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ONE
Interpretations of Sex in Christianity
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I
JESUS AND PAUL
WESTERN CIVILIZATION is like an Oriental rug. Many hands have contributed to its weaving, and numerous threads of varied hues constitute its pattern. Greek classicism, Old Testament Hebraism, Roman law, Christianity, Teutonic tribal customs, these are but a few of the more clearly discernible strands which have been laid upon the loom of the centuries. Two of these threads are the particular concern of this book: their origins and their vicissitudes as they move in and out, back and forth across the weaving. One of them is the thread of naturalism, a term which is used here in a special sense to mean a positive and accepting attitude toward the physical, material world. The other is the thread of dualism, defined as a point of view that regards the realm of matter as illusory or evil, or both, and displays a marked preference for the ‘spiritual.’ Interpretations of sex in the western world have usually been characterized by one or the other of these two outlooks. Essentially naturalistic individuals or societies have accepted the sexual nature of man with gratitude and even joy. In some manifestations, there has been an exuberance almost without restraint, as in Rabelais, or Boccaccio, while in others a more dignified moderation has prevailed, as in Aristotle, or Montaigne. But even the advocates of the golden mean reveal little or no hostility to the erotic as such. They counsel moderation in all things, even in virtue! They do not, like the dualists, regard man’s passion as his problem but as his prize. They glory in the beauty of the naked human form, seeking to perfect it in the Olympic Games, in the sculpture of fifth-century Athens to exalt it, and in the painting of the Renaissance to sanctify it. They write odes to the goddess Eros, from the bibulous banqueteers of Plato’s Symposium, to the flirtatious knights and ladies of Castiglione’s Courtier, to the uninhibited protagonists of Joyce’s Ulysses. The scarlet thread of naturalism appears in the first pattern of the weaving, and though it seems, at times, almost to vanish, obscured by the somber and sober blue of dualism, it persists in its undulating presence.
It is from what Will Durant calls ‘Our Oriental Heritage’ that the second strand derives. The dualist is he who regards the body as a tomb from which the immortal soul must be released. The visible world, peopled with tangible, physical bodies, is the realm of illusion, and bondage to it means death. The real world is immaterial and invisible, at least to the eyes of the flesh. The goal of life is to soar above the sordid demands of the body, to achieve the liberation of the spirit through contemplation of the eternal verities. And such a good can be realized only by walking the harsh and narrow path of asceticism, by sternly resisting the alluring but faded primroses which grow beside the road. For if the soul allows itself to become enamored and ensnared by the fading beauties of mortal flesh, then it will share the ultimate destiny of all flesh, mortality and death. So gluttony and greed and especially lust are to be rigidly checked, disciplined, and finally extirpated. The dualists shrink from nudity, covering the genitals of the gods of Praxiteles and Phidias with fig leaves, painting modest draperies over the Venuses of the Renaissance. They sing hymns of praise to virginity and celibacy, from the sages of the Hellenistic Age to the medieval monastics. They regard their life as a pilgrimage through a strange and tempting world, from the Pythagoreans to the Puritans. The rug becomes at times a cloth of blue.
It is one of the myths of modernity that the strands of dualism were first woven into the fabric of western civilization by Christianity. The earliest squares were, so it is popularly understood, all scarlet, all naturalistic, created by the happy and healthy pagans of Hellas. Even the gods of Olympus were well versed in the arts of love from philandering Zeus to poor, lame Hephaestos mooning after the remote Aphrodite. The heroes of Homer quarreled over a prize of war feminine and fair far more fiercely than over gold. Physical perfection was a cult in which the numerous gymnasia served as temples. What contrast to the anti-feminism of the Apostle Paul, the graceless asceticism of the church fathers! The ranks of those pointing the accusing finger at Christianity have not lacked ever-fresh recruits. The mythical account of man’s fall contained in Genesis has been superseded by a new one. The first parents of western man, according to this legend, were Greeks, walking naked and unashamed in the Garden of Hellas. They played together as lovely children, carefree and guiltless in their sexual freedom. Then entered the serpent, who was really the Church in disguise, and persuaded these holy innocents that their bodies were evil and disgusting, that they must cover their nakedness and control their desires. He did not succeed in persuading them to give up sex altogether. After all, he was realistic enough to admit that the race must be carried on, somehow. But he did render it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for anyone ever completely to enjoy sex again. Henceforth, western man was fallen, an aura of guilt destined to hang over what had previously been untrammeled and free.
