Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (18 page)

The cruelty of his persecutions can scarcely be excused by the purity of his motives. In defiance of every principle of justice . . . a painful death was inflicted by the amputation of the sinful instrument, or the insertion of sharp reeds into the pores and tubes of most exquisite sensibility . . . A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or servant: the guilt of the green faction of the rich [which opposed the emperor], and the enemies of [Empress] Theodora, was presumed by the judges, and pederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.

As we have seen, the ancient Greek and Roman worlds based their sexual categorizations not on differences in gender but on the active-passive dichotomy. The fact that a man had sex with other men was usually incidental. The key question was what exactly he did with them. The Bible made no such distinctions, and neither did Western sex law after Justinian. For about fifteen hundred years,
all
homosexuals would be associated with heresy and pathology, and would suffer dearly under the law.

As late as 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court relied in part on the Roman law used against the Thessalonican charioteer when it upheld the state of Georgia’s ban on “homosexual sodomy.”
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Rather than condemning the statute as hateful and unjust, Chief Justice Warren Burger cited the law as an example of “millennia of moral teaching.” Burger omitted the fact that the Roman law probably left half of all homoerotic sex partners—the active ones—in the clear. He also failed to mention that the Roman law had sparked a popular revolt and thousands of deaths, and caused a permanent reduction of imperial power.

In the centuries after Justinian, life would get a lot worse for homosexuals and, indeed, all people who enjoyed sex.

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THE MIDDLE AGES: A CROWD CONDEMNED

U
NTIL THE FOURTH century AD, the followers of Jesus Christ made up one of many outlaw religious cults in the Roman Empire. As the early Christians fled from persecution, their souls yearned for the world to come, a deliverance they were convinced was just around the corner. The men who built Christianity into an organized religion lived, at least for a time, as ascetic monks or hermits, and treated their devotion to God as part of the physical ordeal. Their outlook hardened further as they sought to distinguish themselves from the licentious pagan world around them. It was from this hothouse of deprivation that Christian doctrine announced that the body was an object of horror, and that the soul could be saved only through rejection of the flesh.

Had Christians not gained real political power, they would be remembered as an austere sect. Their insistence on the conflict between the body (which craves sex) and the spirit (which sex destroys) would be a point of historical interest, nothing more. There were a number of religious sects that did battle with the body, some of which had more adherents than Christianity in its early days. That was not the way things turned out, of course. From the reign of Emperor Constantine to the present, the Christian notion that sexual love brings spiritual death has been the cornerstone of Western sex law.

In fairly short order, Christianity transformed itself from a collection of infighting provincial fanatics into a critically important branch of the Roman government. The first step was Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, which took the heat off Christianity by giving official toleration to all religious beliefs. By the end of the century, Christianity had become Rome’s official religion, and the oppressed had become the oppressors. Under the influence of bishops, the empire furiously suppressed paganism. At the same time, Christianity’s various factions cohered into a sophisticated organization. As Rome’s hold over Europe, Africa, and the Occident peeled away in the coming centuries, the church was the only institutional power capable of filling the vacuum. The long-term consequences for sex law could not have been greater.
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Jesus Christ said much about love, but precious little about sex. Although his own life was relatively chaste by local standards, the fine points of sexual behavior were not his main concerns. He made no statements on carnal relations between the unmarried or homosexuals, he was tolerant of prostitutes, and he was less harsh toward adulterers than the Jews had been. But Jesus the man did not last long in this world, and soon his word was taken up by others. His most influential followers were consumed with sex in all of its permutations and devoted much of their attention to questions of sexual morality. Jesus’s relative indifference never prevented the Christian fathers from devising a violent array of restrictions in the Savior’s name.

THE DOMINANT FIGURE in the first generation of Christian sages was the Apostle Paul, who taught that sexual behavior could be nearly as bad as murder: Homosexuals, masturbators, adulterers, anyone who sought sexual satisfaction for its own sake were, he said, to be barred from the kingdom of God. Intercourse between husband and wife for the purpose of procreation was the only way for people to join as “one flesh” with each other, though Paul was no great proponent of matrimony either. For Paul, marriage was a crutch for those too weak in their faith to give up sex entirely. “It is better to marry than to burn,” he said—but not much better.

Like his contemporaries, Paul was convinced that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. The world as they knew it was about to end. Such earthly trivialities as marriage and children were distractions from the urgent spiritual business at hand. In the meantime, he taught his followers to follow a carnal holding pattern. Those who were virgins should remain so if they could stand it; those who were already married should stay with their husbands and wives. No more divorce, remarriage, prostitutes, or concubines were permitted. To keep a lid on adulterous desires, Paul instructed husbands and wives to submit to each other’s sexual demands. Celibacy was the preferred means of preparing for salvation in the next world, but Paul recognized that only spiritual giants (like himself) could carry it off: “I wish all men were as I am,” he mused, but he knew they were not. For the common Christian, sex was acceptable in limited quantities, at least until Judgment Day.
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That day never came, either in Paul’s lifetime or afterward, but rather than adjust religious doctrine to the ongoing realities of human desire, succeeding Christian fathers amped up the campaign against the libido. Sex and salvation became mutually exclusive. After Paul came Saint Jerome (circa 347–420), who taught that
all
sexual relations were unclean—even in marriage. “Everything [is] poison which bears within it the seeds of sensual pleasure,” he preached. No less strident in his disapproval of all sexuality was Jerome’s contemporary, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), bishop and later saint. A late convert to Christianity, Saint Augustine perfected the idea of original sin, the doctrine that pits the needs of the sex organs directly against the purity of the spirit.

