American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  At its heart, Christianity expressed a horror at the tainting of godliness with sexuality. Some early Christian Fathers, such as Origen, had taken literally the prophet Matthew’s charge (19:11–12) that “there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,” and castrated themselves. Such self-mutilating behavior finally was condemned by the Church in the fourth century as being excessive and unnecessary; thenceforward celibacy would be sufficient. But then this too was carried to extremes. Saint Paul had written (Cor. 7:1,9) that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman. . . . But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” Even marital sex invariably was infected with lust, however, so there developed in Christian culture the anachronistic institution of sexless so-called chaste marriage, and it endured with some popularity for nearly a thousand years.20

  As Peter Brown has pointed out, however, perhaps the most remarkable thing about what he calls this gran rifiuto, or “great renunciation,” was the way it quickly became the basis for male leadership in the Church. One key to understanding this phenomenon is located in the contrast between Judaism at the time and its radical offshoot of Christianity. For as Brown notes: “In the very centuries when the rabbinate rose to prominence in Judaism by accepting marriage as a near-compulsory criterion of the wise, the leaders of the Christian communities moved in the diametrically opposite direction: access to leadership became identified with near-compulsory celibacy.” The Christian leader, then, stood apart from all others by making a public statement that in fact focused enormous attention on sexuality. Indeed, “sexuality became a highly charged symbolic marker” exactly because its dramatic removal as a central activity of life allowed the self-proclaimed saintly individual to present himself as “the ideal of the single-hearted person”—the person whose heart belonged only to God.21

  Of course, such fanatically aggressive opposition to sex can only occur among people who are fanatically obsessed with sex, and nowhere was this more ostentatiously evident than in the lives of the early Christian hermits. Some time around the middle of the third century the holiest of Christian holy men decided that the only way to tame their despicable sexual desires was to remove themselves completely from the world of others. Moving to the desert, they literally declared war on their sexual selves, first by reducing their intake of food to near-starvation levels. “When one wants to take a town, one cuts off the supply of water and food,” wrote a sainted monastic named John the Dwarf. The same military strategy, he continued, “applies to the passions of the flesh. If a man lives a life of fasting and hunger, the enemies of his soul are weakened.”22

  Weakened, perhaps; but never, it seems, defeated. On the contrary, the more these godly hermits tried to drive out thoughts of sex, the more they were tortured by desire. Thus, when one young monk, Palladius, reported to an older one, Pachon, that he was thinking of leaving the desert because, no matter what he did, “desire filled his thoughts night and day, and . . . he was increasingly tormented by visions of women,” the old man replied that after forty years of exile and isolation in the desert he too “still suffered the same intolerable urges. He said that between the ages of fifty and seventy he had not spent a single night or day without desiring a woman.”23 But try he and the others did, with maniacal obsessiveness. Aline Rousselle provides a few examples:

  Ammonius used to burn his body with a red-hot iron every time [he felt sexual desire]. Pachon shut himself in a hyena’s den, hoping to die sooner than yield, and then he held an asp against his genital organs. Evagrius spent many nights in a frozen well. Philoromus wore irons. One hermit agreed one night to take in a woman who was lost in the desert. He left his light burning all night and burned his fingers on it to remind himself of eternal punishment. A monk who had treasured the memory of a very beautiful woman, when he heard that she was dead, went and dippled his coat in her decomposed body and lived with this smell to help him fight his constant thoughts of beauty.24

  But let Saint Jerome describe for himself the masochistic joys of desert exile:

  There I sat, solitary, full of bitterness; my disfigured limbs shuddered away from the sackcloth, my dirty skin was taking on the hue of the Ethiopian’s flesh: every day tears, every day sighing: and if in spite of my struggles sleep would tower over and sink upon me, my battered body ached on the naked earth. Of food and drink I say nothing, since even a sick monk uses only cold water, and to take anything cooked is a wanton luxury. Yet that same I, who for fear of hell condemned myself to such a prison, I, the comrade of scorpions and wild beasts, was there, watching the maidens in their dances: my face haggard with fasting, my mind burnt with desire in my frigid body, and the fires of lust alone leaped before a man prematurely dead. So, destitute of all aid, I used to lie at the feet of Christ, watering them with my tears, wiping them with my hair, struggling to subdue my rebellious flesh with seven days’ fasting.25

  Extreme though such thoughts and behavior may seem today, in the early centuries of Christianity, when the seeds of faith were being nurtured into dogma, such activities characterized the entire adult lives of thousands of the most saintly and honored men. During the fourth century about 5000 holy ascetics lived in the desert of Nitria, with thousands more tormenting themselves around Antinoe in the Thebiad, at Hermopolis, and elsewhere. Indeed, so popular did the life of the sex-denying hermit become among Christian men that in time it was difficult to find sufficient isolation to live the true hermit’s life. They began to live in small groups, and then eventually in organized monasteries. Here, because of the closeness of other bodies, carnal temptation was more difficult to suppress. The institution did what it could to assist, however: rules were instituted prohibiting the locking of cell doors to discourage masturbation; it was forbidden for two monks to speak together in the dark, to ride a donkey together, or to approach any closer than an arm’s length away; they were to avoid looking at each other as much as possible, they were required to keep their knees covered when sitting in a group, and they were admonished against lifting their tunics any higher than was absolutely necessary when washing their clothes.26