It is remarkable how widespread belief in this myth has become, even among those who ought to know better. One historian has called it ‘a modern literary mirage, more popular among essayists and journalists than among classical scholars.’ For the fact of the matter is that the strand of dualism is contributed to western civilization and not merely contributed but laid on so heavily that it becomes the dominant pattern, not by Christianity at all but by Hellenistic culture, which begins in the fourth century before Christ. There is some truth in the assertion that classical Greek civilization was naturalistic. From Homer to Aristotle, the dominant motif of the age was summed up in the one word, sophrosune, moderation. Any man who refused to accept the joys of the flesh made himself an object of curiosity and pity, like Euripides’ Hippolytus, who sought to lead a life of celibacy. The libertine, on the other hand, was equally censured, for he also violated the golden mean, transgressed the via media. Asceticism and over-indulgence were alike condemned. Sin was not sensuality but the violation of measure, the rupture of the bonds of delicate balance. Sex was to be savored and enjoyed like wine or sweetmeats, never in excess because the aftereffects corroded the experience with a sordid and painful rust. This temperate and healthy naturalism prevailed in the flourishing days of the Greek city state. But even as early as the fifth century, the Pythagoreans sounded their hymn of soma sema, the body is a tomb, and they clearly impressed and influenced Plato. Dualism remained in the background, however, until the devastation of the Peloponnesian wars had prepared the way for the Alexandrian Empire. Then the naturalistic spirit perished with the Athenian democracy, giving way to the so-called ‘failure of nerve.’ Alexander saw himself as the apostle of Hellenism, the purveyor of Greek culture to the backward and unenlightened Orient. And no doubt his mission in some measure succeeded. But the traffic was by no means one way. The twain of East and West did meet in the wake of the Macedonian conqueror. The dualism of Egypt and Mesopotamia and India flowed at full tide into Greece. The Oriental mystery cults blended with their Hellenic counterparts. It would be difficult to award the prize of cultural conquest, to declare that the West had evangelized the East or whether missioner had turned convert. Actually, neither carried off the victor’s laurel wreath. The result was rather a syncretism, a blending of the two civilizations into a new creation, the culture of the Hellenistic Age. Life’s goal was now summed up in one word, ataraxia, detachment, freedom from passion. Stoic and Epicurean alike withdrew from the world of the flesh into the citadel of the soul. Salvation, conceived as immortality of the spirit, was the goal which all men sought. At whatever point a study of Hellenistic culture begins, dualism is encountered. It was the presupposition of all thought, all writing, and it was the soil in which the pale flowers of asceticism grew. Sex was regarded as low and degrading, an act in which man descended to the level of the beast. Epicurus, the philosopher of hedonism, declared that ‘nobody was ever the better for the carnal act, and a man may be thankful if he was not definitely the worse.’
The corrupting serpent in the Garden of Hellas, then, was not the Church but a far older form of life, and western man was ‘fallen’ long before Christianity made its appearance. Of course, the new Gospel was born in the late Hellenistic Age, and it shared the fate of every other cultural movement of the period, adopting the prevailing coloration of the environment. There was no philosophical school or religious cult in the Graeco-Roman world which was not in some respect dualistic. Even Judaism, with its naturalistic heritage from patriarch and prophet, was not unaffected in the Persian and Greek periods of Israel’s history. The mystery cults of Isis and Osiris, the Persian Mithras, the Syrian Baals proffered release from bondage to the mortal flesh and multitudes responded. If Christianity had not in some measure spoken in accents to which the ear of the age was attuned, it would have remained an obscure sect within the Jewish faith. That it did so speak is clear both from the New Testament itself and from the writings of the Greek and Latin fathers of the Church. Origen castrated himself in order to escape the temptations of lust; John Chrysostom declared that ‘virginity is greatly superior to marriage’; and Tertullian regarded sex even within marriage as sinful. St. Paul wrote in the lingua franca of his time, and he unavoidably used terms which were the common coin of the Mediterranean world. Even the Gospels were written in Greek so that the portraits of Jesus were not entirely uncolored by the prevailing view.
