. For better or worse - but the latter, I will argue - we are heirs to their traditions. I
will now draw attention to some of these original sexual opinion-makers-and-shakers of
the Western sexual tradition by starting with Tertullian.
Tertullian, a second to third century Common Era (North African) churchman was
an uncompromising advocate and apologist for the Christian Faith. He visited Rome and
was known there 1. It is claimed that he coined the terms Novum Testamentum and the
expression Trinity to refer to God as Father, Son and Spirit 2.
Later in life, Tertullian became a Montanist which sprung from a Christian named
Montanus who attracted attention to his beliefs around 172 AD. Montanus’s main message
was (1) nearness of the end, and the return of Christ (2) asceticism and marital relations
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were to be abandoned in favour of chastity, fasts, and food eaten dry. Montanists urged
Christians to relish persecution ‘do not hope to die in bed … but as martyrs’ they declared
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. Soon after, however, Tertullian broke with them and formed his own party, known as the
Tertullianists 4.
Tertullian was one such Christian Father – although not a ‘Doctor of the Church’ –
he nevertheless, put his stamp of authority on contemporary and subsequent Christian
beliefs and practices. ‘Tertullian profoundly influenced the latter church fathers … and
through them, all Christian theologians of the West’ 5. In his role of theological writer and
apologist, he for instance, urged persecuted Christians not to recant; not to fear death for
their faith. He writes:
You are about to pass through a noble struggle, in which the living God acts the part
of superintendent, in which the Holy Ghost is your trainer, in which the prize is an
eternal crown of angelic essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory everlasting 6.

He further challenges Christians to constancy with this statement:

The flesh, perhaps will dread the merciless sword, and the lofty cross, and the rage
of wild beasts, and the punishment of the flames, of all most terrible, and all the
skill of the executioner in torture. But on the other side, let the spirit set clearly
before both itself and the flesh, how these things though exceedingly painful, have
yet been calmly endured by others – nay, have even been eagerly desired for the
sake of fame and glory … 7.

So clearly, a man like this is a significant Christian cheerleader who cannot easily
be ignored when after urging others to lay down their lives if necessary for Christian
principles, if now, with equal fervour and eloquence writes about moral and sexual matters.
Taking up the Pauline teaching about virginity, celibacy and marriage, Tertullian says,
“marriage is good but celibacy better”. He adds, “marriage comes from ‘necessity’ but
whatever necessity grants, she by her very nature depreciates”. He agrees up to a point
with Saint Paul’s injunction that: “To marry is better than to burn, but Paul prefers
abstinence to marrying”. The former is better, says Tertullian, “because of the
invidiousness of temptations, marriage is allowable but the straits of the times [trials,
persecutions and the imminent return of Christ] make abstinence preferable”. But he
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insists that, it is “far better neither to marry nor to burn”. He compares his entreaty to a
situation where it is far better for someone to flee for one’s life at the prospects of being
tortured (marrying) than remain and when racked to deny the faith (burning). However, the
ideal position is one of “neither marrying nor burning [which] is like having the strength to
depart this life in blessed confession [martyrdom] of their testimony” [Neither marrying
nor burning] 8.
Tertullian sees human nature as essentially flawed. In his Apologeticus he says:
“The truth is, the human race has always deserved ill of God’s hand” 9. He says this is
because humans have willingly rejected God and have spurned His graciousness, so when
natural disasters, pestilence and diseases are visited upon humanity it is because of their
vices and crimes that they are guilty and why God allows disasters to happen hoping to
draw humans back to Him by way of repentance. However, much of the prevailing views
at the time were motivated by Graeco-Roman superstitious beliefs. However, the intriguing
thing about his interpretation of natural disasters which he attributes not to gods, but to
One God – the Christian God - is that, one still hears echoes of his beliefs throughout
history even to our present day.
Tertullian’s uncompromising stand on morality and sexuality also comes through as
he expounds on the following issues: Remarriage, widowhood and other issues of morality.
Underlying all sexual desires or drives for fathers like Tertullian was the great sin of
concupiscence. Concupiscence according to Armstrong,
… was the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of God; it was
felt more acutely during the sexual act when our rationality is entirely swamped by
passion and emotion, when God is utterly forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly
in one another 10.

Concupiscence therefore is sinful and should be avoided; it is linked to sex,

therefore sex is sinful and therefore should be avoided. Tertullian praises celibacy,
continence and widowhood. He even tells his wife that when he dies that she should
remain a perpetual widow (but later enjoins her, that if she does, to at least marry a
Christian) and that other widows too should remain celibate. He says, “there will at that
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day be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us. No such frivolities, no such
impurities …” 11. He also admonishes other women who lose their husbands to remain
celibate: “But whether to you [his wife], or to any other woman whatever who pertains to
God, the advice which we are giving shall be profitable, we take leave to treat of at large”
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. Likewise, Tertullian says, “… she whose husband has departed from the world should
therefore impose rest on her sex by abstinence from marriage …” 13.
Tertullian is against adultery, homosexuality and pederasty. He says:
But if we challenge you [pagans] to comparison in the virtue of chastity, I turn to a
part of the sentence passed by the Athenians against Socrates who was pronounced
a corrupter of youth. The Christian confines himself to the female sex. The
Christian husband has nothing to do with any but his own wife. Democritus, in
putting out his eyes, because he could not look on woman without lusting after
them, and was pained if his passion was not satisfied owns plainly, by the
punishment he inflicts, his incontinence …. But a Christian with grace-healed eyes
is sightless in this matter; he is mentally blind against assault of passion” 14.

11. Critique of Tortilla’s teaching

Clearly, here Tertullian promotes a high, rather, an extreme moral standard; that was
something that early Christians displayed which surprised, stunned and gained the
grudging admiration of their pagan persecutors, and in a way helped Christianity to finally
succeed as a religion because of its high level of morality. Bertrand Russell in his History
of Western Philosophy notes:
.... Their sexual ethics had a strictness that was rare in antiquity. Pliny whose
official duty it was to persecute them, testifies to their high moral character. After
the conversion of Constantine, there were of course, time-servers among Christians,
but prominent ecclesiastics, with some exception, continued to be men of inflexible
moral principles 15.

Some of Tertullian’s moral teachings and moralising were carried over into Western
culture later to the detriment of normal sexual relationships between males and females.
For instance, many feminists and non-feminists would argue as Armstrong does, that:
Neither Jews, nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a
catastrophic light; nor later, would Muslims adopt this dark theology of original sin.
Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested by
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 Tertullian. … A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as
chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation
more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in
particular. Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it
had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of
Augustine…. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger
to mankind 16.

Armstrong’s assessment of Tertullian judged by our present day standards seems

harsh, but his comments must be set against a backdrop of those ancient times when
slavery was rife, when blood sports were the order of the day, when people sacrificed their
children to the gods as propitiation for sins and to gain favour of the gods. Men like
Tertullian, against these cruel Roman practices, enunciated a more humane and a higher
moral standard. Women were like property and completely subordinated during his time,
and to be fair to Tertullian, although his position seems harsh to us, he was trying to raise
the value of women and set them apart from the mere economic and sexual objects that
they were under pagan social and religious systems. He himself was married because he
had given instructions to his wife not to remarry on his death, so it does not suggest that he
hated women. What it does show, is that, he taking not only a symbolic but also a literalist
interpretation of the Fall of Adam and Eve, really believed that Eve, and by extension
women were the cause of sin entering the world, for she was the one – not Adam - who
yielded to Satan’s temptations. He preaches modesty for females in line with St. Peter’s
command, for he believed somehow, that the female, particular young women and virgins
were irresistible sources of temptations to males. He adds that on ‘the account of the
daughters of men, angels in desiring them revolted against God’ (Gen.6: 2ff), and it was
one of these fallen angels, Lucifer, who became God and humans’ greatest mimesis. So
women, because of their real or imaginary seductive and sexual powers had to be modest;
had to veil themselves.
A kinder interpretation of Tertullian’s apparently anti-women sentiment, in my view,
would be not to construe his position as one of misogyny, but that his assumption, although
not realised by him and subsequent Church fathers, was more a problem of male
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testosteronal impulses – a libidinal necessity - rather than motivated by any personal spite
against females. Of course, seen through modern Western moral prisms where women
through their incessant struggle against patriarchy and male domination – and the struggle
still continues for full equality, e.g. in the priesthood - have seen an improvement in their
human and civil rights, people may understandably, deplore certain aspects of Tertullian’s
apparent condescending attitude towards women, particularly in regards to their dress, for
on that score, he says:
And do you know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours
lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway:
you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are
she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You
destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert [dessert] that is
death – even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself
over and above your tunics of skins? 17.

Now, what are we to make of this apparent outburst of Tertullian’s? Recall, that I
suggested that Tertullian wanted to set Christian women apart from pagan women whom to
him were very voluptuous, vain, immodest and showy. Now, even in our present day
culture, we too are sometimes uncomfortable with how some people dress – well, to put it
mildly, inappropriately.
However in regards to Tertullian's attitudes towards women, I think he is judged too
harshly - as a woman basher. I think that assessment of him in this regard is inaccurate.
The man was a brilliant rhetorician, polemicist, and Christian apologist, and such people
usually tend to exaggerate and over-dramatise their point of view in order to get their
message over, for if one examines closely the phrase, for instance, about Eve “destroy[ing]
so easily God’s image, man”, this really ought to confirm a woman’s power. She ought
then to be able to claim with some justification that she is stronger than a man, and even
God, for she outwitted both of them. Is it why then, many males seem fearful or threatened
by females, and why males wish to dominate women? A question like this needs to be
faced and resolved if male and female relationships, at all levels, are to become less
confrontational and more cooperative.
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 Tertullian and those early Christians tried to take the moral high ground at a time of
extreme immorality, brutality, cruelty and violence. We find that he deprecates for instance,
the gladiatorial shows, and in his De Spectaculis (the Games) warns Christians not to
attend those spectacles. He says: "We shall now see how the Scriptures condemn the
amphitheatre” Rhetorically, he asks:
… It is good no doubt to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself
will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings …
But who is my guarantee that it is always the guilty who are adjudged to the wild
beasts, or to some other doom, and that the guiltless never suffer from the revenge
of the judge, or the weakness of the defence, or the pressure of the rack? How much
better, then, is it for me to remain ignorant of the punishment inflicted on the
wicked, lest I am obliged to know also of the good [person] coming to untimely
ends … 18.

Indeed, Tertullian’s attitudes towards females, males, sexuality, dress and notions of
original sin and concupiscence need modifying, and thankfully they have been modified,
but there is still a long way yet to go to destigmatise certain taboos surrounding sexual
relationships, and to accord full civil, human rights and dignity to all women.
Now, to conclude this examination of Tertullian, let us not reproach him too
severely for his views for he was a creature of his time. Furthermore, on many other
matters, he is very positive. For instance, in terms of freedom to practice religion, he says
in Ad Scapulam “… it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that everyman
should worship according to his own conditions: one man’s religion neither harms nor
helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion – to which free will
and not force should lead us … 19. Such a statement shows the man as a strong human
rights advocate – and way ahead of his time – and many religious and political figures of
our day could learn a lesson or two from him about religious tolerance, individual freedom,
and the dignity of the human being.
However, notwithstanding his powerful defence of Christianity or perhaps because
of it, Tertullian has bequeathed to the West a harsh morality, “and Tertullian was often
wrong, and the church has, with sorrow, so adjudged him; but the character of the man
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explains everything” 20. He was “abrupt and impetuous, eloquent and stern, his sentences
follow one another with the sweeping, rushing force of storm-waves” 21.

