The Worm in the Apple
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No
Protestant, no Chinese and no Eskimo could possibly enjoy sex as much
as the sin-stricken Catholic.
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Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)
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I.
Unto
the pure all things are pure, says the poetess Sappho, and the apostle
Paul, of
all people, has quoted her with approval. In 424 BC. was the premiere
of Lysistrata. You should
read it to your spouse, when you are
alone with her. 26,000 people filled the amphitheater of Athens with
waves of
roaring laughter. Almost 700 years later Longos wrote a story about two
pubescent shepherds who began discovering their hormones. Surrounded by
their
animals who do “it” all the time, the kids somehow manage not to have a
clue
before we reach the last page. Very romantic, very charming, mildly
arousing –
your spouse might like it, too – but not so funny anymore. A sign of
the
progressing ages. These days hardcore pornography is proliferating on
our
desktops, but bawdy humor is on the retreat; I wonder why? In our porn
flicks
the couples fuck as if it is for the Olympics but barely utter a
memorable
phrase. Compare this with the work of the Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). It is still a seminal
goldmine for
lewd language; and his Lordship has dished it out with elegance and
wit. Our
presumptuous jargon of political correctness would have struck this
aristocrat
as the telltale sign of low breeding. Stable-boys who want to be kings.
In
1922, the postmaster general ordered to seize and burn a
shipload of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In
the end Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was "not
pornographic." At the time this
was
hailed as a landmark decision. But was it really? God forbid that a
book should
affect us as an aphrodisiac – in legalese: "dirt for dirt's
sake" (Judge
John M. Woolsey, 1936, in his
ruling
on James Joyce's Ulysses).
The legal definition of the word "obscene" is: "tending to
stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts" (Judge
John M. Woolsey).
Impure?
What’s impure about lust? And why this fly-fishing for legal
definitions in the
first place? What business is it for secular legislation to interfere
in my
privacy and enforce somebody else’s religious taboo? Especially if it
is not my taboo? “Prude” and
“pure” have
only one thing in common, the first letter.
Most
statues that have survived from antiquity are disfigured at their noses
and
penises. When Michelangelo (1475 – 1564)
unveiled his "David," the bigots threw stones at the statue and broke
off an arm; the repair marks are still visible. Northrop Frye has
observed that
Judaism, Christianity and Islam have descended from the same line of a “revolutionary
tradition,” which "has
tended to a good deal of prudery about the naked body, to iconoclasm,
and to a
rejection of spectacular art, especially when representational" (The
Great Code II:117). Moses'
law is listing 36 crimes as punishable by death. Half of these involve
sex,
including "the uncovering of one's nakedness" (Exodus 20.26, 28.42; Levi 18.6-19). A prudery that seems to go
with
revolutions everywhere. For the Marxists in Russia and China the
un-blurred
view at our genitals is just as anathema as it is for Puritans and
Ayatollahs,
or the American television. We cry "foul" should children catch a
glimpse of one inch of penis or the pubic area of a pussy. I heard
intelligent people
defending censorship for fear of having "kids carrying pornography
in
their satchels." I had to pinch
myself
to believe what I just heard. These days kids pack cigarettes, drugs
and
handguns; but, oh, beware of pornography! So what? The boys wank it off
over a
centerfold from Playboy, while girls manually explore their feelings
further
south under a glossy of Tom Cruise on the bedroom wall, and most of the
girls
do it already at an age when boys not even think of wanking.
Michelangelo had
to paint boobs on a young man, because for that scene in Paradise, he
couldn’t
get a female to model for his Eve. (I’ve always wondered what, on the
fresco,
Eve was doing before she reached for the apple: just look how the
naughty
Michelangelo has positioned the two.) When Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (971 – 1030) raided the temples at
Khajuraho,
the Islamic Jihadis encountered carved walls with figurines in
complicated
group positions, masturbating, giving blow jobs, shagging front and
aft.
Occasionally one of these sculptures is depicted averting its eyes at
the sight
of somebody penetrating a horse. The temple is a Kamasutra hewn in
stone. It
was too much for even the horniest of the Muslim Jihadis. The slaughter
in the
name of Allah was indiscriminate.