  Although sex was at the core of such commitments to self-denial, it was not all that the saintly Christian rejected. Indeed, what distinguished the Christian saint from other men, said the early Church fathers, was the Christian’s recognition of the categorical difference and fundamental opposition between things of the spirit and things of the world. The two realms were utterly incompatible, with the result, says the Epistle to Diognetus, that “the flesh hates the soul, and wages war upon it, though it has suffered no evil, because it is prevented from gratifying its pleasures, and the world hates the Christians though it has suffered no evil, because they are opposed to its pleasures.”27 In demonstrating their opposition to the world’s proffered pleasures, some monks wrapped themselves in iron chains in order that they might never forget their proper humility, while others “adopted the life of animals,” writes Henry Chadwick, “and fed on grass, living in the open air without shade from the sun and with the minimum of clothing.” Still others, such as Saint Simeon Stylites, displayed his asceticism by living his life on top of a column; by so doing, he not only “won the deep reverence of the country people,” but he also “inspired later imitators like Daniel (409-93) who spent thirty-three years on a column near Constantinople.” 28

  During those same first centuries of the Church’s existence some paragons of the faith took to literal extremes the scriptural charge to “love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” by flinging themselves into what Augustine was to call the “daily sport” of suicide and by searching for ways to become Ignatius’s longed-for “fodder for wild beasts.”29 Suicide, like castration, in time was discouraged by the Church as at best institutionally counter-productive, but the idea of flesh as corruption and of the physical pleasures of the world as sin continued to evolve over the centuries, by the Middle Ages flourishing into a full-fledged i
deology that came to be known as the contemptus mundi or “contempt for the world” tradition. All of life on earth was properly seen as a “vale of tears,” as a “desert,” an “exile.” As one medieval saint, Jean de Fecamp, exclaimed, human life was and should be viewed as “miserable life, decrepit life, impure life sullied by humours, exhausted by grief, dried by heat, swollen by meats, mortified by fasts, dissolved by pranks, consumed by sadness, distressed by worries, blunted by security, bloated by riches, cast down by poverty.”30 The torment of life lay, therefore, not only in its pains, but equally (if perversely) in its pleasures that systematically had to be both resisted and condemned. Thus, an anonymous twelfth-century poet confronted himself with the riddle—“Evil life of this world then / Why do you please me so?”—and answered piously with the following litany:

  Fugitive life,

  more harmful than any beast.

  Worldly life, evil thing

  Never worthy of love

  Life which should be called death,

  Which one should hate, not love

  Worldly life, foul life

  Pleasing only to the impious

  Worldly life, sickly thing

  More fragile than the rose

  Life, stupid thing

  Accepted only by fools,

  Worldly life, source of labors,

  Anguished, full of suffering

  I reject you with all my heart

  For you are full of filth.

  Worldly life, future death,

  Permanent ruin,

  With all my heart I reject you

  I prefer to undergo death,

  O life, rather than serve you.31

  A century later the poet and Franciscan monk Giacomino di Verona expressed the matter of humanity’s proper Christian understanding of itself in similar, if even more pithy terms:

  In a very dirty and vile workroom

  You were made out of slime,

  So foul and so wretched

  That my lips cannot bring themselves to tell you about it.

  But if you have a bit of sense, you will know

  That the fragile body in which you lived,

  Where you were tormented eight months and more,

  Was made of rotting and corrupt excrement. . .

  You came out through a foul passage

  And you fell into the world, poor and naked . . .

  . . . Other creatures have some use:

  Meat and bone, wool and leather;

  But you, stinking man, you are worse than dung:

  From you, man, comes only pus . . .

  From you comes no virtue,

  You are a sly and evil traitor;

  Look in front of you and look behind,

  For your life is like your shadow

  Which quickly comes and quickly goes . . .32

  In response to learned and saintly medieval urgings of this sort, the efforts of good Christians to purge themselves of worldly concerns and carnal impulses became something truly to behold, something that had its roots in the asceticism of the early Church Fathers of almost a thousand years earlier and something that would persist among the faithful for centuries yet to come. Norman Cohn has provided us with one vivid though not untypical example by quoting an account from the fourteenth century when, on a winter’s night, a devout friar

  shut himself up in his cell and stripped himself naked . . . and took his scourge with the sharp spikes, and beat himself on the body and on the arms and legs, till blood poured off him as from a man who has been cupped. One of the spikes on the scourge was bent crooked, like a hook, and whatever flesh it caught it tore off. He beat himself so hard that the scourge broke into three bits and the points flew against the wall. He stood there bleeding and gazed at himself. It was such a wretched sight that he was reminded in many ways of the appearance of the beloved Christ, when he was fearfully beaten. Out of pity for himself he began to weep bitterly. And he knelt down, naked and covered in blood, in the frosty air, and prayed to God to wipe out his sin from before his gentle eyes.33