111. St. Jerome’s teachings on morality and sexuality

I would now like to consider Jerome and show how some of his religious views
have affected the moral and sexual behaviour of his time and the conduct of later
generations in the West. Jerome was an indefatigable and fierce defender of official Church
dogmas. He is not so much a theologian, but an eminent scholar who is better known for
his translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to Latin. His Bible, the Vulgate
produced in the 4th Century CE has been used by the Catholic Church from his time even
down to our present time.
Jerome, we are informed in The Fathers of the Church translation of his writings,
that he entered into controversy against Helvidius, Jovinian, Vigilantius, the Origenists and
the Pelagians and refuted their heretical teachings on grace, on asceticism, on the perpetual
virginity of Mary, and on the veneration of saints and relics so eloquently and so soundly,
that those heresies never again seriously threatened the Church 22.
Jovinian for instance, published a treatise asserting that (i) all sins are equal (ii) it’s
impossible for man to sin after baptism (iii) that the state of virginity in itself is more
meritorious than the married state (iv) that Mary lost her virginity by a true parturition
[bringing forth] in the birth of the Lord (v) that all who have kept the grace of baptism will
receive the same reward in heaven 23.
He attacked the continued influence of Origenism (Origen, 185-254 CE) which had
strong leanings towards Manichaeism and Gnosticism – Jerome had in the past, great
admiration for Origen for his work on the Old Testament – he had translated some homilies
of Origen 24, but later he vehemently repudiated what he saw as Origen’s theological
errors. Chief among the errors of Origenism were four heresies: according to Russell: 25
(i) The pre-existence of souls as taught by Plato
(ii) That the human nature of Christ and not only His divine nature existed before
the Incarnation
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 (iii) That at the resurrection our bodies will be transformed into absolutely ethereal
bodies
(iv) That all men and even devils shall be saved at the last

Jerome also became involved in a great controversy with the Pelagians who
affirmed the moral strength and self-sufficiency of man’s freewill, e.g. man, relying on his
own power can always will and do the good; that there is no such thing as original sin 26. In
the case of Helvidius, Jerome condemned him as heretic when he claimed that Mary did
not remain a perpetual virgin; that after the birth of Christ, she had relations with Joseph
and from the union there were born children referred to in the Gospel as the brothers of the
Lord 27.
Where Vigiliantius and Jerome were concerned, the latter had a falling out with the
former. Vigiliantius had come to see Jerome in Bethlehem and went away carrying news
that Jerome was a confirmed Origenist. When Jerome heard this accusation of him, he sent
a letter to Vigiliantius in 396 CE severely repudiating this charge. Some years later the
priest, Riparius, wrote Jerome telling him that Vigiliantius was preaching in southern Gaul
against the veneration of the relics of saintly martyrs and against the keeping of night
vigils. Jerome repudiated some of the errors of Vigilantius in his reply to Riparius, and
later, in Contra Vigilantium, an apology full of invectives, denounced Vigiliantius, and
supported the cult of saints and relics. This treatise of Jerome’s seemed to have silenced
Vigiliantius 28.
Jerome, because of his very acerbic nature, quarrelled with, and angered many
people, and in so doing, made a lot of enemies. For instance, Russell tells us that:

He quarrelled with St. Augustine about the somewhat questionable behaviour of St.
Peter as related by St. Paul in Galatians ii; … he was so vehement against Pelagius
that his monastery was attacked by a Pelagian mob. After the death of Damascus
[that same Pope who was his friend who had commissioned Jerome to write his
Bible], he seemed to have quarrelled with the new Pope [Siricius]; he [Jerome] had,
while in Rome, become acquainted with various ladies who were both aristocratic
and pious, [e.g. the widow Paula and her daughter Eustochium] some of whom he
persuaded to adopt the ascetic life. The new Pope, in common with many other

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 people in Rome, disliked this. For this reason among others, Jerome left Rome for
Bethlehem, where he remained from 386 till his death in 420 29.

So we observe that St. Jerome was really a rigid enforcer and almost a self-
appointed religious guardian for the defence and protection of the doctrines of the Church.
Now his views on chastity are instructive. For as Russell observes “some of Jerome’s
letters to Eustochium are curious. He gives her advice on the preservation of virginity, very
detailed and frank …” 30. "I tell you without hesitation", writes St. Jerome in his twenty-
second Epistole to St. Eustochium, "that though God is almighty, He cannot restore a
virginity that has been lost" 31. In other letters of Jerome, the theme of virginity is strongly
stressed leading Russell to muse, that:

It is strange that with all Jerome’s deep feeling about the fall of ancient Rome
[Alaric, king of the Goths sacked Rome in 410] he thinks the preservation of
virginity more important than victory over the Huns and Vandals and Goths … the
same is true of Ambrose and of Augustine …32.
But if Russell’s opinions about some of the great doctors of the Western Church are
thoughtful – Russell, that great British philosopher and mathematician, describes himself
as non-Christian 33 - he can hardly be considered an unbiased witness for Christianity – but
his views may be consonant with Armstrong’s (who writes extensively on religious
themes) when she remarks:
These were dark and terrible times in the Western world. The barbarian tribes were
pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman Empire; the collapse of
civilization in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there …. The
Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the pure body of the Virgin
Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by false doctrines of the barbarians many of
whom had converted to Arianism 34. A deep sadness, continues Armstrong, also
informed Augustine’s later work; the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of
Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view
the world … The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the
sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine called ‘concupiscence’ 35.

I shall discuss Augustine later in greater details, but suffice it now to say, that he
had also inherited some of those same theological and psychological notions of sin from

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his contemporaries like Ambrose, Jerome and others, and these in turn, had taken their
ideas of original sin and concupiscence from people like Tertullian whom I have already
spoken about, and of course, this doctrine of original sin goes way back to at least St. Paul
of the early First Century CE.
To understand how Jerome’s teachings impacted people of his time and people
subsequently, let us see his arguments against Helvidius. To restate, Helvidius’s
propositions, they claimed that Mary did not remain a perpetual virgin; that after the birth
of Christ, she had relations with Joseph, and from the union there were born children
referred to in the Gospel as the brothers of the Lord 36.
Jerome’s rebuttal takes three forms:
1. That Joseph was only putatively, not really, the husband of Mary.
2. That the "brethren" of the Lord were his cousins, not his own brethren.
3. That virginity is better than the married state 37.

Jerome pours scorn on Helvidius calling him ‘a rough boor’, and declaring that, at
first, he did not want to answer him because his refutation would honour Helvidius, which
he did not want to do. Jerome falls back on divine authority and sanction to refute
Helvidius and declares:
We must call upon the Lord Jesus to preserve free of all suspicion of copulation the
inn of the sacred womb wherein He dwelled for ten months. We must also invoke
God the Father, Himself, to prove that the mother of His Son who was a mother
before she was wed, remained a virgin after she had brought forth her son 38.

1V. Critique of Jerome’s teaching

Jerome by some arcane, convoluted logic, linguistic sleight of hands and by semantically
altering phrases like ‘knew his wife’; ‘before they came together’, ‘he did not know her
until she had brought forth a son’ and so on, maintains that Joseph had no sexual
relationship with Mary even after she bore Jesus; that in fact, although she was ‘espoused’
to him, he never became her husband. That the reasons Scripture call Joseph a husband is:

16
1. That the origin of Mary might also be revealed through the lineage of Joseph, to whom
she was related
2. That she might not be stoned as an adulteress according to the Law of Moses
3. That in her flight to Egypt, she might have the solacing comfort of a guardian rather than
a husband 39.

Now, if Joseph was believed to be the father of Jesus it was just by custom, for
Jerome says: … everybody, with the exception of Joseph, Elizabeth and Mary
herself, and a few others at most, if we can assume that others were informed of this
fact by them, considered Jesus to be the son of Joseph to such a degree, that even
the evangelists quoting the view of the people (and this is the true function of
history), called him the Father of the Savior… 40.

So if we are to accept Jerome’s propositions, Joseph then was only Jesus’ father by
hearsay. According to the Virgin Birth theory, Jerome’s position is right, assuming that one
accepts that account put forward by a couple of the Gospels. But Jerome seems
disingenuous, for at the very least, Joseph was Jesus’ earthly or adopted father, and Jerome
seems unable to accept even this basis fact.
Jerome’s second proposition: That the "brethren" of the Lord were his cousins, not his own
brethren. This turns upon the words "first-born son" which, Jerome argues, are applicable
not only to the eldest of several, but also to an only son: and the mention of brothers and
sisters, whom Jerome asserts to have been children of Mary the wife of Cleophas or Clopas
he appeals to many Church writers in support of this view 41.
As Jerome maintains the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary, then it must
follow that Jesus could have no other siblings born to Mary and Joseph. Now, if Joseph
had children prior to him being betrothed to Mary, or if he had them after she bore Jesus,
and even if they adopted these children, then they could have reasonably be called brothers
and sisters of Jesus. But each one of those possibilities is ruled out, for we have no
evidence that Joseph had been previously married, or that Joseph and Mary adopted any
children, and because he remained with Mary - even though it is assumed that he never
consummated the ‘marriage’, and according to St. Jerome, they were technically never
married, just ‘espoused’ - then, Joseph did not have any children. So based on Jerome’s
reasoning, the term ‘brethren’ can only mean cousins or some other kind of social or
familial relations, but not brothers by virtue of close consanguinity.
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 Now, I do appreciate that such a view – perpetual virginity of Mary - is held to be
sacred and sacrosanct in certain religious circles - as a piece of theological invention that is
fine – but, I do not believe that even those who hold such a view would see it as a
biological and scientific fact. However, because such a view of Jerome’s is sincerely held
by so many people, and enshrined in liturgical and confessional practices; that, because
this belief and practice is important to a significant number of people, this suggests that
there are some profound underlying assumptions at work about sexuality. For instance,
because the Saviour of the World could not be brought into the world by normal
reproductive processes because sexual desire – concupiscence – and the reproductive
organs of humans are impure – then God had to bypass this vulgar and profane process,
i.e. male-female copulation; then it stands to reason that people who would seek to be holy,
righteous and divine, must avoid concupiscence and sexual activity.
Jerome’s third proposition argues in support of his preference for virginity to
marriage. Jerome argues that not only Mary, but Joseph also remained in the virgin state;
that, though marriage may sometimes be a holy estate, it presents great hindrances to
prayer, and the teaching of Scripture says that the states of virginity and continence are
more accordant with God's will than that of marriage. Jerome says:
And since I intend to make a few comments on a comparison of marriage and
virginity, I ask my readers not to think that I disparaged marriage in praising
virginity, and that I have discriminated between the holy man of the Old and New
Testament, that is to say, between those who had wives and those who had
completely renounced the embraces of women …42.

He still believes that marriage is honourable, for he subscribes to the injunction to

“increase and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen.1: 28), but he realises that there are now
some powerful countervailing or overriding considerations against marriage which make
continence more necessary and desirable than marriage, and one of these over-riding
factors is “time” - “The time is short” (1 Cor.7: 9); Jerome echoes St. Paul.

18
 For these early Christian fathers then, concupiscence got in the way of total
dedication to God. Pauline theological and personal preferences have influenced the
Christian fathers, and so men like Jerome preferred virginity both in body and in spirit to
marriage. This is what he says about married women and married life:

‘For she who is married thinks about the things of this world, how she may please
her husband’. Do you think that it is one and the same thing to spend days and
nights in prayer and fasting, and to paint the face in anticipation of the arrival of a
husband, to break step, to feign flattery? … Add to this the prattling of infants, the
noisy clamoring of the whole household, the clinging of children to her neck, the
computing of expenses, the preparing of budgets. …. Tell me, I ask you, where is
there any opportunity to think of God in the midst of all this? …. Moreover, with
kettle drums resounding, flutes blaring, lyres shrieking, cymbals clashing, what kind
of fear of God prevails amidst such a commotion? … and women, practically
naked, dressed in flimsy clothes, are exposed to the gaze of immodest eyes 43.

Some concluding thoughts on Jerome then: Clearly, the 4th –5th centuries' Roman
households and concerns seem not much different from 21st Century’s households and
concerns. Humans in whatever time, place are so similar to one another. Perhaps, some
females might be sympathetic towards Jerome’s ideas about shedding the encumbrances of
the household, although, not for the reasons he wants women to be detached from domestic
cares – celibacy, continence, virginity. However, his very descriptive account of the
households of his time realistically shows family life in most average households of today,
which to most people is normal and natural. People are foremostly social beings, and they
live or ought to live in caring and protective environments, and a relevant religion should
encourage supportive families (families won’t always be perfect), instead of discouraging
normal family associations, as Jerome seems to be doing.

V. Chrysostom’s teachings about morality and sexuality

Another Church Father whom I would like to talk about in relation to religion and
chastity, and how his views about morality have undoubtedly influenced people of later
generations down to our present one, is John Chrysostom. It is said that his name means

19
‘golden-mouthed’ because of his eloquence. He is one of the great doctors of the Church,
and although he was a Patriarch of Constantinople of the Eastern Church, and was
contemporary to Fathers like Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Basil the Great and
others, Chrysostom is recognised in the Western Church as a saint because his teachings
are said to have benefited the entire Christian Church.
Chrysostom was an ascetic and for two years he lived in a mountain cave. He tried
to raise the moral standard of the capital, Constantinople, but met strong opposition from
the Empress Eudoxia, from the local clergy, and from Theophilus Patriarch of Alexandria
44
.

Although Chrysostom and the Greek Church’s theology and mental attitudes were
in significant ways different from that of the Latin, or Western Church’s theology – both
wings were competitive, antagonistic, and combative towards each other, particularly
towards each other’s understanding and interpretation of the Trinity and the Incarnation,
plus worship and contemplation – Chrysostom however, shared some of the same sexual
anxieties that we find in Western Christianity. For instance, in regards to women, adultery
or virginity, his views are consonant with virtually all the other patriarchs from either wing
of the Churches. This is what Chrysostom has to say about virginity in his Homilies of St.
John, the Fourth Gospel writer:

I entertain no evil suspicion regarding the virgin (for I love virginity and ‘charity’
thinks no evil). I am a great admirer of this way of life and cannot think anything
unseemly of it 45. He is strongly against adultery and fornication – much more so
than some of the other Christian Fathers looked at so far: He says “… it is
impossible to enter into the kingdom of heaven if one is guilty of fornication.
Moreover, this is true not only of fornication, but even more so of adultery.
Therefore, such a man will not be an heir to the kingdom but will fall into hell.
Listen to what Christ said of these: Their worm dies not, and the fire is not
quenched. Indeed, a man is unpardonable if, though he has a wife and enjoys such
consolation in her, he brazenly has an affair with another. His behaviour surely is
wantonness’ 46.