Yet Christianity did not surrender unconditionally to Hellenistic dualism. The Church steadfastly resisted numerous efforts to sever the new faith from its Hebrew roots, to erase all traces of naturalism. The temptation of the Gospel to accommodate itself to the spirit of the age by minimizing or omitting entirely the scandalous and offensive doctrines of creation and incarnation was strong as is evident from the numerous heresies of the early centuries, all of which were essentially Hellenistic. Gnosticism denied that creation was the work of God, that the Logos had truly become flesh. Marcion denied the Old Testament any place in Christian Scripture. Montanism went to extremes in its otherworldly asceticism. The essential aim of the heretics was, in one way or another, to cast a shadow upon the material world, to exalt the spirit at the expense of the flesh. The fact that the Church branded these attempts as heretical is testimony to the naturalism of Christianity, its steady insistence upon creation and incarnation as indispensable to the true faith. The phrase referring to God as ‘maker of heaven and earth’ inserted in the so-called Apostle’s Creed near the beginning of the second century as well as the emphasis upon the Word made flesh in the Johan-nine writings, which come from the same period, are evidence of the Church’s struggle against the dualism of the Gnostic movement. The early Church understood the issues well. They resolutely resisted attempts to transform Christianity into another Hellenistic mystery cult. They held fast to their Jewish heritage in affirming their faith in the essential goodness of the created world and in God’s love for that world, a love so great that ‘He gave His only begotten Son’ to take upon himself human flesh. Any suggestion that Jesus was in any respect less than wholly human was rejected.
The victory of Hellenistic dualism over Hebrew naturalism was, then, a limited one, achieving its most dramatic triumph in the realm of sex. The vantage point of contemporary naturalism enables the modern student to recognize that the negative attitude toward the bodily aspects of life manifest in the asceticism of early Christianity is sharply inconsistent with the total outlook of the Gospel which is positive in its acceptance of the material world. Such a recognition is, however, a comparatively recent phenomenon, owing a larger debt to secular thought than is sometimes acknowledged. The statement of William Temple, late Archbishop of Canterbury, to the effect that Christianity is the most materialistic of the world’s great religions is characteristically modern. It is doubtful whether any Christian theologian of former times would have made such an assertion. So pervasive was the pall of dualism in the early, medieval, and even Reformation Church that sex withered under its shadow. Only since the nineteenth century have the tools of modern scholarship and the prevailing mood of naturalism made it possible to unravel the strands in the weaving of the centuries and to see the pattern clearly. Part One of this book attempts to do just that, demonstrating the fact that Christianity remains consistently naturalistic in most respects, yet unable to resist the lure of dualism in its historic interpretation of sex. It goes without saying that a major inconsistency is revealed herein. Oil and water do not mix. The Biblical doctrines of creation and incarnation demand a positive attitude toward the body and all of its functions. Such an historical analysis and such a theological presupposition may make some contribution to contemporary efforts to arrive at a sound ideological base for codes of sexual morality.
Jesus
Jesus was a Jew, speaking and acting out of a heritage of fifteen hundred years. His teaching in both its content, which stems from the long tradition of Hebrew prophecy, and its form, which bears striking resemblance to the Hebrew sages and wise men, is comprehensible only against the religious and cultural background of Israel. The naturalism of Jesus and the early Church owes its existence to the Jewish soil in which it had its origin. And that soil is almost totally devoid of dualism. There are some traces of dualism in the late Judaism of the Persian and Greek periods of Jewish history, but these are minor motifs. The prevailing spirit of the Old Testament was throughout naturalistic in sharp contrast to the dominant mood of Hellenistic culture. This contrast is especially discernible at three points: in the doctrine of creation, in the understanding of man, and in the interpretation of sex.
The Hebrew Scriptures begin with the account of creation, a poetic description which is punctuated by the repeated refrain, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ The work of the six days is completed with the observation that ‘God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.’ The physical, material world is created by God, and as his handiwork it is to be accepted and enjoyed with thanksgiving. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.’ Such an attitude is far removed from the outlook of Hellenistic culture, which regarded matter, or hule, as the Greek has it, as an intractable ‘stuff’ upon which the eternal and spiritual forms sought to work. The physical is evil and illusory; only the spiritual, the immaterial, is good. Jesus, with his references to the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, the fallen sparrow, obviously stands solidly within the naturalistic tradition of Hebrew life. There is no suggestion in his teachings of any conflict between matter and mind, no trace of dualism.
