Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World

Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice

Merry E Wiesner-Hanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535611
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World surveys the ways in which people from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson used Christian ideas and institutions to regulate and shape sexual norms and conduct, and examines the impact of their efforts.

Global in scope and geographic in organization, the book contains chapters on Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, and North America. It explores key topics, including marriage and divorce, fornication and illegitimacy, clerical sexuality, same-sex relations, witchcraft and love magic, moral crimes, and interracial relationships. The book sets its findings within the context of many historical fields, including the history of gender and sexuality, and of colonialism and race.

Each chapter in this third edition has been updated to reflect new scholarship, particularly on the actual lived experience of people around the world. This has resulted in expanded coverage of nearly every issue, including notions of the body and of honor, gendered religious symbols, religious and racial intermarriage, sexual and gender fluidity, the process of conversion, the interweaving of racial identity and religious ideologies, and the role of Indigenous and enslaved people in shaping Christian traditions and practices. It is ideal for students of the history of sexuality, early modern Christianity, and early modern gender.

1 Christianity to 1500

Many factors shaped ancient and medieval Christian ideas about sex, the institutions that resulted from these ideas and in turn influenced them, and the actual sexual practices of Near Eastern, African, and European Christians. Of these factors, the words of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in Christian Scriptures were probably the least important, for Jesus seems to have said very little about sex, and his recorded words are contradictory. Jesus describes marriage as ordained by God (Matthew 19:4–5), yet later in the same discussion appears to approve of those “who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). He also characterizes those who remained unmarried as “equal to angels … and sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36). Jesus clearly opposes adultery and divorce, and seems to have condemned sex with “harlots” (the Biblical term for women who had sex with many men or sold sex for money), though he made friends with individual harlots and shocked priests who challenged him by commenting that repentant “tax collectors and harlots” would get into heaven before they would (Matthew 21:31–32). While Jesus was himself a man, the centrality of the male disciples may have been less evident during his lifetime than it later became; women were present at many of the key events of his life and were the first to discover the empty tomb after the crucifixion (Mark 16:1–8).

For the New Testament roots of Christian ideas about sex, the letters of Paul and those attributed to Paul are far more important than the Gospels containing the words of Jesus. A convert from Judaism, Paul never met Jesus, but became an important early Christian missionary. His letters to many Christian groups around the Mediterranean became part of Christian Scripture, and his reputation was so great that works probably written by others were also attributed to him. The Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and of Titus are now considered by almost all Biblical scholars not to be Paul’s words, though they were considered Pauline for most of Christian history. The majority of modern scholars view Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians also as deutero-Pauline, that is, as written by someone other than Paul. Many of the most restrictive comments about women in the New Testament occur in these books, and have carried the weight of Paul’s authority.

Like all early Christians, Paul expected Jesus to return to earth very soon, and so regarded sex as one of the earthly concerns that should not be important for Christians. To him, the virgin life was best, but if people could not “exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Paul warned against those who prohibited marriage and emphasized the importance of spousal love and respect. Like Jesus, Paul opposed divorce, and he even suggested that widows and widowers would be happier if they did not remarry. He condemned all extramarital sex, singling out adulterers and masturbators, along with thieves and drunkards, as people who were unworthy of heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9). This list also includes words that most historians and many Bible translators interpret as referring to homosexuals, although the original Greek is somewhat ambiguous and has occasioned scholarly controversy. Elsewhere Paul condemns male/male sexual activity (Romans 1:27) though his parallel condemnation of some female sexual activity (Romans 1:26) does not explicitly mention female/female sex.