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 V1. Early American puritanism in relationship to Chrysostom’s teachings
Clearly, Chrysostom shows his strong moral indignation or righteous repugnance if
one can call it that against ‘sins of the flesh” and he consigns such ‘violators’ to hell. This
type of religious stricture as regards morality, when acted out in some theocratic societies
or otherwise, can require offenders to the stoned to death, as was the requirement in the
Mosaic Law and in Sharia Law, where capital punishment was or is meted out to someone
accused of adultery – invariably, the woman. Or if she was not executed, then she would
be ostracised from the community as in the case of Hester Prynne in the New England
puritanical society that Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about.
Prynne was forced to wear a big scarlet tag embroidered with the letter ‘A’ which
represented adultery that she was supposed to have committed. One of the women in the
crowd of her detractors said of Prynne: “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and
ought to die 47. Although Prynne was being punished, and had to wear that badge of shame
for the rest of her life, ironically, her anonymous co-adulterer or fornicator met no such
similar fate.
In regards to women, Chrysostom seems to have some positive views about them,
but there is an assumption, rather a requirement on his part, that they – not their husbands
– be mainly responsible to be the nurturing, and to be the obsequious party in the
relationship. Chrysostom says: “So if you wish to please your husband, adorn your soul
with chastity, piety and the careful management of your household …” 48. Again, he says:
Indeed, nothing, I repeat – is more potent than a good and prudent woman in
moulding a man and shaping his soul; in whatever way she desires…. She shares
with him his table and couch, the procreation of his children, his spoken words and
secret thoughts, his comings and goings, and a great many other things as well… 49.
V11. Critique of Chrysostom’s teachings

Teachings like those of Chrysostom’s seemed to have been foisted on a compliant

society by a dominant, usually celibate patristic cabal who by religious indoctrination,
prohibitions and prescriptions that parade themselves as divine laws or rational structures
have become unfair and unjust power relationships by which the religious hierarchy seeks
21
to maintain control of people’s life – their sexuality – through implied and explicit threats;
the deification of superstition; but worse, by displaying prurient and voyeuristic interests in
what people do in their bedrooms in their most intimate, sacred, and personal moments.

Now, one has to be very careful about such preachers who belch out denunciations
against ‘sins of the flesh’. For one has seen over and over again, that very often, they are
the very ones against whom they are unconsciously preaching. By preaching against ‘sins
of the flesh’, they thereby (a) assuage their own guilt (b) get some kind of perverse or
vicarious satisfaction, because they feel that they might stop someone from doing
something that they are illicitly doing which they really believe is wrong – but which they
are incapable or capable of preventing. It is the ‘do as I say, but don’t do as I do” moral
duplicity or equivocation.
To support this contention, recall the Hester Prynne tragedy of being branded an
adulterer and forced to wear the scarlet ‘A’ letter on her chest. It turned out to be that it was
her pastor, the Rev. Dimmesdale who was the father of Pearl, her daughter. Dimmesdale
had been given the task by those in authority, e.g. Governor Bellingham, to obtain a
confession from Hester. He instructed the Reverend this way, “Good Master Dimmesdale,
the responsibility of the woman’s soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you, therefore, to
exhort her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof” 50.
Dimmesdale then harangues Prynne and tries to extract - albeit reluctantly on his part, but
persuasively in the eyes of those spectators in the courtroom – a confession, “for her own
soul’s salvation”. But Hester despite the ignominy that they wanted her to feel, resolutely
refuses to name, “thy fellow-sinner and fellow-suffer” 51.
She is indeed heroic, and Dimmesdale is supremely cowardly, for were he not, he
could have long before, and even now, instead of going through this charade, reveal that he
was the one who had brought Hester to this inquisitorial and pillorying state of affairs.
Although Dimmesdale recognises his wrongdoing, he keeps it hidden, and this
concealment eventually leads to his downfall. His harmartia or character flaw as the
Greeks would call it, would probably be self-pity, self-indulgence or self-delusion. But then
22
again, he like President Bill Clinton who in 1998 denied having ‘sexual relations with that
woman Miss Lewinsky’ who later under evidentiary, legal, and political pressures admitted
to having an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with her, and like many of us, do not want to
reveal secret sexual misconducts. Dimmesdale like so many others in society, because of
the taboos attached to illicit sexual escapades allow them to become hypocrites, and to lead
a life of deceit and duplicity. However, I assume that John Chrysostom was a honourable
man – that is why he has been elevated to sainthood – but still, one would be wise to bear
in mind the statement: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’.

V111. Augustine’s teachings on morality and sexuality

St. Augustine bequeathed to Western culture an oppressive and repressive sexual
patrimony. Armstrong informs us that:
Augustine left us with a difficult heritage. A religion which teaches men and women
to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves.
Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in
general and women in particular… 52.

How did Augustine come to have such a dismal view of human sexuality? This
view was rooted in his belief in original sin. Now, sexual intercourse in marriage is not
necessarily sinful, provided that the intention for performing it is to have children. Yet
even in marriage, a virtuous person would wish to avoid lust. But this seems impossible.
That is why according to Augustine there is a need to perform sexual intercourse in privacy
because people are ashamed of it. The desire for privacy or secrecy is because of guilt -
one wishes to hide away while engaging in sex. Guilt is traceable back to Adam and his
illicit act of eating the ‘forbidden fruit’, and his guilt is inherited by all humans.
Augustine reveals to us in His Confessions the tremendous difficulty he personally
has with his sexuality and with lust. Of course, his Confession is directed to God, but to
which he makes us privy, and although there is a sense of bravura, youthful exuberance
and even intemperance in revealing certain intimate details of his adolescent life when his
hormones are very active – and even if what he has to say is an exaggeration and over-
23
dramatisation of real or imaginary events in his life – his claims about his youthful
behaviour begins to reveal his psychological attitude towards sexuality.
What was it that delighted me, except to love and to be loved? But, the moderate
relation of mind was not maintained according to the bright bond of friendship;
rather, the mists of slimy concupiscence of the flesh and of the bubbling froth of
puberty rose like hot breath beclouding and darkening my heart. It thus was not
possible to distinguish the serenity of joy from the dark mist of lust. Both seethed
together in hot confusion, and swept youth over the precipice of passions and
engulfed it in a whirlpool of shameful actions 53. ... Yet, as a youth I was quite
unhappy in the beginning, in the period of adolescence. I even begged chastity of
Thee, saying: ‘Give me chastity and self-restraint, but not just yet’. I was afraid that
Thou wouldst quickly heed my prayer, that Thou wouldst quickly cure me from the
disease of concupiscence, which I preferred to be appeased rather than to be
abolished 54.

Augustine was in his thirties when he finally got converted, but even as an adult (he
was baptized in 387 CE by Ambrose) and on the eve of his conversion he was still having
difficulty dealing with his sexual anxieties. He discloses:
What held me were the trifles of trifles and vanities of vanities, my former
mistresses, plucking softly at the garment of my flesh and whispering: ‘do you send
us away?’… and ‘From this moment unto eternity, this and that will not be
permitted you’. What suggestiveness was there in that phrase, ‘this and that’ …
What sordid things, what indecencies, did those words suggest! 55. He tried to
ignore these pleas but he had difficulty doing that for he says:
Yet they did retard me, hesitant as I was to tear myself away and to cut myself off
from them, and to make the leap to the position to which I was called, for, all-
powerful custom said to me: ‘Can you live without these things, do you think? But,
it was now saying this very feebly. For, from the direction to which I had turned my
face and to which I was afraid to pass, the chaste dignity of continence began to
manifest itself: tranquil and joyful, but not in a lascivious way, inviting me in
upright fashion to come ahead and not hesitate … 56.
Likewise, Augustine’s ‘difficult heritage’ of asceticism that he has bestowed on the
West is reinforced in his treatise De bono conjugali (The Good of Marriage’). This apology
was written as an answer to the false teaching of Jovinian which considered the married
state equal to that of virginity. Pope Siricius and St. Ambrose had condemned this heresy
before him, but it still was so rampant that many consecrated virgins were leaving their
convents to marry 57.

24
 In De bono conjugali, sexual intercourse is to be performed for the purpose of
generation and Augustine says when this intention is fulfilled it is a good act. However,
intercourse other than for procreation is sinful 58. Stressing that intercourse has to be
confined to marriage he further adds:
In marriage, intercourse for the purpose of generation has no fault attached to it, but
for the purpose of satisfying concupiscence, provided with a spouse, because of the
marriage fidelity, it is a venial sin; adultery or fornication, however, is a mortal sin.
And so continence from all intercourse is certainly better than marital intercourse
itself which takes place for the sake of betting children 59.

Although Augustine supports marriage in De sancta virginitate (Holy Virginity)

virginity is preferable to marriage. He sees the former as ‘the superior of the more perfect
gift that virgins of Christ received from an high. That because of divine law, continence is
preferred to matrimony; holy virginity to wedlock’ 60.
Brown remarks: He [Augustine] wrote with lyrical fervor in support of virgins of
the Church. Communities of dedicated women had sprung up in every Christian
community. Virgins mattered vastly to contemporaries. In many churches, they
stood behind a chancel screen of glistening white marble, which seems to condense
their rock-like purity, But he also reminded these virgins that some of the greatest
martyrs in the North African church had not been virgins … It was not their self-
made virginity that would bring them to heaven, but only their love of Christ … 61.

1X. Critique of Augustine’s teachings

However, Augustine’s teaching on original sin, concupiscence and sexuality has
some flaws which commentators like Armstrong have already alluded to. She says: “This
image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was
disturbingly similar to Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low
by the barbarian tribes. By implication, Augustine’s harsh doctrine paints a terrible picture
of an implacable God.”62 So for example, Augustine says:
Thence, after his sin, he was driven into exile, and by his sin the whole race of
which he was the root was corrupted in him, and thereby subjected to the penalty of
death. And so it happens that all descended from him, and from the woman who had
led him into sin, and was condemned at the same time with him - being the
offspring of carnal lust on which the same punishment of disobedience was visited -
25
 were tainted with the original sin, and were by it drawn through divers errors and
sufferings into that last and endless punishment which they suffer in common with
the fallen angels, their corrupters and masters, and the partakers of their doom … 63.

This teaching of Augustine’s dominated the patristic and early scholastic periods
according to the editors in the introduction to De bono coniugali who go on to say:

Its rigorium is rooted at least to some extent in St. Augustine’s defective

metaphysical psychology of human nature, with its attendant misconception of the
character of concupiscence, as well as in his imperfect theory of the nature of
original sin, and above all, of its mode of transmission which attributed to
concupiscence a real instrumental causality 64.
For as Augustine in his City of God says:
For as soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace
forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore
they took fig leaves … and covered their shame; for though their members
remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before …. For the
soul reveling in its own liberty and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the
command it had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had wilfully
deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior, servant; neither could it
hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself
subject to God …65.

X. Monasticism and asceticism

Before I look at perhaps one of the main representatives of the scholastics, Thomas
Aquinas, I will examine how some of these early Christian fathers and significant
ecclesiastical churchmen, hermits and other religious personalities have influenced the
West’s attitudes towards public and personal attitudes and behaviour on asceticism and
sexuality.
In most Gnostic sects marriage was actively discouraged on the grounds that it
entangled the spiritual soul with the evil physical world. Some Jewish and Christian
traditions blamed sexuality on the fall, and believed that salvation included a return
to a [chaste] life. By the 3rd Century CE, celibacy was beginning to be valued as a
mark of holiness. Even so extremes were frowned upon and Origen earned
considerable disapproval because he made himself a eunuch believing this was
commanded in the Gospels. As martyrdom declined, asceticism began to become

26
 the measure of spirituality; the leaders regarded as more spiritual in the churches
tended to be those who practiced an ascetic way of life…. Jerome was the most
enthusiastic supporter of celibacy and was criticized because many of his
pronouncements seemed to denigrate marriage 66.

The late 3rd and early 4th Centuries CE saw the beginnings of monastic asceticism in
Christianity. Clement of Alexandria and Origen laid the foundations for orthodoxy
of asceticism based on the principle of encratism or self-control. Those who
retreated to the desert … abandoned family life, and celibacy was the rule. Although
some married couples retreated together into the desert, they lived without sexual
intercourse 67.

