The Worm in Eve’s Apple

 

In the esteem of the ancients, Sappho of Lesbos (631 – 572 BC) was second only to Homer. Sappho introduced a personal voice and genuine intimacy. "We shall enjoy sex,” she wrote, “as for those finding fault, may they suffer silliness and sorrow! Panta kathara tois katharois, unto the pure all things are pure." Stung by this kind of purity the Christian Taliban Tatian (110 – 180 AD) called the poetess a "sex-addicted fornicator who is making a spectacle of her debauchery." It was the opening salvo of a relentless campaign.

Girolamo Cardan (1501 – 1576) says Bishop Gregory Nazianzen (330 – 390 AD), a man I once used to give credit for learning and culture, had his parishioners collect all the copies of Sappho's work they could lay their hands on and burned the lot. Yet seven hundred years later, says Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540 – 1609), there was still enough left of her work, for Pope Gregory VII and his colleague in Constantinople to burn the remains in “celebration of the reunification of the two Churches." The union lasted just eight years. A last, incomplete manuscript escaped the holy arsonists and surfaced in the Laurentian Library in Florence. Savonarola (1452 – 1498), another Christian Taliban, stoked with it a blazing fire in the library’s backyard. Since then 270 lines, gleaned from the commentaries of ancient grammarians, is all that is left of once nine volumes in the Great Library of Alexandria. The Catholic Church has continued censoring every book “which deals with fleshly passion,” ever since.

In the 20th century, after nine million fallen in the trenches, and fifty million perished from the Spanish flu, there was still “no other danger greater” than this. “After all,” said Cardinal Marry del Val with the chutzpah of a rabbi, “lately even civil governments use preventive censorship to suppress publications to protect the wellbeing of the public. This stands to show how well it corresponds with true liberty” (Palazzo del S. Uffizio, Festa del S. Cuore di Gesu 7th of June, 1929). The case the cardinal was referring to, was the impounding and burning of a newly published novel under Comstock’s "Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use." The book was the Ulysses by James Joyce.

The case went to court and Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the novel was "not pornographic." This was hailed as a landmark decision. But was it really? What is wrong with a book affecting us as an aphrodisiac – in legalese: "dirt for dirt's sake" (Judge John M. Woolsey)?

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). Perhaps before we discuss impurities, somebody should explain to me what “sexually pure” thoughts are supposed to be? Why this fly-fishing for legal definitions, which effectively enforce a purely religious taboo under a constitution, meant to separate state and church? At the root of all Christian and Islamic iconoclasms and prudery lies Moses' law, listing 36 capital crimes, half of which involving sex, including "the uncovering of one's nakedness" (Exodus 20: 26, 28: 42; Levi 18: 6-19). It made it acceptable to disfigure sculptures of the naked body. 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. For his Eve in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo had to paint boobs on a young man, because in the Rome of the popes, he couldn’t get a female to model for him. (I’ve always wondered what Eve was doing in the painting, before she got distracted and reaches for the apple. Just look, how the naughty Michelangelo has positioned the two in the picture.) Even now – or should I say especially now – the un-blurred view at our genitalia on public television is just as anathema as it is for Puritans and Ayatollahs, or the American broadcast. Not that religion per se is opposed to the celebration of sex and the naked body. The walls of the Hindu temples at Khajuraho, are carved with figurines in complicated positions, masturbating, giving blow jobs, shagging front and aft. One of these sculptures is averting the eyes at the sight of somebody penetrating a horse. The temple is a Kamasutra hewn in stone.

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, crack and handguns; but, oh, beware of pornography! So what? We cry "foul" should a boy catch a glimpse on a shaven pussy and wank it off over the centerfold in Playboy, while girls manually explore their feelings further south under a glossy of Tom Cruise pinned over their beds. Most girls start at an age when boys not even think of wanking. “Prude” and “pure” have only one thing in common: the first letter.

The renunciation of sexuality became the most significant of all qualities required for leadership in the Catholic Church. The theologian Origen went so far as castrating himself. His colleagues felt this was cheating. It made celibacy just too easy. And when, before everybody’s eyes, Pope John VIII (855 – 858 AD.) went into labor on the stairway to the Lateran Church, the Roman cardinals introduced a new election procedure. The candidate was hoisted up on a special chair with a strategic gap underneath. After passing single file underneath the chair to inspect the holy balls, the cardinals would give their verdict: “Testiculum habet et bene pendente” (W. E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals).