In
the West the renunciation of sexuality not only became the batch for
one’s
unhesitating availability to God – “there are some eunuchs, which
have made
themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake” (Matt. 19:3-12), as
Jesus used to put it – on the scale of Christian virtues the complete
disconnect from all sexual urges became the most significant of
any quality
required for leadership in the hierarchy of the medieval church. The
theologian
Origen went so far as doing a bit of DIY surgery on himself. But other
saints,
embroiled in their lifelong struggle with sexual fantasies, felt this
was
cheating, it made celibacy just too easy. So to make absolutely sure
that no
other cleric would ever follow Origen’s example, the cardinals in Rome
introduced a new election procedure. With the candidate hoisted up on a
special
chair, the electoral college passed single file underneath a strategic
gap in
the chair’s seating area. After a short and sharp glance at the not yet
holy
testicles, they pronounced that the new pope was going to be intact: “Testiculum
habet et bene pendente” (W. E.H. Lecky, 1838 – 1903, History of European Morals).
I am not sure whether
the historian here fell for an urban legend or whether the procedure
was
actually introduced to make sure that no other woman could become pope,
after
the true identity of Pope John VIII (855
– 858
AD.) had been discovered, as she went into labor on the stairway
to the
Lateran Church. “Clearly the broad
we merely imagine is worse than the one living next to us,” said the “Doctor Seraphicus,” St.
Bonaventure of
Bagnoregio (1221 – 1274),
a
sexually particularly screwed up specimen of catholic sainthood. He
watched
with approval a nun sucking off the scabs from a leper and getting an
orgasm –
pardon, a vision of Christ of course – when swallowing. Having his own
mother
sitting next to him without a chaperone made him break a sweat; perhaps
he was
afraid, or had reason to be afraid, the old woman might jump him for a
last
hurrah. And today, in the 21st century, there are convents in Italy
where the
nuns take showers only if dressed in an ankle-long shirt, so as not to
offend
their divine bridegroom with their immodesty. As if God can’t look
through the
linen. And why shouldn’t he: “Don’t you think,” says the Benedictine, Bernard of
Clairveaux (1090 – 1153),
that “from time to time even
God would like to lay his eyes on something pretty?” The dog-collared celibate breaking the
wafer knows the feeling, but
the only pretty thing at his disposal is the altar-boy swinging the
smoking
censer. Abuse is still endemic. Not everybody has an escape into
virtual
orgasms like the beguine St. Agnes Blannbekin.
In
1315 she imparted to her confessor that “from childhood on she was
in a
habit to profusely weep at the feast of Circumcision, touched to the
heart that
Christ had condescended so early to suffer and spend his blood. It made
her
wonder what became of Jesus’ foreskin. And one day she felt it on her
tongue,
like the skin of an egg, full of great sweetness, and she swallowed it.
Then
she felt the little skin again, and swallowed it once more. And she did
so a
good hundred times. And it was revealed to her, that on the Day of
Resurrection
the prepuce was also resurrected. So great was the sweetness when she
swallowed
this little skin, that in all her limbs and in all the muscles of her
limbs she
felt a sweet transformation” (The Lord’s Prepuce, chapter XXXVII).
Yes –
these sweet transformations. (And now I have of course forgotten what I
wanted
to say.) By now, the Church has decreed that anyone writing or speaking
of the
Holy Prepuce is to be excommunicated. Meditations on the foreskin may
wander
off to – you know where. So, no wafer for me.
Always
concerned to fend off the temptation of information,
the Holy Office has never tired to condemn every book “which deals
with
fleshly passion,” because
“no
other danger is greater” (Cardinal Merry del Val, Palazzo del S. Uffizio, 1929). What
earned
Voltaire a secure position on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was initially not his anticlerical
griping, but the
reputation of his unpatriotic poem La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) for being comically
pornographic.