Brown commenting on monasticism says: “In Northern Syria and in many areas in
North Africa, population had risen and new forms of village life [thrived]. It was in the
countryside that many of the most radical forms of Christianity took root. This happened in
the most spectacular manner in Egypt and in Syria …. In Egypt, the Greek word
monachos, ‘lonely one’, from which our word ‘monk’ derives, soon became attached to
such eccentric persons” 68.
Prominent among the early solitary ascetics, says Russell,
… was St. Anthony, who was born in Egypt about 250 and withdrew from the
world. For fifteen years he lived alone in a hut near his home, then for twenty years,
in remote solitude in the desert … he practiced extreme austerities reducing food,
drink, and sleep to the minimum required to support life. The devil constantly
assailed him with lustful visions, but he manfully withstood the malign diligence of
Satan. By the end of his life, the desert near the Egyptian Thebes was full of hermits
who had been inspired by his example and his precepts…. A few years later (c. 315
or 320 CE), another Egyptian, Pachomius, founded the first monastery. Here the
monks had a common life, without private property with communal meals and
communal religious observances. It was in this form, rather than in that of St.
Anthony’s, that monasticism conquered the Christian world 69.

Athanasius, Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Martin of Tours, Cassian, Cassiodorus, St.
Patrick to name a few Christian fathers, ascetics and writers helped to promote or
established the ascetic and monastic way of life. In Western monasticism according to
Russell, who I shall paraphrase:

27
 … the most important name is that of St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine
Order. He was born about 480 CE, and at the age of twenty, fled from the luxuries
and pleasures of Rome to the solitude of a cave, where he lived for three years…
From the speeches of Pope Gregory the Great written in 593, a lot is learned about
Benedict. For instance, he (like other hermits suffered from ‘evil temptations’) has
some kind of experience about a woman which arouses his passions to such a
degree that he was overtaken with concupiscence and pleasure - this was put down
to the devil’s instigation – that in order to overcome the sexual temptation, he threw
himself into a nearby clump of thorns and nettles and wallowed in them until his
flesh was raw. By this masochistic exercise – his bodily pains - he obtained the cure
for his soul 70.

The monastic way of life was esteemed as the way par excellence to heaven. In it [a
monk] would be shielded from the distractions of the world, be given an
opportunity to pursue the contemplative life, and also to earn merit. He must turn
his back upon all worldly goods, and family, and practice celibacy, but because of
these sacrifices he would be rewarded by God 71.

However, there was another side to the extreme kind of asceticism practised by the
medieval monks and nuns – there was a practical side to it. For as Norman Vance
informs this present writer, and I will paraphrase him here:

… that the celibate life was not just celebrated as a practical matter, but that one of
the pragmatic arguments for clerical celibacy was and continues to be that the priest
may have to function in difficult, impoverished, even dangerous situations in which
the responsibility for a wife and family would be a distraction and an avoidable
complication. So celibacy in these terms was but as a kind of sacrifice … 72

This brief perusal of some of the moral teachings of some of the fathers, some of
which has to do with chastity fed into Western attitudes towards sexuality; and, because
lust was part and parcel of sexual intercourse, it either had to be avoided, and if that could
not be done, marriage then was the better alternative available. Feuerbach critically
commenting on marriage, celibacy and monastic life says: “The unworldly, supernatural
life is essentially also an unmarried life … This is sufficiently declared in the supernatural
origin of the Saviour – a doctrine in which unspotted virginity is hallowed as the saving
principle, as the principle of the new – the Christian world” 73.

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X1. St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on morality and sexuality
Similarly to the other Christian church fathers and apologists, Aquinas also subscribes
to the doctrine of Original Sin. In his Summa Theologica he disagrees with propositions
like these that critics at the time advanced against the doctrine of original sin:
 The first sin of our parent is not contracted by others by way of origin
 Ezekiel claimed that ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the Father’ that the sin of
parents cannot be passed on to their children
 Accidents cannot be passed on by way of transmission, unless its subject is also
transmitted. That the rational soul is the subject of sin and this is not transmitted by
way of origin
 Whatever is transmitted by way of human origin is caused by the semen. But
because the semen lacks the part of the original souls which alone can be the cause
of sin; sin therefore, cannot be contracted by way of origin 74.

Aquinas refutes these contentions by falling back on Scriptures or authority. He

quotes the Apostle Paul who says: ‘By one man, sin entered into this world and by sin
death’. (Rom.5:12). He also refers to what he calls the Catholic Faith which teaches, ‘that
the first sin of the first man is transmitted to his descendants by way of origin. For this
reason children are taken to be baptized soon after their birth, to show that they have to be
washed from some uncleanness’ 75.
He explains original sin or guilt in this way that:
‘… all men are born of Adam may be considered as one man, since they have one
common nature which they receive from their parents’. He compares the human
species to the body and its members. Now as an example of this, he argues that if
one uses one’s hand to commit murder that this sin is not imputed to the hand, but
this sin has to be ascribed to the first moving principle – the will. Similarly, ‘the
disorder which is in this man born of Adam, is voluntary not by his will, but by the
will of his first parent, who, by the movement of generation, moves all who
originate, even as the soul’s will, moves all the members to their actions. Hence, the
sin which is thus transmitted by the first parent to his descendants is called original,
just as is the sin which flows from the soul into the bodily members is called actual’
76
.

Aquinas is also concerned with concupiscence or as he terms it, that appetite which
drives the sexual act. It is the desire for pleasure or concupiscentia, which is a power

29
seated in the bodily organ 77. For instance, he appeals to what he calls the Philosopher,
Aristotle in this case, and says that lust is more shameful than anger, because lust is devoid
of reason. He also says:
… sins of intemperance are most worthy of reproach, because they are about those
pleasures which are common to us and irrational animals, hence by these sins man
is … brutalized … 77. He also tells us that: The devil is said to rejoice chiefly in the
sin of lust because it is of the greatest adhesion, and man can only with difficulty be
withdrawn from it … 78.
On the subject of adultery he says it, “belongs not only to the sin of lust, but also to
the sin of injustice, and in this respect many be brought under the head of covetousness …
so that adultery is so much the more grievous than theft as a man loves his wife more than
his chattels” 79.

Russell in summarizing Aquinas says:

Divine law directs us to love God; also in a lesser degree, our neighbour. It forbids
fornication, because the father should stay with the mother while the children are
being reared. It forbids birth control, as being unjust against nature; it does not,
however, on this account forbid life-long celibacy. Matrimony should be
indissoluble, because the father is needed in the education of the children, both are
more rational than the mother, and has having more physical strength when
punishment is required. Not all carnal intercourse is sinful, since it is natural; but to
think the married state as good as incontinence is to fall into the heresy of Jovinian.
There must be strict monogamy; polygamy is unfair to women, and polyandry
makes paternity uncertain. Incest is to be forbidden because it would complicate
family life…80.

X11. Critique of St. Aquinas’s teachings

However, he along with many of the other Christian and fathers and schoolmen
bequeaths to us a kind of harsh and repressive morality because he believes that all
humanity are tainted with original sin – a notion that has helped to shape what I believe are
misleading beliefs about sexuality in the West. His views almost remind me of the
Freudian analyses of sex being the ground spring of all neuroses. Aquinas likewise, links
much of humanity’s alienation to inherited uncleanness – irrational and impure impulses
that drive sexual desires. It is as if, sin - this overarching theological invention - is a

30
defective gene which is passed on from parent to child, which condition can only be
corrected by gene therapy which in Christological terms is equivalent to divine
intervention, and its doling out of unmerited grace and favour, but this is dependent on one
subscribing to the whole religious and confessional apparatus in order to obtain relief from
what it is that ‘ails’ humans.

X111. Other Christian fathers’ (Lactantius and Methodius) teachings on

morality and sexuality
In view of the forgoing discussions, I would like to revisit the Religion and
Sexuality chart and elaborate some more on it. I have already made reference to notions of
original sin, lust, concupiscence, chastity and other theological constructs that have
impacted on morality and sexual behaviour. Many of these moral and sexual themes have
been propounded by fathers like Lactantius who in speaking about virtue, marriage,
chastity and so forth, denounces infanticide and abortion:
… let no one, then, think that it is to be conceded even, that newly born children
may be done away with … God breathes souls into them for life, not for death.
Those who kill their children because they cannot afford to raise them because of
poverty, he tells the man, ‘it is more satisfactory that he refrain from intercourse
with his wife than [to] corrupt the works of God with defiled hands. He is against
effeminate men, and says: ‘Their enervated bodies, softened to womanish step and
apparel, belie shameless women with their dishonorable gestures’. He warns against
passions or desires which lead to sexual vices like prostitution and homosexuality.
For he says: ‘He (the devil) has plunged in these obscenities, as in a whirlpool of
filth, souls destined for sanctity; he has extinguished shame; he has berated modesty
… has even joined males and has contrived abominable intercourse against nature
and against the institute of God’. He denounces adultery by saying not only is it not
lawful to touch what belongs to another man’s marriage bed, but God also charges
us and teaches us that we must abstain from public and common bodies, for when
two bodies have been joined together, they are made one 81, and so in this state of
lugubrious indignation Lactantius issues his moral edicts.

Religion also concerns itself with virginity, married life, abstinence and diverse
other sexual matters. For instance, Methodius (who is known chiefly as the antagonist of

31
Origen, but who is also influenced by his methods to allegorise the Scriptures) in his
treatise, The Banquet of the Ten Virgins or Concerning Chastity in one of the discourses
between several characters like Marcella, Euboulious, et al., Marcella declares:
Virginity is something supernaturally great, wonderful and glorious; and to speak
plainly and in accordance with Holy Scriptures, this best and noblest manner of life
alone is the root (the udder) of immortality …. Chastity with man is a rare thing,
and difficult of attainment, and in proportion to its supreme excellence and
magnificence is the greatness of its dangers 82.

Theophila, (another character in Methodious’ treatise) in her discourse, advises her

interlocutors that marriage does not abolished the commendation to virginity, which she
compares the making of Eve from Adam’s rib or side to connubial love. Theophila gives a
lyrical account of loving-making. Thus:
When thirsting for children a man falls into a kind of trance, softened and subdued
by the pleasures of generation as by sleep, so that again something drawn from his
flesh and from his bones, as I said, [is] fashioned into another man. For the harmony
of the bodies being disturbed in the embraces of love, as those tell us who have
experience of the marriage state, all the marrow-like and generative part of the
blood, like a kind of liquid bone, coming together from all the members, worked
into foam and curdled, is projected through the organs of generation into the living
body of the female; and probably it is for this reason that a man is said to leave his
father and his mother, since he is then suddenly unmindful of all things when united
to his wife in the embraces of love, he is overcome by the desire of generation,
offering his side to the divine Creator to take from it, so that the father may again
appear in the son 83.

The Chart also points to chastity which according to St. Thomas Aquinas is called
that because ‘it chastises lust and concupiscence’. For a significant number of the early
fathers as well for scholastics like St. Aquinas, chastity is generally viewed not only as the
sine qua non of a godly life - because the carnal appetite is kept in check - but chastity is
also declared to be a virtue because ‘it engenders an exalted reverence for the mysteries of
the sacrament of marriage and consecrated virginity. This reverence is supernatural and
religious in nature’ 84.

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 Now, if most or all of the Christian fathers whom I have discussed seemed to have
at best an ambivalent and defensive view of religion and sex, and at worst, a misogynistic
notion of human sexuality, from whence did this sexual theology derived? Is Nietzsche
correct or is he being boorish when he remarks?
On the way to becoming an “angel” man has acquired that chronic indigestion and
coated tongue which makes not only the naïve joy and innocence of the animal
distasteful to him, but even life itself; so that at times he stops his nose against
himself and recites with Pope Innocent 111 the catalogue of his unsavoriness
(“impure conception, loathsome feeding in the mother’s womb, wretchedness of
physical substance, vile stench, discharge of spittle, urine, and faeces) 85. Perhaps,
the latter, but it is still useful to note his antipathy and moroseness against religion
because many of the founding fathers of religion were equally gloomy in their
prognostications as is Nietzsche.

Chapter Three
1. Sexuality and the Bible
It seems hardly likely that doctrines of original sin and such other defective
theological inventions can adequately account for the Christian fathers’ proscriptions, and
denunciations against sexual desires and activities, for the same Scriptures that they
employ to denigrate sex, in fact, seems to be positive about sexual relations. For instance,
Debra W. Haffner, says:
There is no question that certain church traditions have provided justification for
sexual oppression. From the writings of Paul to those of Augustine and Aquinas -
and through the current work of the Christian Coalition - parts of the Christian
church have attempted to control, define, and limit sexual expression. In fact, it is
clear that the mind/body dualism that characterizes much of Christian thought is the
lens through which both the Bible and church traditions are used to limit people's
experience of their sexuality and, indeed, to promote systematic oppression of
sexuality 86.
Perpetual virginity was not unknown among the Jews. The sect of the Essenes
demanded absolute continence of its members. However, since the great glory of the
race lay in the propagation of the people of God and in providing the carnal
generation of the Messias, marriage and parenthood were more highly esteemed
than virginity” 87.
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Armstrong says:
Even though the Rabbis taught that women were blessed by God, men were
commanded to thank God during the morning prayer for not making them Gentiles,
slaves or women. Yet marriage was regarded as sacred duty and family life was
holy…. The idea that sex could be holy … would be alien to Christianity, which
would sometimes see sex and God as mutually incompatible. That although later
Jews often gave a negative interpretation to these rabbinic directives [niddah or
sexually unavailable] and menses [menstruation] the rabbis themselves did not
preach a lugubrious, ascetic, life-denying spirituality 88.