As I speak, there are still convents in Italy where the nuns take showers only dressed in an ankle-long shirt, so as not to offend the divine bridegroom with their immodesty. As if God can’t look through the linen. And why shouldn’t he: “Don’t you think,” said St. 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 at the altar knows the feeling, but the only pretty thing at his disposal is the altar boy. It really shouldn’t surprise anybody that child abuse is still endemic in the Catholic clergy. The “fire of the loins” never ceases and “the broad we merely imagine is worse than the one standing next to us” (St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, 1221 – 1274). Not everybody has an escape into virtual orgasms like St. Agnes Blannbekin.

In 1315, Agnes imparted to her confessor that since childhood she had wondered, “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. So great was the sweetness, when she swallowed this little skin, that in all her limbs she felt a sweet transformation” (The Lord’s Prepuce, chapter XXXVII). Oh yes, these sweet transformations – – – . (And now of course I completely forgot what I wanted to say.)

The first book I read on how to have sex, marital sex of course, was a product of the late 50s. The Joy of Sex was still a thing of the future. The book generously gave permission to look at your naked wife “if you absolutely must,” but the man should better keep his jim-jams on. Large sections were about “sexual perversions,” meaning anything that is not “leading to the child,” and the two coauthors seemed to agree, “that there is really a lot to learn from moral theology.” Believe it or not, on the dust jacket the book was hailed as a “liberation.” After a millennium of Catholic sex-education, women, in a whisper, began to speak of orgasms again. When my mother broke her water, things were still different; only a small percentage of women in the Christian West had heard of orgasms, let alone ever had one! This included my mother.

So what has done more harm to mankind? The Bible, the Koran, or the Kamasutra?

Way back in the second century AD, the book by a slave, the Shepherd of Hermas (75 – 155 AD), was the most popular of all Christian books, a kind of ancient Pilgrim’s Progress. Despite his subservient status, Hermas was an educated man. He felt uncomfortable when his mistress, a good Christian woman herself, thought nothing of asking him – her slave – to help her out of the bath dressed only in her jewelry. Him looking at her naked body meant less to her as it means to us when our pets see us in the bathroom. To remain continent under this condition became for Hermas a heroic act of faith. I think it was Ortega y Gasset who said, that the virtues we do not possess are those that mean most to us. In an era where even the emperors began styling themselves as guardians of private and public morals and the secular legislator had recognized the legality of marriages between slaves, the nude statue of Venus at the entrance to the public baths assumed a new role as guardian of public morals, causing the wind to blow underneath the robes of adulterous ladies. There were of course still instances of the old frivolities. Saint Jerome once “saw a married couple from the very dregs of the suburb.”

“The man had already buried twenty wives, and the woman twenty-two husbands. Now they were united to each other, as each believed for the last time. Great curiosity prevailed to see who of the two veterans would live to bury the other. The husband triumphed and walked before the bier of his often-married wife, amid a great concourse of people from all quarters, with garland and palm-branch, scattering spelt as he went along among a cheering crowd like a victorious gladiator” (Jerome Letters CXXIII: 10). So there was something that could set apart the Christian from common morality, and it was duly noted and respected in the Gentile neighborhood. Galen, the physician, was struck by the “sexual austerity of the Christian communities.”

For Hermas life had a happy ending in store; he was released from bondage and inherited a well-trimmed little vineyard. It became the setting for 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” (The Shepherd, Mandate IV). He was still around, when a visitor from the Black Sea arrived in Rome, the Bishop Marcion of Sinope (85 – 169 AD).

It was the year when Bar Kokhba’s insurrection in Palestine had ended in defeat and the Jewish religion, at least for now, was losing its status as “religio licta,” a legal cult (Dio, Epitome IXIX: 10-14). For a Christian this could mean only one thing. It was time to sever whatever ties there were to Judaism. Marcion took it upon himself to do just that. In his Antithesis, a polemic against the Jewish Bible, he wrote: "Jesus has emancipated us from the legalistic requirements of Judaism," and Christians should not allow themselves to be soiled by the teachings of the rabbis. With the seasoned confessors in Rome this didn’t chime well. They had not yet forgotten the days when the Septuagint was still their only reference to anything resembling “scripture.” Much better received was Marcion’s Apostolicon, the earliest collection of the letters of St. Paul. 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 the term “love” is supposed to mean. The apostle has spelled it out for us: “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!” So what has Paul to say in the cases where “love” actually matters, the real thing, the love for your spouse? The urges and temptations of recreational sex? 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. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” You heard him right. Marriage, the foundation of our family values, the cornerstone of the economical and social alliances in a patriarchy, for Paul it is merely the piss-pot of our physical needs. And when it came to homosexuality Paul went positively ballistic.