The Letter to the Ephesians introduces a gendered and sexualized metaphor for the Christian community: the bride of Christ. Human marriage is equated with the union between Christ and the church; husbands are admonished to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and wives to be subject to their husbands as the church is subject to Christ (Ephesians 5:21–33). Later authors elaborated on this analogy (as well as on the call for wifely subjection), and extended it to individual Christians, not simply the church as a whole. Christian women, said King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, are all “spiritually espoused to Our lord Jesus Christ by virtue of the faith and baptism they received in His name.” Men, too, were occasionally described explicitly as “brides of Christ,” and also as children of Jesus understood in sexual terms. As the Spanish theologian Vincent of Ferrar put it: “Jesus every day impregnates the Church, and the womb is the baptismal font, and he sends there his semen from heaven.”¹

Sexuality in Judaism

Because most Christians came to accept Hebrew Scripture as part of their tradition – designating certain books of the Hebrew Bible the “Old Testament” to parallel specific Christian writings termed the “New Testament” – Jewish writings on sex also influenced the development of Christian thinking. Jewish ideas about human sexuality were rooted in Jewish concepts of the divine. In contrast to other ancient cultures, Judaism held to a strict monotheism, with a God (Yahweh), conceptualized as masculine but who did not have sexual relations like Greek or Egyptian male deities did. Yahweh’s masculinity was affirmed by the words used to describe him – Lord, King, Father – and not by any progeny or penis. In Hebrew Scripture God’s sexuality was spiritualized, not described physically. Thus human sexual relations, though basically good because they were part of Yahweh’s creation, could also be a source of ritual impurity. Nocturnal emissions in men made them and anything they touched unclean, as did menstruation and childbirth in women; sexual relations made both partners impure (Leviticus 12 and 15). Other sexual practices created more than ritual impurity (which was removed by baths or temple sacrifices) and were termed “abominations”; violators were liable to the death penalty. Leviticus 20 specifies as abominations adultery with a married woman, incest with a variety of relatives, bestiality on the part of men or women, and male same-sex relations. (Female same-sex relations are not mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament, and sexual relations between a married man and an unmarried woman were not considered adultery.)

Despite the ritual impurity it created, sex itself was not regarded as intrinsically evil, and husbands were religiously obligated to have sex with their wives. Women were expected to have sex with their husbands – though not religiously obligated – and the bearing of children was seen in some ways as a religious function, for this would keep Judaism alive. Sexual relations were viewed as an important part of marriage even when procreation was impossible, such as after menopause. As the definition of adultery in Leviticus makes clear, men were free to have sexual relations with concubines, servants, and slaves; polygamous marriage was acceptable and occurred often among Jewish leaders in the Old Testament. Theoretically unmarried women were also quite free sexually, for Hebrew Scripture nowhere forbade sex between unmarried individuals, though the harsh treatment of children born out of wedlock undoubtedly acted as a deterrent to such relationships. Selling sex for money was officially prohibited to Jewish women, but the many references to women who did in the Old Testament and other sources indicate that it was tolerated. The usual English translation for such a woman is “harlot,” a word that is used frequently to describe the Jewish people’s turning away from their single god to worship numerous other deities, a usage that equates polytheism with a woman’s having many lovers (e.g., Leviticus 20:5–6; Jeremiah 3). Because many of these deities were the fertility gods and goddesses common to the Israelites’ neighbors, their worship sometimes did involve a stress on divine sexuality that was not part of the worship of Yahweh; the prophet Jeremiah condemns this practice as “committing adultery with stone and tree” (Jeremiah 3:9).

Judaism influenced Christian sexuality not only through the writings of the Old Testament, but also through its actual sexual practices. By the time of Jesus and Paul, most Jewish couples were monogamous, though polygamy was sometimes promoted as an expression of Jewish identity in contrast to the monogamous Romans. Marriage was arranged by the families of the spouses, and involved the transfer of goods or money from the husband’s family to the wife’s or from the husband to the wife; this would assure her support in the event of his death or divorce. Unilateral divorce on the husband’s part was permissible, though community norms frowned on divorce for frivolous reasons. A wife could not divorce her husband, even for desertion, though the desperate situation this created for some women led rabbinical authorities to relax the rules in actuality. Traditionally, Judaism frowned on celibacy – “chastity” is defined in Jewish law as refraining from illicit sexual activities, not from sex itself – and almost all major Jewish thinkers and rabbis were married. In the centuries immediately before the development of Christianity, there was some change in these views, however, and a few Jewish groups such as the Essenes began to advocate abstinence from sexual relations for their members.