“The Hebrew Bible” also claims Haffner “is replete with stories that have sexual themes.
Genesis itself has more than 30 stories that deal with sexual issues” 89. I will try then and
briefly adumbrate a few of these sexual themes which deal with issues like marriage,
chastity and other such issues. But first, it seems to be a fact that the ancient Jews had a
sacred obligation to ‘bear seed’ so as to increase and enlarge their descendants as the
‘chosen people’ for the glory of their God.

Therefore, in the Creation narratives, for example, God created man and woman,
male and female blessed them and told them to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:27,28) 90.
After, He had created man, He then figured that it was not good for the man to be alone, so
he made him a help meet (Gen. 2:18, 28); so he made a woman. (Gen. 2:22). He
anticipates that man will have a desire for a woman, so He says, if a man leaves his father
and mother, and takes on a woman, they then become “one flesh”. This indicates some
kind of social or marital arrangement and sexual union between them. (Gen. 2:24)

After Adam and Eve ‘fell from grace into disgrace’, God tells Eve that she would
have a ‘desire’, presumably, a need for sex from her husband as well as protection by him
(Gen. 3: 16). With the use of the euphemism, ‘Adam knew Eve his wife’, she became
pregnant and produced Cain, and later, Abel (Gen.4:1,2). Sexual desire and activity are not
only confined to earthly creatures but even to celestial ones, for Genesis 6:2 says: “That
the sons of God, (presumably angels) saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and
they took them wives of all of which they chose”.
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 Judah has sex with Tamar his daughter-in-law, thinking that she was a prostitute.
She had entrapped him because he had refused to give his son to her in marriage. Judah
had not done so because he was worried that he would lose another one of his sons like he
had lost Onan. Onan, instead of impregnating his deceased brother’s wife as custom
demanded, instead ejaculated on the ground. God was angry with Onan, so he killed him,
not so much it seemed for Onan ‘masturbating’, but that he failed to carry out his filial
duties to ‘go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s
brother unto her. (Deut. 25:5). So Tamar then to exact revenge on her father–in-law, and
because she wanted to have babies, lured Judah into having sex with her. He was about to
have her burned as a whore, but when she proved by means of some of his own
possessions that he had given her for keepsake as payment for sex, that he was the person
with whom she had slept, he relented, and said that she was more righteous than he
(Gen.38:13-30).

Proverbs also praises the marriage state. It says, “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a
good thing …” (18:22). One may assume the “thing” is the relationship. It contains some
lyrical sexual imageries: ''Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your
youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. May her breasts satisfy you at all times; may you be
intoxicated always by her love" (Prov.5:18-19).
Likewise, The Song of Songs is demonstrably an anthology of erotic and sexual
Jewish love poems. Many coy or timid religious commentators and theologians have
interpreted these erotic verses as allegorical or figural in meaning. For example, many
Jewish rabbis say the poems are meant to show the love of God for Israel. On the other
hand, the Song of Songs for many Christian commentators represents the love that the
bridegroom, who is Christ, has for the bride, who is either the Church or the soul of the
believer. Those who hold this allegorical view believe that the Bible would not contain a
book just describing mere human love; that the language of the bride, if taken literally, is
contrary to modesty. However, contemporary scholars prefer to believe that these poems
deal explicitly with human love, and nowhere in them is the name of God mentioned. The
35
Song does not talk about sex in the context of marriage or procreation: the woman in the
Song is never called a wife, nor is she required to bear children 91. Here are a few
fragments of these erotic love ballads some of which are indeed sufficiently metaphorical
and obscure as to be opened to a whole range of interpretations:
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth
For thy love is better then wine (Songs 1: 2)

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door

And my bowels were moved for him
I rose up to open to my beloved
and my hands dropped with myrrh
…. (Songs 5:4, 5)

Thy two breasts are like

two young roes that are twins (Songs 7:3)

The reason for drawing attention to all these sexual liaisons is that the Old
Testament Scriptures speak explicitly about sex, and sometimes does it in quite graphic
ways. This surely is in great contrast to how the Christian fathers treated the issue of sex.

In the New Testament too, we see where Jesus supports marriage “… What
therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder”. Matt.19: 6 and Mark10.9. He
even attends a wedding ceremony and there turns water into wine at ‘The Marriage in
Cana’ (John 2: 1-11). However, tradition insists that he was never married.
Paul, says, so as ‘to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let
every woman have her own husband (I Cor. 7:2). He tells married couples to not:
“Defraud” or refuse each other sex unless it be with consent for a time in order to fast and
pray, but they should come together again so that they won’t be tempted by Satan because
of prolonged sexual abstinence (1 Cor.7: 5). His instructions to the unmarried and the
widows are that he wished they could be like him – that is celibate, for that would be good.
However, if they cannot contain themselves, then they should marry rather than ‘burn’ with
sexual lust. (1 Cor. 7: 9). He tells Timothy that a bishop should be the husband of one wife
36
(1 Tim. 3:2), and warns him to watch out for deceivers who speak lies … forbidding
marriage (1Tim. 4:2, 3). The book of Hebrews which tradition ascribes to Paul says:
“Marriage is honourable … and the bed undefiled; but whoremongers and adulterers God
will judge” (Heb. 13:4).

So from this brief survey of Scriptures, both Old and New, one observes that human
sexuality is not avoided but dealt with in both joyous and distressing ways very much
differently from how it is treated by many of the Christian fathers, the schoolmen and other
religious people. These religious groups have tended to view sexual relationships as
tainted, full of anxiety and inimical to the virtuous life.

11. Sexuality in medieval literature

Yet, not all important religious thinkers saw sex – well, at anyrate, marriage and
women - in a disparaging light. For example, Peter Abelard, that great French scholastic
philosopher and perhaps, the greatest logician of the 12 Century CE did not see sex and
religion in this way. Abelard had an affair with his brilliant young pupil Heloise who was
entrusted to his care, by her uncle, Canon Fulbert for her education. Abelard got her
pregnant. Her uncle arranged a secret marriage between the couple, but because he wanted
to make the marriage public, Abelard removed Heloise to the Convent of Argenteuil.
Abelard would visit her and have sexual relationship with her. Believing that Abelard had
repudiated the marriage, Fulbert had him castrated. Heloise then becomes a nun at
Argenteuil and Abelard a monk at the Abbey of St. Denis near Paris. For the remainder of
their lives as long as one of them remained alive, they kept up correspondence with each
other, and their love remained strong for each other despite their separation. The intensity
for example, of Abelard’s feelings for Heloise is brought out in letters like these: I will
paraphrase one of them:

In Letter 7: Abelard shows that women are revered in the Old Testament and in the
Gospels. That divine grace bestowed the highest gifts on them, for example, because, they
are the ones who usually have the miracles of seeing their dead loved ones restored to
them. (For instance, Elijah raising the widow’s son and Elisha raising the Shunammite’s
37
son: these stories are found in I and 11 Kings). Lazarus being brought back to life for his
sisters’ comfort.... Abelard says that the female sex also is seen to have won merit because
they are endowed or imbued with natural compassion towards the Lord when he faced
persecution. Christ loved Mary and Martha. God showed mercy to public prostitutes like
Mary Magdalene… And so he goes on praising women, virgins, nuns and other women 92.

Likewise, another medieval allegorical writer William Langland recounting the

vision of Piers Plowman in a bawdy and even in a comical way, says of sex and marriage:
‘Every layman who cannot persevere in a chaste single life should go and make a prudent
marriage [not for money or wealth] to protect him [from] falling into sin. For sexual
pleasure sure is the devil’s lime-rod; while you’re still young and your tool is in fighting
shape, cool your heat in the marriage bed’ 93. About his own failing virility, he says, ‘… my
wife took pity on my troubles and fervently wished that I was in heaven. My member
which was the reason why she loved me and which she was very fond of feeling –
especially at night as we lay in bed – whatever I tried, had lost the power to pleasure her.
Old age, helped by her, had worn it to nothing’ 94.

Even in Dante’s Divine Comedy we observe that he himself is prepared to follow

Virgil to Hell and Purgatory, and from there to be led by his one true love Beatrice to
Paradise. He is very sympathetic toward the adulterous pair Francesca da Rimini and Paolo
who had committed adultery and had been murdered by Paolo’s older and deformed
brother whose wife Francesca was. They are now in the second circle (or Upper Hell) –
seven circles higher than the lowest one - for the sin of lust or incontinence. His
compassion for them comes out in Canto V:

Lines

106 Love to a single death brought him and me;

Cain’s place lies waiting for our murderer now
These words came wafted to us plaintively

109 Hearing those wounded souls, I bent my brow

Downward, and thus bemused I let time pass
Till the poet said at length: “What thinkest thou?”
38
112 When I could answer, I began: “Alas!
Sweet thought how many, and desire how great,
Brought down these twain unto the dolorous pass!”

115 And then I turned to them: “Thy dreadful fate,

Francesca, makes me weep, it so inspires
Pity,” said I, “and grief compassionate, 95
…”.

There is nothing in Dante’s treatment of these carnal sinners of the false and
unchristian condemnation of sexual motive which has sometimes obtained in the Church’s
teaching. Their offence is not at all the natural impulse of sex, but that they ‘subject reason
to desire’ 96.

Likewise in the medieval Arthurian legends between the 12-15th centuries CE for
example, those of Chrétien de Troyes, and the English knight Sir Thomas Malory’s Le
Morte d’Arthur, themes of courtly love, betrayal and adultery were much of the oralist,
balladic and literary blandishment of those periods. For example, in one Malory’s
romances, King Mark’s trusted nephew, Tristram de Liones (Tristan), and Mark’s wife, La
Beale Isoud (Iseult or Isolde) have an affair with each other. In another one of his
romances, King Arthur’s wife, Guenever (Genevieve) falls in love with Arthur’s knight,
Launcelot (Lancelot). These are cases of adulterous liaisons - these love affairs which were
usually love triangles – and depending on which version of the legends one reads, the
outcomes usually had dire consequences for each one of the parties, and even for the
kingdoms involved.

In the case of Sir Tristram, he is sent to Ireland by King Mark of Cornwall to bring
him his bride-to–be and the future Queen Isoud. However, on his return journey, he and the
King’s Bride drink the love potion intended for Mark and Isoud on their wedding day. This
seal their fate as perpetual lovers ‘… and thus is happed the love betwixt Sir Tristram and
La Beale Isoud, the which love never departed the days of their life’ 97.

39
In the case of the romance between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever, she began to
notice that his love for her had cooled. She queen then started crying and called Lancelot
‘a false recreant knight and a common lecher, and lovest and holdest other ladies, and by
me thou has disdain and scorn’. She vows never to love him anymore and she then tells
him to leave court 98.

Again after many twists and turns in the plot, Launcelot comes to defend the honour
of the Queen against Sir Meliaguant (he is jealous of Guenever because of Launcelot).
Then one night Lancelot goes into the Queen’s bedroom by way of her window by
climbing a ladder. But as her window was protected with iron bars, he had to pull at them
very hard to break them from the wall to gain entrance into the queen’s room. However, in
dislodging the bars he severely cut his hand. But still he ‘leapt into the chamber of the
queen’ 99, and they made love until daybreak. Later that morning the jealous Sir Meliaguant
comes into the queen’s chamber and finds blood on her bed. He then accuses her of going
with one of the wounded knights next to her room, and threatened to report her to Arthur
for treason. Again Launcelot has to defend the Queen’s honour this time in a joust that
Meliaguant had arranged 100.

Eventually, after the death of Arthur, Guenever becomes a nun. Launcelot comes to
see her and she tells him that they should no longer see each other. She tells the ladies in
attendance with her: “Through this man and me hath all this been wrought, and the death
of the most noble knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is
my most noble lord slain” 101.

Such is Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (printed by Caxton in 1485) that it seemed that
at time, these romances - some erotic and others didactic - were not as yet burdened with
religious guilt of the patriarchs and schoolmen of whom I am discussing, neither do these
romances carry the religious claustrophobia, moral anxieties and sexual repression of say
Victorian times. Clearly, I see an evolution, a religious, moral and spiritual development in
the whole works. For instance, Tristan and Iseult’s life generally carries on in a secular

40
way – they are both destined to love each other because they are under the influence of the
magic potion that they were fated to drink, whereas, the lives of King Arthur, Genevieve
and Lancelot following their post-Grail experience, together with the suffering that they
endured was morally awakened. Arthur for instance, upon the cry of Sir Bedevere, 'Ah my
Lord, what shall become of me …” experiences his epiphany as he senses the hopelessness
of his condition for he had lost all his knights save two, Lucan and Bedevere, and his
kingdom was crumbling. Although mortally wounded, he counsels Bedevere: ‘Comfort
thyself said the king and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust in …
and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul’ 102. The queen also has arrived at her
moment of truth when she discloses: “Therefore, Sir Lancelot, wit thou well I am set in
such a plight to get my soul health; and yet I trust through God’s grace that after my death
to have a sight of the blessed face of Christ, and at doomsday to sit on His right side, for as
sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven’ 103.