The
first book on how to have sex, marital sex of course, I
ever read, was a product of the late 50s. The Joy of Sex was still a thing of the future. The book
was
allegedly authored by a pair of gynecologists who in great detail
dwelled on
the anatomy but mentioned orgasms merely as a side effect, pleasant to
have but
inessential (for her, not the man of
course) and “if you absolutely
must, there is nothing to object to, to see your wife without a stitch
on her
body” (the guy was advised to
keep on his
jim-jams). There were long sections about sexual perversions, “everything
is allowed that is leading to the child,”
and both doctors seemed to agree “that there is really a lot
to learn
from moral theology.” I was too
young then
to pay any attention whether there was an “Imprimatur” on the title
leaf. But,
believe it or not, on the dust jacket the book was hailed as a
liberation.
Women, in a whisper, began to speak of orgasms. An exotic affair by
now, after
1,600 years of Catholic sex-education. Prior to Jesus, the ancient
moralists
still insisted that screwing had a function in the general scheme of
things, it
was the glue of society. They took for granted that a vigorous
discharge of
"generative heat,"
accompanied by sensations of physical pleasure in both sexes, was sine
qua non
of conception. Conception and passion could not be disjoined. In the
year when
my mother wrapped me in a bundle and we left the maternity ward, things
were
different; only the smallest percentage of women living in the
Christian West,
had ever heard of orgasms, let alone ever had one! This included my
mother.
So
why has the demonizing of sex been allowed to pull so much
weight in Christian circles? What has done more harm to mankind? The
Bible, the
Koran, or the Kamasutra?
II.
The
Shepherd of Hermas
has by a hair’s
breadth missed to become canonical. The book is included in many of the
ancient
collections of the New Testament –
“kainê diathêkê” – a term that
came up the first time in 192 AD.; Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have it included as well.
In a parallel Universe the Shepherd
may even be the only holy
book of those extraterrestrial Christians; and for good reason. The
book is a
kind of ancient Pilgrim’s Progress, its
author was what theologians in their specialized jargon use to call an
“adoptionist.” For Hermas, Jesus was the chosen son because he had been
"walking
honorably in holiness and chastity."
Salvation by grace was not Hermas’ cup of tea. Instead “all
men who
are able to do right shall not cease to practice good works; for it is
useful
and will receive a reward” (The Shepherd, 5th parable).
The
world of the Shepherd is a
place
where the church was under the sponsorship of rich patrons. Their
contacts with
the pagan neighborhood provided protection and prestige. Predictably
the mind
of the influential Christian was torn between the demands of solidarity
to his
religion and the concerns for his day to day business. Jesus came from
a rough
neighborhood and his particular pet hate were the wellborn and the
rich; he
didn’t mince his words: “It is easier for a camel to go
through the
eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mt. 19:24; Mk.
10:25; Lk. 18:25).
But the
underprivileged in the community, like Hermas, couldn’t help noticing
how even
the pillars of the church were utterly absorbed with their concerns for
wealth
and success, albeit seasoned with a twang of bad conscience. I think it
was Ortega
y Gasset who said, that the virtues we do not possess are those that
mean most
to us. However there was one thing about the Christians, that was duly
noted
and respected even among the gentiles. Galen, arguably the greatest
medical
capacity of the millennium, was struck by the “sexual austerity of
the
Christian communities.”
Hermas
(c.75 – c.155 AD.), “patient,
not given to indignation, always
with a smile,” was no simple
soul. Although
in bondage, he was an educated man who served in an urban household. He
felt
disturbed by sexual attraction to his own mistress. She was a good
Christian
woman, but thought nothing of asking her slave – Hermas – to help her
out of
the bath when she was naked! The fight for continence under this
condition
became a heroic act of faith.
After
his manumission, Hermas
inherited a well-trimmed little vineyard, a property in the residential
area
just outside of Rome’s city limit. It became the setting for his book.
