Sex Before Sexuality

A Premodern History

Kim M. Phillips, Barry Reay

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637266
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historiografía

Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern past. Before the 'invention' of sexuality, erotic acts and desires were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love, courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c. 1100–c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings, languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography.

This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and modern commentators will never know their subject without a deeper comprehension of sex's history.

1

Sin

If ancient Greeks and Romans were concerned with the social and political implications of their sex acts, modern westerners have become obsessed with desire’s objects. ‘The West has been largely preoccupied with whom people had sex, the ancients with the question of excess or over-indulgence, activity and passivity.’¹ However, another sexual preoccupation is the problem of desire itself. In promoting the ideal of sexual abstinence, Catholic Christianity parted company with its parent, Judaism, and younger sibling, Islam, and had more in common with Hinduism and Buddhism.² In Christianity sexual desire became linked to sin – hamartia in the Greek of the New Testament, a metaphorical use of an ancient archery term meaning ‘to miss the mark’. The experiences of desire, arousal and sexual acts caused a Christian soul to be diverted from its path to God; they entailed estrangement from the divine.

We begin our study of sex in premodern western cultures with a study of sexual sin because we recognize the centrality of Christian morality to medieval and early modern erotic sensibilities. Before sexuality, carnal arousal and ‘venereal’ acts were intimately connected with spiritual status and eternal fate. The medieval Christian view of the impact of carnality on spirituality has sometimes been viewed, especially under the influence of Michel Foucault, as a crucial stage in the formation of modern subjectivities. In Foucault’s account, in the wake of the codification of the sacrament of penance in 1215,

confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles. … Western man has become a confessing animal.³

Foucault elsewhere quoted a conversation with Peter Brown, who claimed that sexuality in the early Christian centuries became ‘the seismograph of our subjectivity’. ‘It is a fact,’ continues Foucault, ‘a mysterious fact, that [in] this indefinite spiral of truth and reality in the self sexuality has been of major importance since the first centuries of our era.’⁴ We have no wish to trace long genealogies in this fashion. Anxieties about spiritual readiness for eternity seem to us to be of a quite different order from modern psychological preoccupations with the truth of the self in a mortal body. In keeping with our assertion of the special modernity of sexuality we ask what constituted the sexual assumptions, the ubiquitous messages (spoken or unspoken), the continual whispering on sex which formed the background noise of premodern lives? In subsequent chapters we grapple with understanding medieval and early modern sex in the absence of the currently dominant concepts and categories – heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography – but for now we stay with a concept with which premodern people were entirely familiar. Thus acknowledging their moral preoccupations, we confront the question of how sexual acts and desires became impediments to a higher experience of the divine and imperilling to the immortal soul.

Premodern Christian cultures linked sex to sin in two ways. One took as its starting point the category of lechery as one of the seven deadly sins (developed and enumerated by theologians beginning in the fourth century), and marked specific lecherous acts on a scale of illicitness.⁵ Taking it as read that marital sex for procreation or to fulfil the conjugal debt was a venial, excusable sin rather than a mortal one (more on this below), by the thirteenth century theologians had worked out a hierarchy of lust. The number and order of sexual sins varied from author to author, but most ranged from fornication (sex between an unmarried man and woman) as the least serious brand of lechery to the ‘vice against nature’ as the worst. A common ranking ran thus: fornication, adultery, incest, violation or debauchery, abduction-rape (raptus) and the ‘vice against nature’ (which generally encompassed all acts which could not result in procreation, including use of contraceptives, masturbation, anal or oral sex, same-sex practices and bestiality).⁶

The habit of weighing the gravity of sexual sins could have startling results. In early fifteenth-century Italy, Bernadino of Siena preached that ‘[i]t is better for a wife to permit herself to copulate with her own father in a natural way than with her husband against nature’. Similarly, ‘It is bad for a man to have intercourse with his own mother, but it is much worse for him to have intercourse with his wife against nature.’⁷ Canonists taught that wives who consented to their husbands’ demands to sin against nature committed mortal sin just as the men did. Better for a wife to let herself be killed or that her husband commit adultery or shame himself with a mule.⁸ Even if Bernadino’s message was intended more in the spirit of hyperbole than literal teaching, the example illustrates a hierarchy of sexual sin somewhat alien to modern thinking. In addition to teachings on the seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments offered basic sexual ethics with the prohibition of adultery (often rendered in more general terms as ‘unchastity’ by medieval preachers) and coveting a neighbour’s wife.⁹ In delineating the line between licit and taboo sex the Christian tradition derives mainly from ancient Hebrew strictures against behaviours potentially detrimental to the patriarchal family, such as adultery, same-sex acts, incest and non-procreative sex.¹⁰

However, in splitting away from Jewish origins early Christians had also added a harder dimension to their concept of sexual sin. In Foucault’s ominous words, ‘Christianity proposed a new type of experience of oneself as a sexual being.’¹¹ Influenced in part by classical ideals of restraint but more by ambitions internal to the development of the religion itself, authoritative Christian writers developed the theory that the very act of sexual arousal was tainted by sin. More emphatically, they asserted that to be married was inferior to being celibate. The ideal of a celibate priesthood arose from this theory, although before the twelfth century many Catholic priests continued to keep wives or concubines. Throughout the 1,500 years of Catholic hegemony the vast majority of laypeople paid little attention to the celibate ideal and had a decided tendency to flout the rules against lechery.