Lancelot’s metamorphosis begins to come about when he lays two nights on the
king’s tomb in prayers and weeping. Then he tells the assembled lords amongst other
things ‘… against death may no man rebel …’ 104; and finally his ‘On the Road to
Damascus’ experience arrived after he left visiting the queen at the nunnery and came to a
hermitage and chapel and heard the bell ring for mass. There he met the Bishop of
Canterbury and kneeling down he ‘prayed the Bishop to shrive him and assoil him [to hear
a confession and to absolve him]. And he besought the Bishop that he might be his brother’
105
.

111. Sexuality during the Renaissance and Romantic period

Now to some religious reformers: Although Calvin inherited some of the angst of
men like the early 4th Century CE Christian humanist and apologist Lactantius, (he had
written a volume called The Divine Institutes in which he denounced false religions, false
philosophies, showed true wisdom and religion, and demonstrated other godly virtues);
41
and although he (Calvin) also absorbed some of Augustine’s ideas, say on predestination
and original sin: Calvin says about original sin: “ … we should contemplate our miserable
condition since the fall of Adam, the sense of which tends to destroy all boasting and
confidence, to overwhelm us with shame, and to fill us with real humility… 106 ; he
nevertheless, has a more positive attitude towards marriage and women than the early
Christian patriarchs as indicated by the following remarks:

Now since the human race could not exist without woman, no bond whatever in
human relations is more sacred than that by which husband and wife unite to
become one body and one soul 107. Or again, he says: Now when God designates
woman as man’s helper, he is not giving woman a rule to determine their vocation
in life by assigning them to a special task; he is rather declaring that marriage itself
will be man’s best help in life …. Of course, we know the common proverb that she
is a necessary evil, but we ought to listen to the voice of God which asserts that
woman was given to man as a companion and partner to help him to live really well
108
.

Luther also ‘… walked in the steps of Paul and Augustine. His position with regard
to marriage was tinctured throughout by patriarchalism … The whole picture was carried
directly over from the Middle Ages, in which Catholic sacramentalism and agrarian society
tended to make marriage an institution for the perpetuation of families and the preservation
of properties’ 109. But despite that, Luther after he had renounced monastic life married
Katherine von Bora and had a family. He gave three reasons for marrying (1) to please his
father (2) to spite the pope and the Devil and to (3) seal his witness before martyrdom 110.
He thought he would be killed because of the Reformation that he had started at
Wittenburg. ‘Marriage is good, virginity is better but liberty is best’ 111, he declared. He
rejected virginity as an ideal. By this move the way was open for the romanticizing and
refinement of marriage 112.

John Milton also in his poem Paradise Lost does not seem to have such a dismal
view of marriage and women. After the Fall, the poet shows Adam and Eve making love
and rejects the idea of abstinence. Book 4, Lines 738-749

42
 Which God likes best; into their inmost bower
Handed they went and, eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid, nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure and commands to some, leaves free to all
Our maker bids increase; who bids abstain
But our destroyer, foe to god and man? 113

In terms of gender equality Milton has been criticised as being patriarchal and
misogynistic when these lines are read. Book 8, Lines 41-44.
Of nature her the inferior in the mind
And inward faculties which most excel
In outward also her reassembling less
His image who made both and less expressing 114
However, Kastan commenting on this alleged misogyny says:

The poem gives us an incompatible view of the relations between the sexes. Adam and Eve
are at one unequal and equal and ambiguity evidenced in various ways but not least in the
syntax concerning Adam’s view of eve as ‘superior, or but equal.’ 115

Book 10, lines 145-151 confirms Kastan’s observations:

…‘was she thy God that her thou didst obey
Before his voice? Or was she made thy guide
Superior, or but equal, that to her
Thou didst resign they manhood and the place
Wherein God set thee above her, made of thee
And for thee, whose perfection excelled
Hers in all real dignity? Adorned.
…’. 116
But Kastan puts to rest any idea that Milton was overtly sexist for he says:

The poem, however, refuses simply to reflect and reproduce a patriarchal ideology.
Eve is far too active and intelligent for her inferiority to be in any sense axiomatic

43
 …. If the biblical account insists that she be the focus of the temptation, Milton has
framed it so her intellect and spiritual activity is emphasized… The poem, then
effectively challenges its own ideological underpinnings, so we are led to see Eve as
Adam’ emotional, intellectual and spiritual equal …. 117

There were also during the Romantic period poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who despite some personal difficulties like financial woes, unhappy love affairs, neuralgic
and rheumatic pains, addiction to opium and suicidal tendencies, he could still find time to
celebrate romance. Fragments from two of his poems lend support to my claim:
Genevieve (1789-90) 118
Lines
1-4 Maid of my Love, sweet Genevieve!
In Beauty’s light you glide along:
Your eye is like the Star of Eve,
And sweet your voice, as Seraph’s song.

No doubt comparing his state – ‘at the end of 1799 Coleridge fell in love with Sara
Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife’ 119 - to that of Lancelot and Guinevere,
he says in a longer poem:

Love (1799) 120

Lines
9-12 The moonshine stealing o’er the scene
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!
29-32 I told her of the Knight that wore
Upon his shield a burning brand;
And that for ten long years he wooed
The Lady of the Land.
93-96 I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
44
 And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride.

Chapter Four

If not from the Bible, from whence did the gloomy view of the patriarchs about
sexuality come?

Now if the gloomy, even fearful view of sex by some of the founding fathers of
Christianity did not, or should not have come from the Bible, from whence then did their
sexual theology come?

This theology of sex seems to have come from a misreading of the Pauline teaching
about ‘original sin’. Paul says: ‘Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world,
and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned’’ (Rom. 5:12 ,
NKJV). Now, although many of the early Christian patriarchs shared the belief that all
human beings were held in a state of sin because of the Fall, however, individuals they do
not per se share Adam’s sin. It is as if we all share the family name ‘Adam’ – we are
related by blood and kinship – but individual acts of each member of the family is the
responsibility of each member. Crudely put, if Daddy Adam does wrong, Sonny Adam is
not responsible for Daddy’s transgressions and the also opposite applies - Daddy Adam is
not responsible for his son’s crime. Fathers like Athanasius seem to have held a view
nearer to this, for he believed that the chief result of the sin of Adam was the loss of grace
because of the abuse of his liberty. That by the lack of conformity to the will of God, he
and his descendants were reduced to their natural condition and became subject to
corruption and death. So original sin - with its implicit defilements and sexual impurities -
was not transmitted by concupiscence to humanity. The Greek fathers emphasized the
cosmic or metaphysical dimensions of the Fall. However, in the West, fathers like
45
Tertullian, St. Ambrose et al, taught the solidarity of the whole human race with Adam not
only in consequences of the sin, but in the sin itself. St. Augustine followed in this train of
thought, and taught that Adam’s guilt was transmitted to his descendants by as it were the
guilt of association – by concupiscence - which damns all humanity. His doctrine was
confirmed by many Christian councils, e.g. Second of Orange in 529.

Yet as to why the early Christian fathers particularly those of the Latin or Western
Church thought that sexuality was evil is not only a misreading of St. Paul, but they were,
it seemed heavily influenced by the some general metaphysics and mysticism of eastern
ideas, but more particularly by Manichaeism. Bear in mind, Augustine, who very much
shaped the doctrine of original sin as it is understood in the West was a Manichee for some
nine years before he was converted to Christianity. Now Mani, a Third Century CE Persian
mystic was greatly influenced by St. Paul. Mani’s doctrines struck Christians as a Pauline
heresy. Manichaeism was based amongst other things on a dualism between body and soul.
The body was principally an evil apparatus and was in conflict with the soul. For them
also, the cosmos was based on a primeval conflict between light and darkness; between
good and evil. Religion was therefore designed to release the particles of light which Satan
has imprisoned in man’s brain and that the prophets including Mani had been sent to help
in this task. To achieve this release of light, severe asceticism was to be practised.
Essentially then, notions of Gnosticism, Manichaeism and other eastern influences
significantly influenced many of the early Christian fathers who inclined them to promote
asceticism, celibacy, chastity and the likes. Such views allowed them to see the flesh as
evil which kept the soul imprisoned, and that for it to be released, and become one with the
divine, then it had to be severely chastised by privations of all kinds including sex and
marriage.

However, on the question of marriage, again, the Eastern Church in the rulings of
many of its early councils allowed the clergy to be married, a position which was
confirmed by the Council of Trullo in 692. Before that, at the Council of Nicea (325) a

46
proposal to compel all clergy to give up cohabitation with their wives was rejected and the
legal position in the Eastern Church was and is that priest and deacons may marry before
ordination, but not after. Bishops on the other hand must remain celibate.

In the Western Church on the other hand, there was the legal position that all the
higher clergy must be celibate. Many councils up to and beyond the Council of Trent
(1545-63) and even into the 20th century (Codex Iuris Canonici, 1983) confirmed and
reaffirmed the practice of celibacy for the clergy.

However, theses rulings about clerical celibacy were not always observed by some
clergy for there have been periods in the history of the Western Church particularly
between the 10th and 15th centuries when clerical concubinage was rife. The Schoolmen
had debated whether celibacy was required of the clergy by the law of God or by the law
of the Church, and St. Thomas Aquinas for instance, decided it was decided that it was
given by the latter. Where the Church of England is concerned, the obligation for celibacy
was formally abolished in 1549.

So the dogma of Original Sin, I contend has given the Western patriarchs a dim
view of sexuality. There are of course fathers and theologian who wanted to delink
concupiscence from original sin. St. Anselm saw Original Sin as the privation of the
righteousness which everyman might possess thus separating it from concupiscence which
Augustine and his followers had identified it with. Abelard refused to accept original sin as
guilt for which he was condemned by the Council of Sens (1140)

St. Thomas Aquinas saw original sin to consist in the loss of supernatural privileges
which had allowed humans to keep their inferior powers subject to reason. So for Aquinas
original sin is transmitted not as personal fault of Adam, but as a state of human nature, yet
a fault because all men are members of one original organism of which Adam was the first
member. The Thomist principles were not at first accepted as the old rigorous view of
Augustine’s prevailed. The rationalist tendencies of Abelard were voiced by others who
denied the guilt recognizing only its punitive consequences. But more prominent
47
Scholastics like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham and their disciples accepted the
Thomist principles while defining Original Sin exclusively as a lack of original
righteousness which tended to eliminate the element of concupiscence. However Luther
and Calvin equated Original Sin with concupiscence and affirmed that it completely
destroyed liberty and persisted even after baptism. The council of Trent opposed the
teaching of the Schoolmen but did not seem to give any clear cut answers to the problem.

Since then the doctrine of Original Sin has had a chequered history, for from the
18th Century, during the period of Enlightenment onwards the dogma conflicted with the
notions of progress and perfectibility of human nature, and made the idea of punishment
for the sins of another seemed morally intolerable. Later the developments in biblical
criticism, evolutionary political, philosophical, sociological, psychological and other
theories cast doubts on the dogma of Original Sin, and doubts on the historicity of the
Genesis account, while at the same time suggesting that the evil propensities of humans
might derive from their evolutionary nature. Modern treatment of Original Sin tends to
regard it as belonging to the nature of humans rather than to the individual person; that
humans derive it less from hereditary but more from the inescapably social character of
man. So sin and as well as righteousness are less personal in nature but more corporate in
scope.

To explain this antipathy towards sex, I am inclined to side with Bertrand Russell
when he observes that: ‘Sex, more than any other element in human life, is still viewed by
many, perhaps by most, in an irrational way…. The densest cloud that remains is in the
territory of sex, as is perhaps natural since sex is concerned [with] the most passionate part
of most people’s lives’ 121.

Why then does sex according to Russell remain the densest cloud? He seems to
posit two hypotheses (1) Modesty (2) Jealousy. He argues that modesty in some form and
to some degree, is almost universal in the human race, and constitutes a taboo which must
only be broken … in accordance with certain forms and ceremonies, or, at least, in

48
conformity with some recognised etiquette…. [that] anthropologists have found the most
elaborate forms of prudery among primitive savages. The conception of the obscene has its
roots deep in human nature. He says, we may go against it from a love of rebellion, or
from loyalty to the scientific spirit, or from a wish to feel wicked … but we do not thereby
eradicate it from among our natural impulses 122.

Russell claims that: In almost every human society, pornography and exhibitionism are
reckoned as offences, except when, as not infrequently occurs, they form part of religious
ceremonies 123. We could also include in Russell’s list this observation of this present
writer: ‘or when they form part of an apparatus or system that is designed to demean
people, as when for instance, an invading or occupying army uses brutality, physical and
mental - rape, genital mutilation, and other types of sadistic violence - to dominate a
person or a people’.