Before the Fall, Augustine wrote, sex was an arid affair. Reproduction was accomplished by something akin to copulation, but it was a function of “will,” not lust. Human genitalia were obedient tools, like hands or feet. Everything changed after Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise. Then they looked down at their crotches and saw monsters, fleshy tyrants demanding to be touched and rubbed. Adam and Eve became incapable of refusing their bodies’ demands and hated themselves for it, so they made aprons of leaves to cover their shame. However, the first human genitals remained ruthless and insistent, as has every sex organ since. In paradise, reproduction was morally neutral. Outside of Eden, it became simply fucking. Wrote Augustine: “The insubordination of [genitalia], and their defiance of the will, is clear testimony of the punishment of man’s first sin.”

The only weapon against genital demands was moral will, then, but the smart money was always on the gonads. A good Christian might resist the urge for a while, but Augustine knew the world well enough to see that a lifetime of abstinence was too much to hope for. As he was composing one of his tracts, he was told that “a man of eighty-four, who had lived a life of continence under religious observance with a pious wife for twenty-five years, [had] just bought himself a music girl for his pleasure.” As Augustine saw it, the sins of Adam and Eve and the lasting damnation of humanity were to blame for this old man’s fall from grace. Every stirring of desire, every child born from lust, was proof positive of original sin. We are all, and always will be, a
massa damnata
: a crowd condemned.

Augustine was no stranger to sexual urges, as he readily confessed. A veteran of many affairs, including a fifteen-year relationship (and a son) with a concubine, Augustine had had more than his share of sexual experience for much of his early life. “I poured myself out,” he wrote, “frothed and floundered in the tumultuous sea of my fornications.” He loved his concubine, and only left her for a marriage his mother had arranged with an eleven-year-old. While he waited for his wife to come of age, he was still “a slave of lust . . . so I got myself another woman, in no sense a wife.” Meanwhile, he prayed, although with something less than full faith: “Grant me chastity and continence,” he begged of God, “but not yet.” It was only after Augustine had lived a rich sex life that he converted to Christianity and went on to become one of the most powerful advocates of celibacy the world has ever known.
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IF SEX WAS by nature impure and disgusting, it was only a short step to conclude that Jesus must have come from something better. The Christian apologist Arnobius was typical in his claim that it was blasphemous to believe the Savior was born “as the result of the spewing forth of senseless semen.” Christ’s mother was recast as the virginal opposite of Eve, a feminine ideal molded from the dry bricks of abstinence. One extreme early Christian sect held that Jesus had come into the world as an adult, and barred the sacraments to anyone who had actually had sex, even if they were married.

If Christian life was, in the words of the second-century theologian Tatian, “unthinkable outside the bounds of virginity,” what was a Christian to do with his libido? Augustine faced down his desires with faith and willpower. Others went to war with their bodies. Saint Benedict could not get the image of a woman he had seen out of his mind, so he tore off his clothes and rolled on beds of thorns until his entire body was cut up. “Thus,” the story goes, “he forced out the sickness of his soul through the wounds of his body, and conquered sin.” Others, like the renowned third-century scholar Origen, cut their genitals off entirely.

The church outlawed castration in 325, but still pressed the message that spiritual purity required chastity. Christians didn’t invent the ideal of sexual continence, but they took it to remarkable lengths. The lives of the early saints and monks, told time and again by priests to their flocks, often included episodes of intense sexual temptation successfully resisted. Augustine was inspired by the example of Saint Anthony, who spent thirteen years in the desert battling the nasty thoughts Satan sent his way: “At night the devil would turn himself into the attractive form of a beautiful woman, omitting no detail that might provoke lascivious thoughts.” Saint Abraham was of a lesser order than Anthony, but he still got high marks for running away from his wife on their wedding night.

Nor was there any shortage of female saints going to extreme lengths to remain chaste. Saint Alexandra walled herself up in a tomb in Egypt for ten years in order not to tempt men. Saint Radegund was captured and forced into a marriage with a Frankish king circa 540, but refused his advances and spent her nights praying on the cold ground near the privy. The king gave up after a while and let her escape to a nunnery. The greatest admiration was accorded to female saints who chose torture and death over sexual impurity. Rather than submit to the desires of a Roman consul, the third-century Saint Agatha of Sicily cheerfully let herself be stretched on a rack and torn apart with iron hooks.

Although these are impossible examples to follow, lay Christians were somehow supposed to do so. No major Western religion had ever demanded that its rank and file fight so hard against their reproductive urges. Restrictions on sexuality had always been in place, but the goal was to
direct
sex, not stop it. The difference between Christian and pagan sex policy could not have been starker. Under Roman law, men and women (at least those of rank) were supposed to marry, and were punished if they did not have children. Men were free to keep concubines and use as many prostitutes as they could afford. However, as Rome was Christianized, the ideal of celibacy became government policy. The older laws were thrown away.

When lawmakers view sex as bad, they write bad sex laws. No one found a way to regenerate without coitus, so sex had to be tolerated at least some of the time, but the church quickly started to restrict the options. Under earlier Roman law, marriages existed so long as there was “consent,” and men were free to abduct women as wives so long as they or their families later “agreed” to the union. That began to change during the reign of Constantine. Marriages started to become formalized, concubinage outlawed, and divorce made much harder to accomplish. Sex was still permitted among husbands and wives, but barely. Building on Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great (circa 540–604) declared that marital intercourse was blameless only when there was no pleasure involved. By the end of the sixth century, new rules were coming into place to make sure that was the case.
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THE PENITENTIALS AND THE PRICE OF SEX