The difference in outlook between the Old Testament and the Hellenistic mind is further illuminated in their respective doctrines of man, in their anthropologies. To the Hebrew, man is a psychosomatic unity, body and soul intimately and inextricably related. The Genesis narrative does not assert that man was supplied with a soul but rather that he became a living soul. And the Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, which refers to the whole human being, not simply to some vague, spiritual entity. The Israelite use of nephesh is very close to what modern psychology means by the term ‘personality.’ It is the totality of the individual, that which marks him with his unique stamp, making him what he is. His family background, his culture, his physical appearance, his temperament, his idiosyncrasies, his hopes and fears — all of these belong to his soul. They determine his being and his action. All his acts are to be understood as springing from his soul. No item of his behavior is isolated. Every word and deed is symptomatic, revealing the true character of the total man. They derive from the vital center of his being which is his soul. ‘As a man thinketh within himself, so is he.’ Whenever the Hebrew thinks of salvation beyond death, it is never in terms of the immortality of the soul but always as the resurrection of the body. There is in some layers of Jewish thought the concept of Sheol, a shadowy ghostly realm where disembodied spirits dwell. But such a life was to the Jew really no life at all. It was a miserable estate, an occasion for lamentation. His only real hope lay in the future resurrection where he would be reunited with his body, a whole man. Hellenistic anthropology, in contrast, split man into two divisible parts, a mortal and evil body wherein dwelt for a time an immortal and virtuous soul. Escape from the prison house of the flesh was the eager expectation of the spirit. Here again, Athens and Jerusalem took separate roads, and it is clear that Jesus walked the latter way.
The third area in which Hebrew naturalism displays marked difference from Hellenistic dualism is in the interpretation of sex. It has already been pointed out that the latter was strongly ascetic, regarding sex as at best a necessary evil and at worst slavery to the lower passions. The Old Testament, on the other hand, portrays God as commanding his creatures to be fruitful and multiply. Nowhere in its pages is there a counsel of celibacy or an exaltation of virginity. Jephthah’s daughter mourns her virginal estate; the patriarchs and kings of Israel practice polygamy; the newlywed male is exempted by the Law from military service for one year so that he and his bride may enjoy the pleasures of wedded sexual life. The assumption throughout is that a man will marry and produce offspring, even taking concubines if necessary. The concern of the Hebrews for the continuation of their seed is one of the stronger motivations. The Law even provides for the so-called levirate marriage, wherein the childless widow of a man shall be bedded by his brother and the resultant child regarded as the offspring of the deceased. The only hint of asceticism of any kind in Israel is to be found in the Nazarites and Rechabites, who represent a prophetic protest against the luxury and the inequities of the commercial life of Canaan and a recall to the hardy simplicity and equality of nomadic existence. They are not dualists in any sense, and they represent a very minor strain in the Old Testament. There is a stern prohibition against adultery in the Law, but this springs from the concern for the seed, the family line. That this is not anti-sexual is demonstrated by the glaring absence of any ban on fornication, an omission which embarrassed later Christians of puritanical hue (cf. John Calvin in chapter 4, p. 126f.).
It is a popular distortion to interpret the original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as the sexual act, but this represents a complete misunderstanding of the myth. None of the Jewish rabbis, nor any of the Christian theologians, not even the most Hellenistically oriented of them, interpreted the fall of man in sexual terms. Clement of Alexandria came perhaps closest to it in his assertion that the serpent signifies bodily pleasure, but he did not maintain that it was the sexual union of Adam and Eve which was in itself evil. Their sin lay in their undue haste, their unwillingness to wait for God’s specific command to coitus. But Clement is almost alone in this. The preponderance of theological opinion, in both Jewish and Christian circles, has interpreted the original sin as pride and rebellion against God. The Church’s negative attitude toward sex has misled many into the belief that the Bible portrays man’s fall as erotic in origin. Neither the Bible itself nor the history of Christian thought substantiates such a belief. If there were any truth in it, Hebrew life would have been dominated by asceticism, which it clearly was not. The evidence shows that the Old Testament is throughout naturalistic and positive in its attitudes toward sex, as in its view of the material world and of man. It is this heritage which underlies the entire message of Jesus. He was a Jew in all respects and moreover a Palestinian Jew, which means that he was singularly sheltered, as far as it was possible in that time, from the taint of Gentile contacts, and hence also, of Hellenistic dualism.
Turning from the Old Testament background to Jesus himself and his teachings, we must admit at the outset that there is a paucity of verses in the Gospel records in which Jesus dealt specifically with sex. On the basis of a very few sayings, it would seem difficult if not impossible to present an interpretation of sex in his teachings. Yet when the whole of his message is considered, some rather definite implications for a sexual ethic do emerge. Generally speaking, then, there are three observations about the mission and message of Jesus which ...
