The writings of these cheerleaders for self-denial drummed home the PC message for century after century that the sole purpose of sex is procreation; that intercourse is a tribulation necessary for the production of babies, but absolutely no cause for joy or pleasure, and best avoided by serious people. The consistency and cross-cultural spread of these ideas is quite amazing.
Here is Tertullian, a native of Carthage in North Africa, pontificating in his A Treatise on the Soul around 200 AD: ‘I cannot help asking whether we do not, in that very heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that somewhat – our soul has gone out from us? And do we not experience a faintness and prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then, must be the soul-producing seed, which arises from the outdrip of the soul, just as that fluid is the body-producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh. In a single impact of both parties, the whole human frame is shaken and foams with semen, in which the damp humour of the body is joined to the hot substance of the soul.’
Then there was Origen, an early third-century theologian in Caesarea, Palestine, who was so taken with Matthew’s mention of ‘eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’ (a metaphorical reference to those who choose celibacy for religious reasons) that he castrated himself as a young man. (Other self-styled divines developed a habit of burning off their own fingers in order to resist sexual temptation.) Abba Cyrus of Alexandria, a third-century Copt, wrote of sex: ‘If you do not think about it you have no hope … he who does not fight against the sin and resist it in his spirit will commit the sin physically’. St John the Dwarf writes at the same time in Egypt’s western desert: ‘When one wants to take a town, one cuts off the supply of water and food. The same applies to the passions of the flesh. If a man lives a life of fasting and hunger, the enemies of his soul are weakened.’
It is at this time that the First Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, the Council of Nicaea, ruled that celibacy was required of bishops. A hundred years later, Christianised Roman emperors such as the joint rulers Constantius and Constans were keen to follow a similar legislative path. In 342 they prohibited sexual relations between man and wife in any fashion that did not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis. Their intent was obviously to outlaw anal and oral sex. They had the backing of contemporary divines such as St Jerome, who opined that all sexual intercourse was impure, and advised young women to avoid hot bathing, because it ‘stirs up passions better left alone’.
It was St Augustine of Hippo in Egypt, who lived from 354–430, who most coherently crystallised the belief that sex was fundamentally disgusting, and spread this teaching across the Christian world. As a young man, Augustine was eager to convert to Christianity, but he could not overcome his lust for his mistress and debauched lifestyle. Retrospectively appalled by his own experiences, he wrote his Confessions, the classic book of Christian mysticism and the story of his conversion. In it he confessed to having prayed regularly to God, saying famously, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Augustine’s new-found loathing of earthy bodily reality was exemplified by his statement that ‘we are born between faeces and urine’. He came to see sex as vile, lust as shameful, and all acts surrounding intercourse as unnatural. He regarded celibacy as the highest good. And adultery, by men as well as women, was naturally the Devil incarnate. Adam and Eve’s fall, Augustine opined, was loss of control over the body, especially the penis. If sex had one purpose other than reproduction, Augustine believed, it was to combat male fornication.
After St Augustine came more detailed codification of self-denying lifestyles, as mankind’s sexy, prelapsarian past faded into distant obscurity. John Cassian, a monk and ascetic writer from Southern Gaul, wrote in his Collationes around 420 that there were six degrees of chastity. The first consisted of not succumbing to the assaults of the flesh while conscious. ‘In the second,’ he specified, ‘the monk rejects voluptuous thoughts. In the third, the sight of a woman does not move him. In the fourth, he no longer has erections while awake. In the fifth, no reference to the sexual act in the holy texts affects him any more than if he was in the process of making bricks, and in the sixth the seduction of female fantasies does not delude him while he sleeps. (Even though we do not believe this to be sin, it is nevertheless an indication that lust is still hiding in the marrow.)’