Greek and Roman traditions

The Essenes’ rejection of sexuality, new to Judaism, came in part from Greek and Roman schools of thought, which also influenced Christian ideas directly. Plato and Aristotle, the two most important philosophers of ancient Athens, were both suspicious of the power of sexual passion, warning that it distracted men from reason and the search for knowledge. Both men praised a love that was intellectualized and nonsexual, the type of attachment we still term “platonic.” (Neither Plato nor Aristotle was concerned about what sex does to women except as this affects men.) Plato developed a dualistic view of both humans and the world, arguing that the unseen realm of ideas was far superior to the visible material world, and that the human mind or soul was trapped in a material body. This mind/body split did not originate with Plato, but his acceptance and elaboration of it helped to make this concept an important part of Western philosophy from that time on, and led some groups (though not Plato) to reject sexual activity completely. In Aristotle the mind/body split is reflected in the process of procreation (which he termed “generation”), with the male providing the “active principle” and the female simply the “material.” (The Greek physician and medical writer Galen disagreed with this formulation, however, and regarded both parents as providing “active principles.”) The categories male and female were not completely dichotomous according to Aristotle or Plato, however, but part of a hierarchical continuum, which historians have since termed the “one-sex model.” Males resulted when conditions during sexual intercourse were optimal, and females when they were somehow faulty, with heat viewed as the most important force in the creation of sexual difference. In this view, female sex organs were generally viewed as equivalent to male, but simply turned inside out. Because both women and men were located along the same continuum, certain women could be more “manly” than some men, and exhibit qualities that were expected of men such as authority or self-control. Accidents or even vigorous exercise might also cause a woman’s sex organs to emerge later in life, thus turning her into a man.

Same-sex relationships in ancient Athens have been the focus of many historical studies. Part of an adolescent citizen’s training in adulthood entailed a hierarchical sexual and tutorial relationship with an older man, who most likely was married and may have had other, female, sexual partners as well. For Athenians, the key distinction in sex was not the gender of one’s partner – as in modern understandings of sexual orientation – but between active and passive, between penetrator and penetrated, with the latter appropriate only for slaves, women, and boys. (There is some dispute about whether penetration was involved in male/male sex involving free men, or whether sex was generally intercrural – that is, between the thighs.) These relations between adolescents and men were often celebrated in literature and art, in part because the Athenians regarded perfection as possible only in the male. The perfect body was that of the young male, which is why even Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, is always shown clothed in classical Athenian sculpture. The perfect love was that between an adolescent and an older man, although this was supposed to become intellectualized and “platonic” once the adolescent became an adult. Thus gender norms in which women were viewed as inferior shaped norms about sexual desirability.

Stoic philosophy, developed by Greek thinkers in the third century bce and later very influential in Rome, agreed with Plato that sexual passion was disruptive. Stoics viewed sexual relationships as an important area of government concern; government should oversee the family, which they considered the basis of the social order, as well as other types of sexual activities, in order to promote public order and civic harmony. Stoic opinion on sexual matters was widely shared, and Roman lawmakers frequently enacted statutes dealing with sexual offenses. The most serious transgressions were those that might upset the social order: adultery (again limited only to married women); sexual relationships involving young upper-class unmarried women (particularly if the man was from a lower social group); marriages that crossed social boundaries; and rape or abduction of girls or boys.