He fulminated against men who "leave the natural use of the woman, and burn in their lust one toward another" (Rom. 1: 27), and against "women who change the natural use into that which is against nature" (Rom. 1: 26), which can mean anything from non-conventional positions to masturbating and employing a dildo. He explicitly condemned the “malakoi,” men who are the receiving party during anal intercourse, and the “arsenokoitai,” men who penetrate the partner during anal intercourse (I Cor. 6: 9-10 and I Tim. 1: 9-10). "Koitai" means "to lie with"; "arseno" could be a derivative of the Ionic “arsen,” meaning, "man, receiving semen." Whatever it meant, Paul was unambiguously against. Christianity is just not the place to look for a haven, if your sexual orientation strays from the narrow path.

But perhaps all this was a misunderstanding; perhaps Paul simply didn’t get the drift of what his boss was really saying? Well what does Jesus say?

He, too, is explicit in his condemnation of sex and he, too, combines 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” (Mt. 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). This was the big thing. Every Sunday the Christians congregated to welcome in their prayers the imminent end of the world. How do you reconcile this with the fateful drive to marry and produce children, with family values, and with virtually everything that is good and decent in a life before death? You don’t! Jesus rejected any man coming to him who didn’t “hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, even his own life," a statement worthy of a Mujahid with Semtex strapped to his chest. "No man,” Jesus said, “putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 14: 26; 9: 62).

So, there was no misunderstanding and Marcion only drew the logical conclusion when he made continence mandatory for the admission to the Eucharist, effectively excluding the married. The reception was mixed; by asking Marcion to hand in his membership card, the Catholic Church entered on her historical path of hypocrisy, condemning the man, but tacitly enunciating his principles in the Christian liturgy. Sexual mores provided the grounds for resounding acts of excommunication. To celebrate the “Mystical Supper,” the congregation lined up with the bishop and the clerics first, followed by the unmarried or widowed. Only then, significantly last of all, the married laity was permitted to the altar. The pressure increased on married clerics to abstain from cohabitation with their wives. A celibate with impeccable credentials, the Abbot Paphnutius, good man, protested against the imposition at the Council of Nicene. His protest was ignored. Instead only weeks after the end of the last and most severe of the anti-Christian persecutions, the patriarchs at the Synod of Ankara considered as their most pressing business the exclusion of homosexuals from the Eucharist.

Accordingly the sons of Emperor Constantine wrote 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 God dealing with cities that allow the queens to live. He wrote it 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 snipped off his testicles and then thrust sharp reeds into the penis before the man was dragged naked to the stake and burned alive. Even members of the clergy, Bishop Isaiah of Rhodes and Bishop Alexander of Diospolis, were mutilated and dragged in agony through the streets before a frenzied mob. (Meanwhile Empress Theodora masturbated behind a veiled peephole to the torture chambers.)

In Spain, after the conversion from Arianism to Catholicism, King Kindasvinth, raised the bar even higher against this "execrable moral depravity." In 650 AD, the unrepentant homosexual not only suffered excommunication and castration, the law treated him as legally dead, allowing his wife to remarry and his children to immediately inherit their patrimony. King Egica at the 16th Synod of Toledo, added flogging and disfigurement to the penalty of castration and exile.

Apparently there was a grey area where the law interpreted taking the partner “a tergo” as an act of sodomy, even if it was not homosexual and penetration went into the vagina. That seems ancient history, however, should you and your wife check in into a motel in Maine, and some snoop is spotting you doing it doggy style, it still could get you booked for "sodomy."

Nevertheless, in 382 AD the cities were just as stridently profane as they are now. Nude girls continued to delight the populace, splashing about in aquatic spectacles and strutting their stuff in lewd pantomimes. When coming of age, it was the passage of rite for the adolescent Gentile to have his first encounter in a brothel. He purchased from the proprietress a set of bronze tokens, each depicting a particular service and priced accordingly: missionary position, doggy style, a hand-job, a mouthful of cock, you name it. The token was handed to the prostitute and she, at closing hour, would return all the tokens she had collected to the proprietress in exchange for her fees minus expenses and rent. Should the drippings of a client lead to consequences there were methods to cause a miscarriage. Girding tight and inserting a pessary soaked in hellebore and oils of common rue was a popular remedy; doctors prescribed to swallow birthwort and surgeons kept their curettes ready. If all else failed there were ways and institutions to dispose of the unwanted baby. This was of course not the Christian vision of an urban existence.