This chapter will focus not on the sevenfold mortal sin of lechery but on the teaching that fused all sexual desire with sin, and argue that, far from being static, Christian thinking on eros evolved slowly and was continually broken. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Pierre J. Payer have suggested that Christian doctrine on sex was formed by the earliest authors of Scripture and hardly changed in its essence between the first and twentieth centuries.¹² Some authoritative accounts of late-antique asceticism paint broad brush-strokes of a sexual landscape transformed by the sixth century and, by implication, entrenched thereafter.¹³ We argue instead for a narrative of discontinuity and failure. Efforts to cast sex as sinful were repeatedly fractured – by disagreement, dissent and considerations of gender. Theologians could rarely agree on the precise relationship of sin and desire; priests and laity alike persisted in marrying or flouting sexual strictures; and men’s and women’s sexual histories have never been the same. The Christian inventions of sexual sin and the figure of the virgin were strongly gendered. It was far more radical to enforce chastity on men than women, and the male virgin was a much more astounding figure than its feminine counterpart. In this chapter we start by sketching a mostly conventional picture of concupiscence, in its narrow sense of sinfully libidinous desire or lust, in the lives and thoughts of premodern Europeans, but then show how recent scholarship has cracked that image apart. To do this, we need to go back to the beginning.

The gospels of ‘Mark’, ‘Matthew’, ‘Luke’ and ‘John’ were written c. 70–95 CE following the bloody ‘Jewish War’ against the Roman occupiers of Palestine (66–70 CE) by Jewish rebels who followed the teachings of Jesus, a seditious Jew and faith healer who had been executed by the Romans with the assistance of Jewish leaders a generation earlier.¹⁴ In the words of Elaine Pagels, the New Testament gospels are ‘wartime literature’.¹⁵ Their purpose was to promote the teachings of a particular minority Jewish sect which believed the end of the world was nigh. Warnings about required sexual behaviour form a small part of the four canonical gospels’ warnings of apocalypse. Most enigmatic was this passage from Matthew: ‘there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.’¹⁶ More explicitly condemnatory of lust was the extension of adultery to ‘every one who looks at a woman lustfully’; such a man was an ‘adulterer in his heart’.¹⁷ To these scattered sexual references we can add some traditional condemnations of fornication and adultery, but it is impossible to say that sex is a major theme of the four gospels.¹⁸ Stronger messages were contained in the letters of Paul, writing in the 50s of the first century CE, and whose message to the Christian community at Corinth made an overwhelmingly enduring impact on sexual ethics. In expectation of the imminent coming of the kingdom, Paul recommends harnessing energies in a manner best for each individual. It is best not to marry, but better to marry than to burn with passion.¹⁹

Other New Testament books reflected the Jewish tradition of high praise for the married state and procreative family life, and several texts denouncing the celibate message were ascribed to Paul in following centuries.²⁰ Sexual asceticism, or abstinence, was uncommon but not unknown in the Jewish and gentile worlds where the followers of Christ were attempting to gain a footing. A Jewish sect known as the Essenes, who lived in caves by the Dead Sea from around the second century BCE to the first century CE, practised total poverty and celibacy (non-marriage) in a manner similar to the early Christian monastic groups which would develop from the early fourth century.²¹ Roman religion and culture held some respect for virgins, with the all-female vestal virgins occupying an especially sacred position.²² Both ancient Greek and Roman cultures possessed the notion that sexual restraint was indicative of personal nobility. The Stoic philosophy, which would reach its height of popularity among Roman aristocrats in the first and second centuries CE, held some echoes of early Christian asceticism in advocating the restraint of bodily passions.²³ As the new religion gained more converts among gentile communities (with their ancient traditions on chastity, moderation and self-control [sophrosyne]) than Jewish ones, the message of sexual renunciation took hold more firmly than it might otherwise have done.²⁴

Not all have been convinced. Kathy Gaca has rejected the notion that Stoicism advocated sexual renunciation and refutes the possibility that the philosophy had direct influence on early Christian sexual theory.²⁵ Debate continues over the extent to which Christians revolutionized or merely intensified the ideal of sexual abstinence; what we can say is they had particular motives for developing it and that it gained a pre-eminence in the new religion’s ethical code that it had not possessed among its pagan or Jewish forebears.²⁶ Christianity’s success relied in part on the moral example of its leaders; ‘the conjunction of self-abnegation and tenacity was revered by Christians’.²⁷ Although Christians were more interested in martyrdom than sexual purity between the second and fourth centuries, all began to change when Christianity received approval by Constantine I in 313, and became the offic...