The
idyllic genre is the traditional vehicle for erotic imagery; Hermas
used it as
the counterfoil to stage his vision of a smallholder’s bourgeois
morality: "Keep
purity, and let not a thought enter your heart of another's wife, or of
fornication, or of any such like evil deeds (sic!);
for
in so doing you are
committing a great sin. So remember your own wife always, and you shall
never
go wrong.” If after a divorce the
wife “repents
and desires to return to her husband,” the
husband who receives her not, “brings great sin upon himself; since one who has sinned and
repents must
be received, yet not often; for there is but one repentance for the
servants of
God, and therefore the
husband
ought not to marry again for the sake of her repentance” (Shepherd,
Mandate IV).
Less
than twenty years later,
Hermas was still alive when a new arrival at Rome’s Christian
community, a
certain Marcion of Sinope (85 – 169 AD.)
set out to reform the church.
It
was a matter of urgency. Jewish
blacksmiths in Palestine had begun to hold back weaponry from their
orders by
the Roman armory. After a period of preparations the sudden outbreak of
Bar
Kokhba’s insurrection took the Romans completely by surprise. The
insurgents
proclaimed a sovereign Jewish state. Emperor Hadrian sent in his
generals and
in 136 AD., after a drawn out campaign of torched earth, the sedition
was
finally extinguished. For a brief period Jewish religion lost its
status as “religio
licta,” a legal cult (Dio, Epitome
IXIX, 10-14), and for this the synagogue is still laying a curse
on
Emperor Hadrian. For a Christian this could mean only one thing. It was
time to
sever whatever connection there was, and once and for all draw the line
between
him and Judaism. Marcion was the man to do the drawing.
He
wrote a book, the Antithesis.
But his book was way too radical. Marcion enunciated
Jesus as the harbinger of a supreme but previously unknown deity of
compassion
and mercy, vastly different from the stern Demiurge, the creator of
good and
evil known from the Septuagint.
Marcion wrote: "All that the Good God is asking of us in
order
to escape from the dominion of the Demiurge, is faith in His love.
Jesus has
emancipated us from the legalistic requirements of Judaism." Therefore Christians should not allow
themselves to be soiled by the teachings of the rabbis and their holy
book.
Yet
the older members in Rome’s
congregation begged to differ. They had not forgotten the days when the
Septuagint had been their only reference to anything that was remotely
resembling “scripture.” It contained the prophesies they quoted to
confirm their
faith, and Marcion’s dismissal of the Old Testament, in their eyes, was merely an
opportunistic ruse in
order to weather the political tide. It didn’t chime well with these
seasoned
confessors. Much better received was Marcion’s edition of the Pauline
letters.
It added shape to the orthodox canon of the Church.
“Marcion’s
prefaces to the letters of Paul were retained in several versions of
the Latin
Vulgate Bible, and many of his proposed emendations have turned up in
numerous
surviving manuscripts, showing that his legacy was intimately
integrated at
various levels throughout the surviving Church, affecting the
transmission as
well as the selection of the final canonical texts” (Bruce Metzger,
The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and
Significance 94-9).
Marcion
agreed with Paul’s opposition to the institution of
marriage. When we are told that Christianity is all about “love,”
loving your
neighbor, loving your enemy, holding out the other cheek, this sort of
thing,
they usually don’t tell us what exactly they mean with the term “love.”
The
apostle says: “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and
though I
give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing” (1
Cor. 13).
“Charity!” Not quite the same as “love,” isn’t
it? Although Paul seems to understand that there is little charity
without
empathy. So what has Paul to say in the cases where “love,” the real
thing,
actually matters, the love for your spouse, your family, your friends?
Paul is
unequivocal: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (I
Cor. 7:1).
“I say therefore to the unmarried and
the widows, it is good for them if they abide as they are.” The next sentence then is the most
degrading thing
anybody has ever said about sex and marriage: “Nevertheless,
to avoid
fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have
her own
husband.” You heard him right.
Marriage for
Paul is merely the piss pot for our physical needs. But perhaps all
this is
just a misunderstanding, Paul may simply not get the drift what his
boss is
saying? Well what does Jesus say?
“If
any man come to me, and hate not his father, and
mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, even his own
life,
he cannot be my disciple.” (Lk.