A modern psychoanalyst would doubtless have a field day with the early Christian sex-phobes. It is tempting to suggest that there was an element of refusal to lose control with these devoutly abstemious men. Among modern celibates, this seems almost expressly to be a motivation. Salvador Dali refused to have orgasms, either through sex or masturbation, arguing that to do so would deprive him of his artistic power. ‘My brush is my penis and my paint my semen,’ Dali would say. Balzac would say after every orgasm, ‘There goes another novel.’ And as late as 1982, Peruvian soccer fans would blame a World Cup defeat by Poland on players who broke a pre-match sex ban.
Oddly enough, celibacy was not imposed on the early Christian clergy, as opposed to monastic celibates, until the Second Lateran Council of 1139, and then only for financial reasons. The Church’s idealisation of celibacy derived originally from the supposed virginity of Christ and his mother, but priestly celibacy was in fact introduced by Pope Innocent II principally to stop married priests handing down Church property to their heirs. The clergy themselves, used to having wives and mistresses and passing on both goods and priestly power within the family, still tended to resist the new view that they should become ascetics and encourage their flocks, who were also clearly copulating far more than the necessity of mere procreation demanded, to regard sex as disgusting. The drive to enforce virginity on the entire clergy was not successful for another two hundred years.
The Church’s more principled loathing for sex was not supplanted by business considerations although it was rarely more eloquently expressed than by Odon, Chancellor of Notre Dame in Paris, who in 1169 proclaimed sexuality to be no less than the principal means by which the Devil secured his hold on the world. But it should be noted that Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose theories and writings have become the cornerstone of the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, arrived remarkably later on the sexual repression scene.
It was not until the thirteenth century that Aquinas expressed his robust opinion on sex, which he called ‘lust’ unless it was strictly procreational. His top four perversions were bestiality, homosexuality, using any sexual position other than the ‘missionary’, and masturbation, which he condemned, although only insofar as he considered it effeminate in men. He was surprisingly tolerant of prostitution, which he saw as a necessary adjunct of morality, an outlet for troublesome male libido. ‘A cesspool is necessary to a palace if the whole place is not to smell,’ he said. Arguing against prostitution for a churchman of the time was a little like a sailor complaining about the sea; it was a financial mainstay of the Church, as well as one of the best ways a priest’s male parishioners had of ensuring that he would not sleep with their wives. Priests were wily when it came to withholding absolution to get induce wives to sleep with them, as well as compelling fornicators to name their partner, in order to get, so to speak, a hot tip.
The intense official anti-orgasm propaganda hit home, nonetheless. In a very real sense, these strictures remain the consensus today, and not just in the Christian world. Just as in the twentieth century the dominant American culture was adopted in part even by its enemies, the other major religions and cultures were also dragged into the fashion for prudish-ness. The extreme misogyny and abhorrence of sex in modern fundamentalist Judaism and Islam, a religion which, it is often forgotten, developed after Christianity, seem to have a curiously Christian momentum behind them.
Would modern Orthodox Jews, in their bizarre, wholly non-Hebraic medieval European garb, be so confused about sex (large numbers of their men are aggressive prudes, yet major users of prostitutes) if it were no
t for the Christian ethic influencing Judaism in the Middle Ages? Would modern fundamentalist Muslims (avowed woman-haters, yet desperate for female company when they visit the West) hold the views they do if Christianity had not poisoned the well of sexuality by associating it so strongly with guilt?
Even today’s Indians and Chinese appear to have revolted against their sensual roots as if in sympathy with the ascetic momentum of Christianity, the notion that the renunciation of pleasure, self-flagellation and the pursuit of a monastic lifestyle are the surest ways of entering a state of grace. Some of the modern world’s most abbreviated foreplay occurs in rural China, where 34 per cent of couples are now said to spend less than a minute on sexual preamble and oral sex is almost unknown, the modern Chinese, even in sophisticated cities, regarding it as ‘too dirty’. Researchers have found a significant proportion of Chinese girls and women today say that they ‘feel like vomiting’ when questioned about sexual matters.