As part of Russell’s modesty hypothesis he also included asceticism where he says it is

not to be found in the earlier books of the Old Testament but appears in the Apocrypha and
in the New Testament. Asceticism at its faintest level says Russell is the reluctance that
one has to imagine a revered individual especially a religious one engaged in love-making
which is felt to be incompatible with the highest degree of dignity. The wish to free the
spirit from bondage to the flesh has inspired many of the great religions of the world, and
still is powerful even among modern day intellectuals 124.

His second hypothesis is jealousy: He contends that the most potent single factor in the
genesis of sexual morality is this emotion. Jealously instinctively rouses anger; and anger,
rationalised, become moral disapproval. He theorises that this instinctive motive had to be
reinforced at an early stage of development of civilization by the desire of males to be
certain of paternity. That without security in this respect, the patriarchal family would have
been impossible, and fatherhood, with all its economic implications, could not have
become the basis of social institutions. It was, accordingly, wicked to have relations with
another man’s wife, but not even mildly reprehensible to have relations with an unmarried

49
woman. 125. So if Russell’s observations are true, property rights are a fundamental element
of sexual morality. However, I will hope to show later that sexual morality is not only
based on property rights but also on other considerations

Another reference to the religion and sexual chart above may be appropriate here: In
Western cultures public nudity is generally censored by disapprobation and by legal
restraints. Nudity is seen as indecent and shameful as Adam and Eve were said to be
ashamed after they ate ‘of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2:17) and
found themselves naked. Upon the discovery that they were naked they made
themselves a covering of fig leaves and hid from God (Gen 3). One wonders why this
single iconic mythological act has from that time until now so profoundly affected the
Western mind, for in contrast to this state of affairs, there are many other cultures -
from the Amazon to Africa, New Guinea and elsewhere - where it is natural (or used to
be so until the missionaries arrived) for male and female to go about naked or only
partially clothed, and such societies did not see nakedness as sinful or shameful. Also,
in many so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘developing societies’ it is natural for women to
publicly breast-feed their babies, yet in the West, there is often a feeling of
embarrassment and even shame attached to breast-feeding a baby. Yet paradoxically, as
the breast in the West has become lest an organ or source of nourishment and comfort
for the baby, it has become more of a sexual symbol; for on one hand, it authenticates
womanhood, and on the other hand, it appeals to the fantasies of manhood. The breast
has therefore become a commodity, a commercial and sexual symbol that
simultaneously reinforces the ego and provides narcissistic pleasures for both females
and males.

Now, by many non-Western countries not having the kind of Judaeo-Christian guilt
or Western strictures against nakedness to make them feel ashamed, and also importantly,
seeing that some of those geographic areas do not have winters, or the pressures of the
fashion and clothing industry pressing down on them, then they feel that they have no need

50
to be covered. This might suggest then, that nakedness or the wearing of clothes is
environmentally, socially and economically determined, and that attitudes towards
nakedness or nudity have less to do with theological and moral notions of shame and guilt.
Yet, missionaries of old, when coming into contact with naturally attired indigenous
peoples - who were naked or semi-naked people - were horrified to see them in that
‘savage’ state - and even objected to the position they assumed in coition - that
immediately, they had to insist that these people be covered; that they adopt the correct
sexual posture, later termed the ‘missionary position’, i.e. the male laying on top of the
female. It begs the question then, what was it that made outsiders impose their sexual value
systems on these indigenous people? It seems to me that the major explanation for this
must be that these missionaries were infected by the idea that the body, particularly, the
sight of the naked body was offensive because it would inflame sexual passions if certain
reproductive organs were not covered, and the excitation of passions was inimical to the
virtuous life.

There are of course people in the West who seem to want to shed this guilt complex
associated with nakedness, and in their attempt to free themselves from what they see as
other people’s prejudices and fears, have created nudist colonies or nude beaches and the
likes. However, on the part of the general society, such nudist encampments tend to be
viewed with suspicion, distaste, bemusement, grudging admiration while others take a
prurient interest in them.

Take also the case of polygamy: Again, religion supports the legal code against this
practice, and the legal code in turn reinforces religion to make polygamy unlawful. Yet
again in several non-Western societies, polygamy is the custom. I am informed by a
colleague of mine, Melsada McKen a resident of the United Kingdom, who in 2001,
visited Gambia in West Africa, and whilst there, she spoke to a man and some of his six
wives each one for whom he provides a hut. In this polygamous context, there is a head
wife whom the junior wives take their cues from. The relationships between the wives

51
appear amicable with little evidence of jealousy and rivalry between them, and the husband
takes it in turn at different times to sleep with each one of his wives. We are also aware that
the Moslem religion permits a man to have up to four wives. Even in some of the western
United States – e.g. Nevada, Utah - there is still strong evidence that some Mormons
practice polygamy much to the consternation of State and Federal Government officials
and religious orthodoxy. So again, where does the insistence on, and institution of
monogamy in the West, and the proscription against polygamy come from? Is monogamy a
theological invention based on God-given diktats or on prejudices, economic, property and
paternalistic demands designed for the preservation of the family structure that there be
one wife to one husband? One must however note that in those same societies that practice
polygamy, the counter-practice of polyandry is not acceptable. So here again patriarchy is
dominant; for although, it is acceptable, laudable, and legitimate for males to have many
spouses, it is forbidden for females to have many male partners. Is this behaviour then
similar to what we observe in some of the animal colonies where the alpha-male controls
what might be viewed as his harem - a collection of females - which he ferociously
defends, and for sole breeding rights, fights off all other male contenders?

Let us observe another element that is on the religion-sex chart; that is sex-
education. Many parents object to their children having sex education in schools because
they feel that this is a private affair, and that these issues should be off-limits to their
children because such knowledge of sexual matters might promote promiscuity in their
children: that subjects like the reproductive organs, sexual intercourse, birth control,
abortion, the use of contraceptives, condoms and a host of other sexual, biological and
anatomical related issues and terms should be left alone. They hope that their children in
time will somehow learn about it. Yes indeed, children in time do learn about sexual
matters, but often from the wrong persons, and often get the wrong information about sex.

Society however, seems to recognise that there is a high nuisance value, and a
costly price to pay for the high incidence or rate of teenage pregnancies and all the

52
associated difficulties that accompany these teenage pregnancies – many of them
unwanted. So there has to be recognition that sex education should be made a part of the
educational curriculum. In some quarters, the late Bertrand Russell is seen as a ‘libertarian’
- a man of loose morals – but, I cannot help feeling that he should be commended when he
says: “When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be
told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know.
There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as
occurring only in marriage. There is no excuse for deceiving children” 126.

Naturally, the amount of information and degree of appropriateness of sex education

ought to match the age and the ability range of the child, and the information presented to
them must be such, that is not likely to scandalise them or the subject. So clearly, what
might reasonably be construed as pornography, say, sexually explicit literature, gratuitous
sex accompanied by violence, brutality, bestiality, sadism, exploitation and other forms of
unmeritorious sexual images and practices might be inappropriate for teenage sex
education classes, except of course, if these scenes having first been agreed upon by
knowledgeable and interested parties and determined to have educative value that
transcends the violent nature of the content. So a carte blanche ban on sexually explicit
material is not automatic. For instance, people witnessing a child starving might be led to
do something to try and reduce or eliminate child poverty. So a gratuitously violent piece
of sexual imagery might be educative in the respect that a boy might see it as not a way to
treat his sister or girlfriend. Of course, these are difficult areas to deal with, especially our
sexuality, which as I have suggested before is clouded in dense superstition, prejudice and
ignorance. It is time however, for the scientific and religious searchlights to be focused on
this most opaque nature of our lives in order that illumination may be had in those dark
corners of our minds; for this will lead to a better, more enlightened and healthier attitude
towards sexuality. For if we are to lessen the kind of commercialisation, trivialisation of
sex; to abolish the commodification, the degradation, demeaning, and cheapening of
females by a contemporary style of musical genre; to make rape, incest, child pornography,
53
pedophilia, sex trade, and such other undesirable acts less attractive; much less socially,
economically, emotionally, judicially, legally and religiously injurious; then a bold attempt
has to be made to redefine the relationship between religion and human sexuality.

Now, all societies have an interest in promoting certain codes of morality and sexual
mores; all societies as suggested, seem to have an instinctive or intuitive feel about what is
offensive – but these feelings about sexuality are not per se theological in origin, but
society seems to have given them a theological base – a puritanical base at that - thinking
that these feelings are so powerful that they could only arise from a Supreme Power. Yet
this cannot be the case, for the ancient gods and goddesses of the pagans were often divine
or semi-divine creatures who over-indulged in all types of sexual and erotic pleasures, and
their sycophants, acolytes, priests and priestesses also were participants in various
bacchanalian, orgiastic rites, and ecstatic ceremonies and celebrations at various times of
the year.

So now whether these pagan practices having to do with phallic symbols, religious
orgies and the worship of Osiris, Eros, Dionysius, Ishtar, Mithras or whatever are now
banished from the Judaeo-Christian religious cosmology, then it only means that old values
have been transplanted or supplanted by newer ones based on the concept of a Single
Divine Deity who is viewed as supremely moral, holy, strict, and who will not tolerate or
be challenged by any other divine competitors. Therefore, this different and dominant
religious paradigm is now the prevailing one that determines much of the current attitudes
towards sex.

In the final analysis, however, sexual mores are more about what society accepts as
being in its best interests – to keep family structures intact and ongoing. No sexual act –
the mere mechanical and biological activity - is in itself, morally bad, and conversely, all
sexual acts can be good. What however, defines the efficacy, acceptability, and
appropriateness of sexual behavior are communitarian considerations, health and wellness
issues, and other emotional and psychological needs which are very much associated

54
amongst other things with real life circumstances. So in a cold country, it is a matter of
survival to cover up, but less a need to do so in a hot climate – yet, still, in a hot climate,
one may also be required to cover up as protection against the elements. The need for
clothing is in the first place, a need for protection, but later it becomes a business and
fashion industry, and also a religious requirement.

Conclusion

Such therefore, is the power of religion to control morality and sexuality, and this
power was at first usurped by the early Christian fathers and the scholastics, and this
power, still to a great extent, rests in the hands of patriarchy, and still functions as forms of
procreational and property rights. However, along with these unequal power relationships,
there is a theology of sex which is based on false assumptions of what are the proper roles
of women and men in society. Traditionally, the roles of men and women have been
predicated on the erroneous interpretations of the Tanakh or Jewish Sacred Writings by
early Christian fathers and the medieval scholars who have taken what is a highly
symbolic, mystical, devotional and liturgical body of literature which is an embodiment of
a people who posits a special relationship to their deity, YHWH, and used this Jewish
cosmogony, particularly, the creation myths along with its narratives of the Fall of Man
and the origin of sin as literal, factual, and historical accounts of the prehistory of
humanity.

As a result of these literalist and rationalist interpretations attached to the Jewish

rendering of history by Western theologisers, humanity and every facet of it, including
sexual relations and the body are intrinsically flawed when interpreted in the light of a
3000-year atavistic tradition.

Now, were modern women and men able to demythologise, demystify, reinterpret or
even reinvent the ancient Scriptures and the writings of the early Christian fathers and
scholastics by reconstructing the ontological, existential, religious, spiritual and human
psychological architecture based on apriori assumptions that human nature is not
55
intrinsically defective, but that it is fundamentally good; then this reinterpretation of the
Scriptures would promote a positive, dynamic, creative and fulfilling role for sex that
would no longer view it as sinful, but, instead, that the sexual act is a religious, spiritual
and sacred duty that should be celebrated, enjoyed, and used responsibly, for it is the only
means available to humans for coming into existence and for the continuation of life on
earth.

However, this reinterpretation of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures - a corpus of

sacred knowledge which is still the basic building blocks of Western civilization - with an
aim to exorcise the ghosts of the ancient patriarchs and schoolmen is going to be
exceedingly difficult for the heirs of their teachings are of a psychological mold that has
hardened over centuries. For as G.B. Harrison observed commenting on the English side of
the religious sentiment, ‘anyone who cares to understand English puritanism at its greatest,
will see it in Pilgrims Progress, Grace Abounding and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.
Nor must it be forgotten that, though a few great English writers have been puritans,
puritanism is one of the strongest and most fundamental traits in the English character’ 127.
So John Bunyan in Grace Abounding for instance says: “I did still let loose the reins to my
lusts and delighted in all transgressions against the law of God; so that until I came to the
state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company into all
manner of vice and ungodliness”128 . Here we witness in Bunyan a sort of religious and
psychological masochism which led William James to categorise Bunyan as a ‘sick soul’.
This is amongst other things ‘pathological melancholy’ otherwise called, ‘anhedonia' -
‘joylessness … lack of the taste for things’. 129 ‘… And only by being twice-born - by the
renunciation even denunciating of the natural life in order to participate in the spiritual life
- can this sick soul find happiness’. 130

As implied above, there lies the difficult task of reinterpreting the teachings of the
patriarchs and schoolmen, but it was my intention in this discussion to strive to
demythologise some of their sexual theological myths. I hope that I have gone a little way

56
to dispel the air of lugubriousness that hitherto has surrounded the religious
pronouncements of the patristic figures in regards to human sexuality.