14;26).
A statement worthy of a suicide bomber. And regarding sex Jesus is even
more
explicit, again combining it with a slur against the institution of
lawful
marriage: “There are some eunuchs, which have made themselves
eunuchs for
the kingdom of heaven's sake” (Matt. 19:3-12), for in the resurrection
they
neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God
in
heaven (Mt.
22:22-32). Paul hadn’t got it wrong after all.
Consequently Marcion made continence mandatory for the admission to the
Eucharist, which in his congregation apparently excluded the married
couples. A
schism tore apart the Church of Rome. Marcion was asked to hand in his
membership card.
Another
Christian Taliban picked up where Marcion had left.
In 168 AD., a certain Tatian published his tirade Against the
Greeks. He called for tearing
down the temples and
destroying the statues, and he denounced a popular icon of Hellenic
culture,
the Greek poetess Sappho (631 –
572 BC.).
He called her names and said she was a "love-crazed fornicator who
even
sings about her own licentiousness."
In 380 AD., Bishop Gregory Nazianzen (330
– 390 AD.), a man I once used to give credit for his learning
and
culture, put his parishioners to work and had them collect all the
copies of
Sappho's work they could find in his diocese. He burned the lot (Girolamo Cardan, 1501 – 1576). Manuscripts that had
escaped the holy arsonist
fell in neglect and the papyrus was recycled for tax receipts and the
wrappings
of mummies. But 700 years later, in 1073, according to Joseph Justus
Scaliger (1540 – 1609), there was
still enough left of
Sappho's work to send a refreshing breeze through the stuffy scriptoria
in the
monasteries. So the prudish Pope Gregory VII and his counterpart in
Constantinople joined forces and simultaneously burned the remains, it
is
stated, "in celebration of the reunification of the two Churches." The new found union lasted eight years.
One
very incomplete manuscript escaped, and surfaced 300
years later in Florence, together with the notes of an admirer from the
1st
century. In 1497, in the backyard of Medici's library, another fucked
up
radical, the self-appointed champion of public mores and the poor,
Savonarola (1452 – 1498) stood
barefoot next to a blazing
fire. He hollered up to the people in the library to toss him the
manuscript. A
torch could fly through the window, so the intimidated librarian parted
with
the last remnant of Sappho's work. Since then we have only the quotes
from
lexicographers and grammarians and the occasional find on a mummy
wrapper. I
don’t know what this has done to improve the plight of the paupers, but
I do
know that only months after the incident, Savonarola, was burned alive
as a
heretic. He still didn’t wear shoes.
III.
In 380 AD.,
Christianity was no
longer a movement of illegal revolutionaries hiding from the police and
sending
their people on suicide missions into the arena. (Quite literally, the
objective was to receive the “crown of martyrdom.” The Circumcellions did everything to
provoke a hostile reaction, not
unlike modern suicide bombers.) The constitutional coup from February
27 had
made it not only legal to be a Christian, it decreed Catholicism to be
the only legal religion in
the empire.
From now on the formula of Nicea defined who received the protection of
the law
and who didn’t: “According to the apostolic teaching and the
doctrine
of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the father, Son and
Holy
Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the
followers of
this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians.” Christians who had the temerity of
begging to differ, “since
they are foolish madmen,” were to
be
branded “with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not
presume
to give their gatherings the name of churches” (Codex
Theodosius XVI.1.2).
When John Chrysostomus
preached his
sermon On Virginity in 382
AD., one
can’t help sensing the giddy excitement of a man who envisions the
human race
on the threshold to a new age: “The things of the
resurrection now
stand at the door. The days for our artifices and buildings, cities and
households come to a close, men and women will soon breathe in the
tremendous
hush of God’s presence. Stepping
on the enamel-green grass of Paradise, with Easter-palms fanning the
air, we
shall live among the patriarchs, converse with the prophets, walk in
the
company of the apostles and meet the martyrs, the mighty men of power.”