Communism may have been to blame here. China may be one of the last communist states remaining today, but it imported, via the USSR, an ideology with distinctly Christian Western roots which, amongst a lot else, redefined sexual pleasure as decadent. Accordingly, from the 1950s to the 1970s there was no sex education at all in China for a population of eight to nine hundred million people. The only sex manual, Xing-di-zhi-shi – Knowledge of Sex - was published in 1957. It was devoted almost entirely to love and marriage.
Whether India can blame such indirectly Christian influences as the British Raj is not clear. But just as in China, in India modernity has, perplexingly to Westerners, become congruent with increased coyness and reticence regarding sex. There has, to adapt an expression of Professor Lionel Tiger’s, been a quite startling decline in the country’s gross national eroticism: there is widespread disapproval of the erotic possibilities of married life. Sexual taboos are still so powerful in some Hindu communities that higher caste women do not have a name for their genitals. In modern India, the Mumbai film industry is only now reverting cultural norms to a more erotic – sometimes downright raunchy – model.
The orgasm’s story from Aquinas onwards is to a large extent the struggle between a near-global orthodoxy that sexuality is a regrettable, animal characteristic (paradoxical since animals rarely and barely experience orgasm) – and occasional cultural blips when sex asserts its old power again and begins to reestablish its ancient primacy.
Given how physically pleasurable orgasm and its preamble are, the Christian achievement in bending the collective human mind away from thoughts of sex as anything beyond an occasionally necessary bodily function was no small feat. Sexual matters were far from ideal or liberal in the Ancient Mediterranean and Eastern worlds, especially when it came to the rights of women, but there is a huge gulf between the world view of Ancient Greek women comparing notes over who made the best masturbating sticks, or Ancient Hebrews believing sex is the holiest experience and undertaking known to man, and the subsequent generations of Christians who were successfully conditioned to be perfectly righteous in their perverse belief that sex and its entire hinterland of affectionate and pleasurable behaviours is a contravention of God’s will, that only intercourse without a ‘lustful appetite’ was acceptable.
Neither, in the absence of any unambiguous sexual directive or taboo having been imposed by Jesus, was there was a clear prime mover for the establishment of the Christian sexual ethic, no inventor of abstinence, self-denial and censorious-ness as a virtuous way of living. In the Roman world, before it became Christianised, there had been an anti-decadence voice in one Musonius Rufus, a Stoic of the first-century, who created the modern marriage ideal. Christianity appreciated his sentiments so much that it borrowed them wholesale. They meshed perfectly with the emerging Christian idea that human beings would sacrifice living in Paradise if they succumbed to weakness of the flesh. (Islam later followed this pragmatic approach more directly; Paradise was expressly promised for those who kept sex from getting out of control on Earth.)
Musonius said marriage should be no more nor less than communion of souls with a view to producing children. His ethical doctrine, for those who bought into it, imposed something that had not really been seen since Neolithic days – a measure of sexual equality. And therein may lie the root of Christianity’s fervour for new sexual ways. Neither partner, in Musonius’s vision, was allowed to have sex outside or before marriage. The rules were also strictly the same for rich and poor. The wealthy he sees as ‘the most monstrous of all, some who do not even have poverty as an excuse’. Here then, we start to see an extension of the recently dead Christ’s spiritual, if not economic, communism into the sexual area. Except that there is no notion from Musonius of equality of sexual gratification. For the first time, sex was only to be ‘indulged in for the sake of begetting children’, never for fun.
Given, as we have seen, the Old Testament’s easy acceptance of a veritably throbbing carnality, plus the New Testament’s blithe lack of concern with the matter, the Christian difficulty with sex is even odder. It extended, what was more, to all forms of pleasure: the third-century Lebanese philosopher Porphyry, regarded by St. Augustine as the father of Christian morality rather than Musonius Rufus, condemned not only sex, but horse racing, the theatre, dancing, marriage and mutton chops, averring of the latter that, ‘those who indulged in them were servants not of God but of the Devil’. (In a bizarre footnote to the history of sexual abstinence, there exists to this day a vegan group in Christchurch, New Zealand, called Porphyry’s People.)