Whenever Christians got their way the theatres closed and the forum was deserted. Winding lanes went back and forth from the cathedral to the dour privacy of secluded courtyards and the many-layered social coherence of the gentile city dissolved into a loose conglomerate of clans and families. Yet even in the New Jerusalem the brothels didn’t close. What changed was the management. In Palermo 300 prostitutes rioted because the local bishop, of all people, was appointed to inspect the brothels. To shield the adolescent Christian from temptation, parents herded their kids to the altar before reaching puberty. Lawful wedlock was considered the antidote for sexual temptation. Especially women, it was hoped, could be disciplined by early marriage. The piercing gaze of God penetrated the most intimate recesses of the bedchamber. Nakedness became a problem. In his sermon On Virginity, John Chrysostom (347 – 407 AD) chastised the aristocratic ladies for exposing their pampered flesh before the eyes of their retainers. Until then, indifferent deportment in the nude still marked you as a member of the upper class. Now this changed.

In the public baths the attendants stood ready to shield a change of clothes behind curtains and portable screens. The higher the rank, the more protection from profane curiosity. It added to the mystique of a grandee’s position. The tanned flesh shining through the rags of the poor became a source of distressing fantasies and the custodians of doctrine began focusing their attention on the nature of sexuality itself.

The celibate life of the hermit seemed to recapture a touch of the original “glory of Adam” and his single-hearted worship of God. Urban clerics used to take sabbaticals with the monks in the hills for a spiritual “journey to the mountaintop on which Christ was transformed.” The asocial and bleak landscape of the desert became a distant reflection of Paradise, the true homeland of the human race, before marriage, greed and labor had robbed Adam and Eve of their rightful heritage. A monk was an angel walking on earth.

Such angel would look at you with rings around the eyes, fanatically unwashed, flea infested, undernourished to the point of bulimia, deprived of sleep and bearing the festering scars of frequent floggings. He exuded the “sweet odor of the desert,” a sort of spiritual ‘Lynx Effect.’ But not every angel was cut out for a life of hardship. At the marts of the metropolis the crowd opened a path for a lank figure with dark, penetrating eyes. You may notice the polished fingernails when he lifts his hand to run his fingers through the silky and carefully groomed hair falling left and right of his hollow cheeks. In the desert, the monk muffled up to his ears, before receiving the visit of his own mother, because “the touch of a woman’s flesh is like fire.” The urban saint, however, would welcome the challenge and looked more like a bridegroom than a man of the cloth. “Through the holes in his shabby cloak of sackcloth shines an ankle long cassock of silk. Under the pretense to assist the mistress in a prolonged fast he worms his way into the antechamber of a rich widow, while at night, unseen from his spiritual ward, he stuffs his face with dainty canapés and peacock tongues stewed in honey and poppy seeds” (Jerome, Letters XXII: 28). Many of these spiritual consultants were living in “holy matrimony” with at least one, if not an entire harem of “syneisactae.” Both, the servant and the bride of Christ slept in the same bed, claiming to refrain from sex. The ascetic thinker Hierakas (270 – 365 AD), while expressing doubts whether married people had any access to Paradise, expected himself and his austere followers to be ministered to by virgin attendants of the opposite gender with impunity. With a sarcastic “can one go upon hot coals and not get burned,” Jerome is telling us even of same sex “syneisactae.”

Mediterranean society, irrespective of class and profession, whether married or single, whether urban or rural, was expected to share a common code of sexual avoidance. A code enforced by a democracy of naming and shaming.

In every minute detail Evagrius (345 – 399 AD) and John Cassian (365­ ­– 433 AD) began examining the manifestations of sexuality – sexual fantasies at day, dreams at night, involuntary emissions. In a reversal of Freud’s theories, the symptoms of repressed sexuality were thought to betray other, more deep-seated emotions. Sexuality became the privileged window through which the monk could peer into the most private recesses of his soul. On the index of “single-hearted translucence to the love of God,” top marks were given to the man who “shall be found at night as he is in the day, in his sleep as in his prayer” said John Cassian. The snares of sexuality were held directly responsible for the decline from the angelic state of Adam and Eve in Paradise. The human libido was vilified as a demonic force.