Marcion’s
extremism was
rejected, but the underlying principle lived on in the Christian
liturgy. When
the service had progressed to the Eucharist, the un-baptized were
herded out of
the building. For the believers this was the signal to bring their
offerings to
the altar and to participate in the “Mystical Supper.” Bishops and clergy first, then a lineup
of the
unmarried or widowed. And only then, significantly last of all, the
married
laity was permitted to the altar. The custodians of dogma knew exactly
what
they were doing. Since the council of Nicea in 325 AD., there had been
repeated
demands on the married cleric to abstain from cohabitation with his
wife, even
if he had received holy orders only after his marriage. The Abbot
Paphnutius,
good man, protested against the imposition. But his protest was soon
forgotten.
While in the Jewish communities the rabbinate rose to preeminence and
accepted
marriage as a near compulsory criterion of living the life of wisdom,
the
leaders of the Christian communities moved in the exact opposite
direction.
Access to leadership became identified with near-compulsory celibacy.
During
the 3rd century the
gentile legislator recognized for the first time the wedlock between
slaves;
Emperors styled themselves as guardians of private morality. Suicide,
once the
batch of libertine independence, came to be branded as an unnatural
“derangement.” To set themselves apart, the Christians seemed to have
only
their sexual discipline left. “A man who divorces his wife admits
that he is
not even (sic!) able to govern a woman,” said John Chrysostomus (347 – 407 AD.).
After
the February revolution
the government of the new Christian state turned on the soft targets
first.
Already in 314 AD., only weeks after the last and most severe of the
anti-Christian persecutions had ended, the Council of Ankara had
considered as
the most pressing business to exclude all homosexuals from receiving
the
Eucharist. In Europe, homosexuality had never been a civil crime
before. Now
Constantine’s sons became the first to write capital punishment for
queens into
the law: “Every person who condemns a man’s body to acting the part
of a
woman, shall be burned” (Codex Theodosianus IX, 7:3). In 390 AD. this was no
longer an
empty threat. The Roman populace fell silent at the novel sight of male
prostitutes burning alive on slow smoldering faggots. The Byzantine
Emperor
Justinian was a firm believer that the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah was
an
example of how God is going to deal with cities that allow the queens
to live
among the denizens. He really feared it could happen again. So he wrote
into
the law that "because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes,
and
pestilences" (Novellae
77, 538 AD.). When in 543 AD. a plague swept through
Constantinople, the
terrified Justinian made it known that "there will be no relaxation
of
enquiry and correction so far as this matter is concerned" (Novellae 144, 544 AD.). Justinian ordered the
arrest of
every gay man who refused to repent in order to receive "extreme
punishments." First they cut off
his
testicles. Then sharp reeds were thrust into the penis before the man
was
dragged naked through a jeering public to the stake, where he was
burned alive.
Even members of the clergy, Bishops like Isaiah of Rhodes and Alexander
of
Diospolis were mutilated and dragged in agony through the streets
before a
frenzied mob.
As
often in such cases, the law
was a pretext for multitasking: Procopius in his Anecdota says that slaves were forced to falsely
accuse
Justinian's political enemies, and that the streets were filled with
mutilated
and humiliated victims of his fanaticism. In Spain the king of the
Goths, King
Kindasvinth, issued an edict against the "execrable moral
depravity" in 650 AD. It raised
the
bar even further. Not only were those caught in the act, ordered to
repent or
suffer excommunication and castration. The law also treated the
convicted
homosexual as legally dead, and allowed his wife to remarry and his
children to
immediately inherit the criminal’s property. King Egica at the 16th
Council of
Toledo, in 693 AD., added flogging and disfigurement to the penalty of
castration and exile.
Apparently
there was a grey
area where the law could interpret taking the partner “a tergo” as an act of sodomy, even if it was not
homosexual
and penetration went into the vagina. That seems long ago. However,
should in a
motel in Maine, in the year of the Lord 2004, some snoop spot you doing
it
doggy style with your own wife, it still could get you booked for "sodomy," should the peeping tom call the cops.
IV.
