The Worm in Eve’s 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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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