Jerome is giving us the story of a youth who fell in love with the girl next door. She was earmarked to become a “virgin of Christ,” with the prospect of slowly shriveling away to the state of a dried prune in domestic seclusion. These days we hear of “Brides of the Quran” in Pakistan. It saves the parents the ruinous expenses of a dowry. The parents spotted the flush in their daughter’s cheeks and surprised her standing at the window and loosen her hair for the boy to see. Clearly the explanation for this could only be a case of demonic possession! So a holy man from the desert duly performed an exorcism on “the virgin because she had opened herself to the demon” (Jerome, Vita Hilarionis). Jerome speaks of a direct encounter with the “demon of love,” and he didn’t mean to be metaphorical. Yet when John Chrysostom was dismissing intercourse as barely more than an untidy means of securing offspring, a bonus feature at best, granted by God after Adam’s fall, the bishop of Hippo (modern Annaba) begged to differ.

St. Augustine agreed with the idea of sexuality as a symptom for the fall of Adam and Eve, but for the very reason that "of all battles the struggle for chastity is the greatest, and victory is rare,” he thought social life, marriage and sexuality were by no means to be dismissed as a second best; he refused to see in them the mere interim before the transition of the human race to the hereafter. For Augustine, Adam and Eve had enjoyed in Paradise a full marital existence; the joys of continuity through children would have been granted to them. Augustine saw no reason why this could not have been accompanied by all the sensations of delight in the act. Therefore “Paradise” was not the antithesis to life “in the world,” it was a “place of peace and harmonious joys,” with all the amenities of urban society, although shorn of tensions and complications. The experience of Adam and Eve in Paradise was the paradigm for social life as well as for the most intimate moments. In his search for the symptom of Adam’s fall it was not the libido as such but rather its uncontrollable nature that caught Augustine’s attention (Confessions X: 43-47).

He began with exploring the “dangers” of taste: “By eating and drinking the necessity of repairing the daily decay of the body has become sweet to me, I fight my addiction to this sweetness, and with daily fasting bring my body into subjection. But while I am passing from the discomfort of emptiness to the content of replenishment, the snare lurks in this very transition. I am beset with lust the concupiscence of the flesh. Because that transition is pleasure, and there is no other way to get through to where we must pass.”

On first sight this seems simply to mean that it is a bad thing to actually enjoy our pleasures. (When studies from the 70s suggested that a well-fed person is less horny than if going hungry, the Catholic Church began encouraging gourmandize; gone were the days of gluttony as one of the deadly sins. Everything to prevent us from enjoying a good lay.) Augustine realized in the sexual act a deep-seated dislocation of will and instinct. The involuntary character of erection and orgasm became a matter of infinite interest as well as the inability of an impotent (or frigid) person to get in the mood by a mere act of will. Because of this ageless, faceless, and protean nature of our libido, which appears to be visiting the married and the continent alike, Augustine reasoned it must be the footprint of an angry God, which was impressed on us, when Adam and Eve cut themselves loose from His will. Augustine concluded that even the married is required to exercise constant vigilance in order to fend off the signs for this fateful dislocation from a former harmony between man and God, between body and soul, between male and female. By revealing the impersonal character of the most intimate stimulants, Augustine thought he had identified the vehicle of original sin. For the Catholic Church Augustine’s deduction was a godsend.

Perceiving a sensual “impropriety” in the love even of a married couple, rather than a moral flaw, Augustine had shifted the emphasis to venial “sin” as an inherent blemish, regardless whether the express purpose is to beget children or, God forbid, merely have recreational sex. “Original sin” is the push button of Christian mind control. “Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love,” observed the songwriter Butch Hancock. Since then celibate clerics – people allegedly without any first hand experience – have been advising their parishioners on how to control caresses so as not to wake the sleeping dog. We’ve entered the age of "moral theology."  

The nuances these celibates keep discussing in their seminars make your head spin!

Is it deserving of penance to have merely inter-femoral contact (penis between thighs), and if so, how much? What, if they don’t keep their hands to themselves? What, if they do keep their hands to themselves? One-week worth of “Hail Maries” and sweeping the chaplain’s chimney? What about two women rocking in unison on the two knobby ends of a double-ended dildo? Is doing it doggy style as bad as going into the ass? Should we tolerate fellatio? The old handbooks assessed licking pussy as worse than killing. Murder received only fifteen years penance tops. Fellatio got you 22 years of penance and a lifetime for the habitual offender. Does age matter? How to categorize a kiss with tongue? Suppose kissing leads to “emissions?” What, if the spillage is hitting the floor – unused? Or worse even, is getting stuck in a condom? What about boys caught kissing each other? Or heaven forbid they both have already hair on their chests?

© – 1/15/2009 – by michael sympson, 5,100 words, all rights reserved