Chrysostomus knew what
he was
fighting for: a new kind of cultural identity, a kind of all-Christian
theme
park here and now. Previously, the adolescent gentile feeling the urge
could
take a cold bath or go to the local brothel. At the entrance you
purchased from
the mama-san a set of bronze tokens, each in detail depicting the
particular
service you expected: missionary position, doggy style, a hand-job, a
mouthful
of cock, you name it. You then handed the token to the prostitute and
she, at
closing hour, would return to the mama-san all the tokens she had
collected in
a day and receive her fee minus the proprietor’s percentage. Should the
drippings of a customer lead to consequences, there were methods to
effect a
miscarriage. Girding tightly the abdomen accompanied by a pessary
soaked in
hellebore and oils of common rue was pretty popular; doctors also
prescribed to
swallow birthwort and surgeons kept their curettes ready. If all that
failed,
there were ways and institutions to dispose of the unwanted baby.
The
adolescent Christian male
on the other hand was herded to the altar before he even could reach
puberty.
Lawful wedlock became to be considered as the antidote for sexual
temptation.
Especially women, it was hoped, would be disciplined by early marriage
and by
the insinuation that the piercing gaze of God was penetrating into the
most
intimate recesses of the bedchamber. Nakedness had become a problem.
Chrysostomus
chastised
aristocratic ladies for exposing their pampered flesh before the eyes
of the
entire train of their retainers. Hermas’ mistress still had thought
nothing of
been seen by her slave dressed only in her jewelry. He was just a
slave. To
have him look at her naked body meant even less to her as it means to
us to be
looked at by our pets when we step on the scales in the bathroom. In
gentile
society, in the public baths, in the arena, at the sports, it was the
indifferent
deportment in the nude that marked you as a member of your class. Now
even the
scanty dress of the poor was thought to create distressing fantasies.
But then
things began to change. In the 5th century, the master’s
body was
swathed in uniform, a heavy, close-fitting and many-layered dress, with
stitched on panels that signaled position and rank and depicted scenes
from the
gospel and the portraits of wife and children. Should the need occur
for a
change of costume, or for a dip in the pool, trained valets were ready
to veil
the scene behind curtains and portable screens. It added to the
mystique of the
master’s position. The higher your rank the better you were protected
from
profane curiosity.
Our
sexuality became the
intensely debated focus not just for lewd fantasies. This was a big
thing, the
root for the fateful drive to marry and produce children and thus
perpetuate a
society that on every Sunday confessed to the belief in the imminent
end of the
world. It even affected the common practice of charity. In the 4th and
5th
century the laity preferred to give alms rather to the monks, the
“ceremonial
poor,” whose prayers were known to be effective, than to the noisy and
repulsive lot begging at the entrance to the basilicas.
V.
People who adopted the
life of
a monk or virgin were seen to anticipate the dawn of man’s true nature,
getting
“ready to receive the Lord of the Angels.”
Admirers did not doubt that the monk, as a “lonely one,” had recaptured a touch of the original
mystery and
majesty of man. The monk impersonated Adam in his single-hearted
worship of God
before his fall. The barren and asocial landscape of the desert was
seen as a
distant reflection of Paradise, the first and true homeland of the
human race,
before marriage, greed, and labor had robbed Adam and Eve of their
serene
majesty. The life of the monk mirrored the life of the angels on earth,
and
from the desert he brought with him the peculiar smell of unwashed
holiness,
the lynx-effect of sainthood.
In
many cases it is difficult
to draw the line between asceticism and profound neurosis. Sylvia Plath
found
herself institutionalized because to her “it seemed so silly to wash
my
clothes and my hair one day when I would have to wash again the next.
It made
me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for
all and be
through with it.”
By
the middle of the 4th
century monastic settlements began recruiting the very young. To keep
the
heritage together the well-to-do dedicated their surplus of children to
the
service of God. These adolescent monks and nuns did not simply vanish
behind
the monastic walls. Years later, they tended to reappear as members of
a new
clerical elite. The monastery was the first institution to offer a
Christian
education based exclusively on liturgy and the Bible, something very
similar to
the kind of instruction into the Kor