George S. Garwood, PhD

USA

Bibliography: Religion and Sexuality

Chapter Two
1. Wace, Henry and William C, Piercy, p. 940, A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature, Publ.
John Murray (1911) London
2. Ferguson, Everett, Tertullian, A Lion Handbook, The History of Christianity, pp.267, 268, Editors: Tim
Dowley et al. Publ. Lion Hudson, PLC, Oxford (1977)
3. Wright, David F. A Lion Handbook, The History of Christianity, p 87, Editors:Tim Dowley et al. Publ.
Lion Hudson, PLC, Oxford (1977)
4. <http://www.island-of-freedom.com/TERTULL.HTM> [accessed 11 May, 2007]
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6. Ad Martyras, 1:3, p.4: Ante-Nicene Christian Library Translations of The Writings of the Fathers, The
Writings of Tertullian, Vol.1, Editors: Alexander Roberts, and James Donaldson, Publ. T&T Clark, (1869)
Edinburgh
7. Ad Martyras 1:4, p.5 (Op.cit.)
8. To His Wife, Bk.1, Ch. iii, p.282 (Op.cit.)
9. Apologeticus Vol. 1, Ch.V (40), p.123, Ante-Nicene Christian Library Translations of The Writings of the
Fathers, The Writings of Tertullian, (Op.cit.)
10. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (p.144), Vintage, Random House Group (1999) London
11. To His Wife, Tertullian, Bk. 1, Chap.1, p. 280
12. Ibid.
13. Pg. 287, Op.cit.
14. Apologeticus, Book V, 46, pg. 129,130
15. Bertrand, Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 351. George Allen and Unwin, (1946) London
16. A History of God, pp.145. (Op.cit)
17. The Writings of the Fathers, The Writings of Tertullian X11, On Female Dress, Bk.1, Ch. 1, pp.
304,305.

57
18. The Writings of the Fathers, 11 De Spectaculis, Ch.1:19, 20, pp. 26, 27
19. The Writings of the Fathers 1V Ad Scapulam: Ch.1:2, p. 47
20. Wace, p. 953, A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature, Publ. (Op.cit.)
21. Op.cit. p.952
22. The Fathers of the Church, General Introduction, vii. Vol.53 Saint Jerome, Dogmatic and Polemical
Works, Trans. Hritzu, John N., Editors: Joseph Deferrari et. al, Publ. The Catholic University of America
Press, Inc. (1965) Washington, D.C.
23. General Introduction xii, The Fathers (Op.cit.)
24. General Introduction xii, (Op.cit)
25. A History of Western Philosophy, p.347 (Op.cit.)
26. Introduction xv, The Fathers … (Op.cit.)
27. The Fathers … p. 5 (Op.cit)
28. Introduction xiv-xv, The Fathers (Op.cit)
29. A History of Western Philosophy, p.361 (Op.cit.)
30. Op.cit. p.361
31. Virginity is irreparably lost by sexual pleasure, voluntarily and completely experienced. "I tell you
without hesitation", writes St. Jerome in his twenty-second Epistole to St. Eustochium, n. 5 (P.L., XXII,
397) "that though God is almighty, He cannot restore a virginity that has been lost”
<http://www.newadvent.org/
cathen/15458a.htm> [accessed 23 April 2007]
32. A History of Western Philosophy, p.385
33. Russell: “Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two
different things; first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and secondly, why I do not think that
Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness”. Why I
am not a Christian, Lecture March 6, 1927, Battersea Town Hall, S. London. Publ. Routledge Classics, p.2
(2004) London
34. A History of God, p.144 (Op.cit.)
35. Ibid
36. The Fathers … p.5 (Op.cit)
37. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3007.htm>
38. The Fathers, Chap.1 (2), p.12 (Op.cit.)
39. Chap.1 (4) p.15, (Op.cit.)
40. Chap.1 (4) pp.15, 16 (Op.cit.)

58
41. Chap. 1 (9-17), pp.23-37 (Op.cit.)
42. Against Helvidius (20) p.39 (Op.cit.)
43. Against Helvidius (20) p. 41 (Op.cit.)
44. Against Helvidius (21), p. 42) (Op.cit)
45. Homily 57, Pg.125. The Fathers of the Church, Vol.41, Saint John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint
John The Apostle and the Evangelist, Homilies 48-88, Trans. Goggins, Sister Thomas Aquinas, Edit.
Joseph, Deferrari et. al, Publ. Fathers of the Church, Inc. (1960), New York, USA
46. Homily 63, pp.187-188. (Op. cit.)
47. The Works of Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter pp.114, 115, Edit. Norman Holmes Pearson, Publ. The
Modern Library, Random House, Inc. (1937) New York
48. Homily 61 pp.163 (Op.cit.)
49. Op.cit. 61, pp.151 ff.
50. The Scarlet Letter, p.123 (Op.cit.)
51. The Scarlet Letter, p.124 (Op. cit.)
52. A History of God, p.145 (Op.cit.)
53. Book 2, Chap. 2 (2) The Fathers of the Church, Vol.21, Saint Augustine Confessions, Writings of Saint
Augustine (Vol.5) Trans. Bourke, Vernon J, Edits. Joseph, Deferrari et al, Publ. The Catholic University of
America Press, Inc (1953), Washington, D.C.
54. Op. cit. pp. 213,214, Writings of Saint Augustine, Book 8 Chap.7 (17)
55. P.222, Book Eight, Ch.2, (26, 27) Op.cit.
56. Ibid.
57. Fathers of the Church, p. 3.
58. Op.cit. pp. 4, 5
59. Op.cit. p.17
60. Op.cit. p.143, Holy Virginity, Chap.1
61. P.90, The Rise of Western Christendom, Triumph and Diversity AD 200-1000, 2nd Edition, Blackwell
Pub 1966, Oxford
62. Op.cit. p.144
63. Chap. 26, Enchiridion; or on Faith, Hope, and Love
<http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augenchiridion/enchiridiontoc.html>
64. Op.cit. p.56

59
65. City of God, Book X111, Ch.13, p. 421, Augustine, Trans. Marcus Dods: Great Books of the Western
World, editors, Mortimer J. Adler, et al. Pub. Robert P. Gwinn, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952)
Chicago, Univ. of Chicago
66. Eusebius: The Ecclesiastical History Book 11, V1 .v.1-V11, pg. 29. Trans. J.E.L.Oulton and
H.J. Lawlor, Publ.William Heinemann Ltd., Harvard University Press, MCMLV11.
67. Brown, pgs.213, 214, The Rise of Western Christendom
68. Brown pg.81, Op.cit.
69. Brown, Op.cit.
70. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, pg.395
71. Op.cit. 398-399
72. A quote about Luther, probably from Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther. Publ. Abingdon Press, New
York.
73. Item 5 from 24 July 2007 email correspondence to writer from Prof. Norman Vance, Programme
Convenor, for Lit. Relg. and Phil. Course in Hums. Dept., Sussex Univ. Brighton
74. George Eliot’s Translation of Feuerbach: The Essence of Christianity, p.164, Publ. New York (1957)
Harper
75. Summa Theologica, Part 1 of Second Part, Q. 81, Art.1, Aquinas 11,Vol.18 pp.163, 164, Publ. Great
Books … Western World.
See also Aquinas by Brian Davies, pp.126, 127, Publ. Continuum (2002) London
76. Op.cit. p.163
77. Op.cit. p.164
78. Vol. 1, Part 1 of Second Part Q. 30, Art.2, p. 749, Publ. Great Books … Western World
79. Part. 1 of Second Part Q73, ART 5, p. 123 (Op.cit)
80. Ibid
81. Book Six Chaps. 22, 23, Divine Institutes: The Fathers of the Church, Lactantius and The Divine
Institutes, Books I-VII, (pp. 452,453,458,459). Trans. McDonald, Sister Mary Francis, Publ. The Catholic
University of America Press (1964), Washington, D.C.
82. Ante-Nicene Christian Library Translations of The Writings of the Fathers, Vol. XIV, The Writings of
Methodius, pp. 4,5, Editors: Roberts Alexander and James Donaldson, Publ. T&T Clark (1869) Edinburgh
83. P.13. (Op.cit.)
84. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals vii, p.199) (1887) Trans.
Francis Golffing, Publ. Doubleday Anchor (1956)

60
Chapter Three
1. Debra W. Haffner, The Really Good News: What the Bible Says About Sex
<http://www.siecus.org/religion/reli0001.html>[accessed 26 March, 2007]
2. Deferrari, Joseph, et. al: The Fathers of the Church, Vol.27, Saint Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and
other Subjects, p.147. Editors, Joseph, Deferrari et. al, Trans. Wilcox, Charles T., Charles T. Huegelmeyer,
et. al, Publ. Fathers of the Church, Inc. (1955), New York, USA
3. A History of God, pg. 92, 93
4. Haffner (Op.cit.)
5. Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, Heritage Edition,
1977, Publ. C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Inc., Charlotte, N.C, USA, and from The Jerusalem Bible, Reader’s
Edition, 1968, Publ. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York
6. Debra W. Haffner, (Op.cit.)
7. Trans. Betty Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Chronology x, pp.73, 74, 121, 122, 125,
275,174, Penguin (1974)
9. Passus ix, pp. 92, 93: Trans. A.V.C. Schmidt, Oxford University Press (1992)
9. Passus xx, p. 248 (Op. cit.)
10. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, p.100, Dorothy Sayers, p. 100, Penguin (1949)
11. Note, p.81. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri , Trans. John D. Sinclair 1 Inferno, Oxford University
Press (1939), London
12. Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte D’Arthur, Vol. 1, Book V111:Chap, 24, pp.345-346: Ed. Janet Cowen,
1969, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, London
13. Op.cit. Book X, Ch.88, p.187
14. Op. cit. Book XV111 – Ch.2, p.375
15. Op.cit. Book X1X – Ch. 7, p. 438
16. Book X1X – Ch. 9, p.445
17. Op.cit. Book XX1, Ch.9, p.523
18. Op.cit. Book XX1 – Ch. 5, p. 517
19. Op.cit. Book XX1 - Ch. 8, p.522
20. Op.cit. Book XX1 – Ch.10, p 525
21. Institutes of the Christian Religion, p.222, Vol. 1, Book II, Chap.1, Book iii, Chap. VII: Trans. John
Allen, Sixth American Edition, Publ. The Westminster Press, 1935, London
22. Calvin Commentaries, Marriage (4) p.357. The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XXIII, Trans. and
Editor Joseph Haroutunian, SCM Press Ltd (1958) London

61
23. Op.cit. p.358
24. Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther, pp.298, 299. Publ. Abingdon Press, New York. Also Luther’s
Works, Vol. 31, Career of the Reformer: 1, pp.5, 6. Editors Grimm, Harold J. et. al Publ. Muhlenberg Press
(1957) Philadelphia, USA
25. Op.cit. p.288
26. Op.cit. p.201
27. Op.cit. p.300
28. Milton, Paradise Lost, Edited by David Scott Kastan, pg. 134, Hackett Publ. Co., Inc. (2005)
Indianapolis, USA
29. Op.cit, p.256
30. Introduction xxxiv. Paradise Lost (op. cit.)
31. Op.cit., p.312
32. Intro. xxxvi, (Op.cit)
33. pp.19,20 Coleridge Poetical Works, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Oxford University Press, London, First
Publ. 1912
34. <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/coleridge.htm>[accessed 15, June 2007]
35. pp.330-335, Coleridge Poetical Works (Op.cit.)

Chapter Four
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, pg.1196, Editors, Cross and Livingstone, Third Edition,
Oxford University Press, 1997
2. Op.cit., pp.310-311
3. Ibid.
4. Op.cit. (Oxford Dictionary …, p. 311)
5. The Book of Common Prayer, p.308, Church of England, Ebury Press, 1992, Great Britain.
6. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p.1055
7. Op.cit., pp.1196ff.
8. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, pp.1196 ff.
9. Our Sexual Ethics, pg.102, Why I am not a Christian, Lecture, March 6, 1927, Battersea Town Hall, So.
London Publ. Routledge Classics (2004) London
10. Op.cit. pp. 106-107
11. Op.cit.
12. Op.cit.

62
13. Op.cit.
14. John Bunyan: Grace Abounding and The Chief of Sinners, Introduction xii.; Grace Abounding (8) pp.8,
9: Everyman’s Library, Publ. J.M. Dent and Son Ltd., London (1928)
15. Life and Death of Mr. Badman, p.153. (Op. cit.)
16. James, William (pg. 142) Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature Publishers: The
Modern Library, New York, 1902
17. James pg.150, 1st. para.; pg.154, 2nd. para. (Op.cit.)
18. Op.cit. pg.77 - 89

63