  Monks and other males were not the only devout souls of this time who tried to work their way to heaven with self-flagellation and other forms of personal abasement. In fact, if anything, women showed more originality than men in their undertakings of humiliation. In addition to the routine of self-flagellation and the commitment of themselves to crippling and sometimes fatal bouts of purposeful starvation, would-be female saints “drank pus or scabs from lepers’ sores, eating and incorporating disease,” reports a recent student of the subject, “and in the frenzy of trance or ecstasy, pious women sometimes mutilated themselves with knives.” One such holy woman displayed her piety by sleeping on a bed of paving stones, whipping herself with chains, and wearing a crown of thorns. As Caroline Walker Bynum dryly remarks:

  Reading the lives of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century women saints greatly expands one’s knowledge of Latin synonyms for whip, thong, flail, chain, etc. Ascetic practices commonly reported in these vitae include wearing hair shirts, binding the flesh tightly with twisted ropes, rubbing lice into self-inflicted wounds, denying oneself sleep, adulterating food and water with ashes or salt, performing thousands of genuflections, thrusting nettles into one’s breasts, and praying barefoot in winter. Among the more bizarre female behaviors were rolling in broken glass, jumping into ovens, hanging from a gibbet, and praying upside down.34

  Such behavior was motivated primarily by the now traditional Christian compulsion to deny and to rout the pleasures of the flesh and by so doing to accentuate the importance of the spirit, for by this time the sundering of the mundane from the spiritual, the profane from the sacred, was a well-established characteristic of European Christian culture. But by listening closely, Bynum has shown that the sounds of other promptings to asceticism can be discerned as well. These additional (not alternative) explanations for such extreme performances included straightforward efforts to escape the restrictions and menial activities dictated by life in authoritarian Christian families and communities. This was a motive particularly likely among women living in a harshly misogynist world, women who by becoming acknowledged saints and mystics were able to use the institution of chaste marriage to negotiate non-sexual relationships for themselves during an era when sexual marriage could be an extraordinarily brutal institution, and women who, when all else failed, sometimes were able “accidentally” to drop an unwanted infant into the fire during a trance of mystical ecstasy.35

  To be sure, much as its priesthood fondly wanted it to be, Christianity never was able to become an entirely totalitarian religion. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in particular, some citizens of Europe found for themselves cultural pockets of at least some sensual freedom. What these exceptions almost invariably demonstrate, however, is that once European sexual mores and attitudes toward the body had been shaped on the anvil of early Christian asceticism, whatever variations those mores and attitudes underwent during the course of time they always were variations that remained partially embedded in that repressive ideal. As a culture, the Christian West never was (and still is not) at ease with sexuality. Thus, even on those short-lived occasions when erotic repression relaxed for a time, the emerging liberatory impulse indulged in by a relative few invariably had about it an almost desperate quality of both flamboyance and risk.

  When a few women of prominence in certain parts of Europe during the fourteenth century felt free for a time to express themselves sexually, for example—no doubt, as part of the breakdown in Christian morality that came in the aftermath of the Black Death—they did it by ostentatiously exposing their breasts, applying rouge or jewel-studded caps to their nipples, and sometimes piercing their nipples so as to hang gold chains from them. If this fashion was a bit extreme for some, an alternative was to cover as little as possible of one’s breasts and then to push them up and out; the result, according to one observer, was to make “two . . . horns on their bosom, very high up and artificially projected toward
the front, even when nature has not endowed them with such important advantages.”36 Such determinedly—or frantically—erotic fashion statements were never the rule for many, of course; and for those few who did indulge in them, the lifespan of the vogue was short. For constantly lurking everywhere was the dominant moral code of the Church. As John Bromyard, an approximate contemporary of those rouge-nippled fourteenth-century would-be libertines and their male companions, warned:

  In place of scented baths, their body shall have a narrow pit in the earth, and there they shall have a bath more foul than any bath of pitch and sulphur. In place of a soft couch, they shall have a bed more grievous and hard than all the nails and spikes in the world. . . . Instead of wives, they shall have toads; instead of a great retinue and a throng of followers, their body shall have a throng of worms and their soul a throng of demons.37

  Bromyard’s reference to scented baths is also telling. Inspired by the example of Muslims living in Spain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, public baths slowly spread throughout Europe during the course of the next two hundred years. By the turn of the fourteenth century, Paris, for instance, had about two dozen public baths. In some of them a visitor might encounter what the Italian writer Poggio did on a visit to Zurich in the early fifteenth century: partially clad men and women singing and drinking, and “young girls, already ripe for marriage, in the fullness of their nubile forms . . . standing and moving like goddesses . . . their garments form[ing] a floating train on the surface of the waters.”38