Most Romans considered marriage a positive good, whose purpose was to pass on property legitimately and preserve wealth. To marry, both spouses had to be free Roman citizens, however. If the woman was not, she could become a concubine, which was a formal relationship generally regarded as honorable with some legal rights, though not as many as wives. Roman concubinage was an alternative to marriage, not an addition to it as it was in many other parts of the world; Romans were monogamous, and a man could have either a wife or a concubine, but not both. If their owner allowed it, slaves could enter a marriage-like relationship called contubernium, which benefited their owner because any children produced from it would be his. Along with these formal relationships, many people simply lived together in long-term informal relationships, but these had no standing before the law and their children could not legally inherit. Although marriages were arranged by families primarily for the handing down of property to legitimate children, the Romans, in something of a contradiction, viewed the model marriage as one in which husbands and wives were loyal to one another and shared interests and activities. The Stoic notion that spouses should feel “marital affection” (affectio maritalis) toward one another gained popularity in the first and second centuries ce; if this affection ceased, formal divorce or less formal separation could end the marriage. Fathers had great power over their children; they could decide whether to accept them into the family at birth and choose who they would marry or if they could divorce.

Roman law increasingly drew a distinction between concubines and women who were sexually available to a large number of people, whether or not they charged for their services. Selling sex for money was not forbidden, however, and the pagan religious calendar had special feast days dedicated to female and male prostitutes. Roman literature also celebrated sexual relationships of all types in a way Roman law did not. The only two sexual activities uniformly condemned in literature were men taking the passive role in same-sex acts – viewed as unmanly and unworthy of a Roman citizen, and suitable only for slaves and prostitutes – and women taking the active role, which was seen as usurping a masculine privilege.

Along with philosophy and law, religion was also connected to sexual and family issues in ancient Greece and Rome. The classical Mediterranean was home to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. These spread from one area to another with the conquests first of Alexander the Great and then Rome; individuals frequently honored a number of gods and goddesses through rituals and ceremonies, both public and private. Religion for the Romans was largely a matter of honoring the state and the family, not developing a close relationship with a deity, or worshipping with a congregation of fellow believers. Family and individual religious practices varied considerably, and every household had its own guardian deities.

Aside from their immortality, Greek and Roman gods were just like humans, so that they, too, experienced sexual passion. Male gods acted in ways that would have been unacceptable had they been mortal; stories of seductions and rapes by Zeus (called Jupiter in the Roman pantheon) and other gods and heroes form a central part of classical mythology. Though several of the most important goddesses, such as Athena (Minerva), Hestia (Vesta), and Artemis (Diana), were virgins, no male gods abstained from sexual relationships. Male priests in some Mediterranean religions did abstain, however, and occasionally even castrated themselves for cultic purposes; such religions in general were strongly dualistic, with self-castration regarded as proof of a priest’s rejection of the body and devotion to the spirit. These religions, usually termed “mystery religions” because they offered their adherents secret powers or personal immortality, were gaining followers in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, even though Roman authorities were often suspicious of them. Traditional Roman religion was a civic or state religion akin to patriotism, in which honoring the gods was viewed as essential to the health and well-being of the state, and the mystery religions were very different from this.

Early Christianity

In the first several centuries after Jesus, Christianity was spread by individuals and groups acting as missionaries throughout the Mediterranean area. Early converts developed their own ideas about sex along with other issues, mixing together the teachings of Jesus and Paul, Jewish writings, Greek and Roman philosophy, non-Christian mystery religions, and other religious traditions in highly individualistic ways. There was no central authority in these first centuries, and even bishops were only loosely in control of beliefs and activities in their dioceses; consequently there was an enormous range of ideas and practices. Many historians today describe this period as one of “christianities” rather than a single “Christianity.” Among these variations was the extent to which women should participate in the workings of the religion; some favored giving women a larger role in church affairs, while others were more restrictive, urging women to be silent on religious matters. The relative values of marriage and virginity was also a matter of debate.

The ideas that were most influential in the subsequent development of Christianity were those of literate men who corresponded with and advised converts and who often became officials in the growing church. These men, subsequently termed the Church Fathers, held differing views, although the degree of variation was smaller than among the Chris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Christianity to 1500
• 2. Protestant Europe
• 3. Catholic and Orthodox Europe
• 4. Latin America and the Caribbean
• 5. Africa and Asia
• 6. North America
• 7. Conclusions
• Index