In the shining, sexless new Christian world which Musonius ushered in, the obsolete, yet still extant, holy books of the old Hebrews became something of an embarrassment. In their drive to understand human beings as a finer, more cerebral, more moral form of wildlife than they were in the past, the writers of the Gospels, the radically-minded post-mortem historians of Jesus, had a problem with antique, but still undeniably holy, relics such as the ‘Song Of Solomon.’ It could hardly be struck out of the Bible without offending God, who must have had his reasons for allowing such muck to be published in his name. So instead it was reinterpreted as a metaphor of Christ’s love of his Church, just as the more hardline Jews rebranded such verses as an explanation of God’s love of Israel. The story of Onan was similarly adapted for the new creed’s benefit by being used fallaciously to denounce masturbation, especially by the male, who has always, in line with Musonius’s idea of a repolarisation of the sexual status quo, been condemned more vigorously for sexual sin than the female.
These modern spiritual regimes across the Christian world triggered a form of what can only properly be regarded as madness, spiralling down the generations, as bodily pleasure (or, at least any admission of indulging in bodily pleasure) became progressively more taboo. The prohibitions were so numerous – no sex (or, needless to say, masturbation) on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which effectively removed five months in the year. Then it was made illegal during Lent (the forty days before Easter), during any penance, during the forty days before Christmas, for the three days before attending Communion, during Saints’ days and from the time of conception to forty days after giving birth, or until the end of breast feeding in some cases, which ruled sex out for at least a year. It seems the Church elders wanted ideally to turn all Christians into semi-professional monks. But even then, they needed to take care; if a man experienced a nocturnal emission, he was required to intone thirty-seven psalms on awakening. The absurdity of all this was ably mocked by the Italian poet Boccaccio in his Decameron.
The veto on masturbation was just as puzzling. Here was a harmless act that did not lower the value of a woman, did not break either her hymen or her heart, and did not produce unwanted, illegitimate children. All masturbation does is to produce an orgasm. If any proof were needed that it was the pleasure of orgasm more than, say, false intimacy or illegitimacy that was being targeted by the killjoy Christians, and would continue to be right up until the present day, it is surely the unfa
thomable obsession with orgasm.
Like all bad political policies, the drive to marginalise sex and those who enjoy it threw up conundrums for the policy makers. For example, absolutely all practices – diverse sexual positions, oral sex, anal sex – that a man and woman might discover they enjoyed were outlawed. But at the same time, a second cardinal rule in almost direct opposition to the first had to be instilled in the public.
Because marital sex may have been a shocking thing, but was not half as shocking as adultery, the Church found itself having to insist strenuously on the concept of ‘marital debt’. Married people were told, confusingly, that they must grant sex to one another on demand. Other isolated incongruities in the monolithic Christian party line on sex can be found. In Christian Byzantium, for example, it was believed that a woman’s erotic pleasure could positively determine her baby’s health and temperament. But the overwhelming weight of belief was on the side of sex being highly regrettable, and the pursuit of satisfactory orgasm, especially in women, a near atrocity.
The communal drawing back from the lascivious delights of the old world and rejection of the bodily equipment their God had provided them with was a strange phenomenon. It was as if human beings had been given by God, Nature, evolution, whichever, a sports car to enjoy and chosen to use it as a tractor. Why should one of mankind’s most intellectually advanced ideas to date – Christianity was revolutionary in so many other ways – have imploded on itself in this way? The historian of sex Reay Tannahill can only suggest that authoritarian societies had worked out that in disciplining sexual relations, it was possible to control the family and thus, critically the stability of the fragile new phenomenon that was the state. However, she says that even so, the legislators of matters sexual limited themselves to intervening only when sex impacted on areas of public concern such as legitimacy, inheritance and population control.
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