Sex In History. Part 4: The Medieval Sexual Ideal

This ideal was a highly consistent one and was embodied in a most elaborate code of regulations. The Christian code was based, quite simply, upon the conviction that the sexual act was to be avoided like the plague, except for the bare minimum necessary to keep the race in existence. Even when performed for this purpose it remained a regrettable necessity. Those who could were exhorted to avoid it entirely, even if married. For those incapable of such heroic self-denial there was a great spider`s web of regulations whose over-riding purpose was to make the sexual act as joyless as possible and to restrict its performance to the minimum - that is, to restrict it exclusively to the function of procreation. It was not actually the sexual act which was damnable, but the pleasure derived from it - and this pleasure remained damnable even when the act was performed for the purpose of procreation, a notion which reached its crudest expression with the invention of the chemise carouse, a sort of heavy nightshirt, with a suitably placed hole, through which a husband could impregnate his wife while avoiding any other contact.153 The belief that even within marriages the sexual act should not be performed for pleasure, still persists to the present day, more especially in the Catholic Church, where it remains official doctrine; it was publicly reasserted by the Popes once again, while this book was being written.

Not only the pleasure of the sexual act was held sinful, but also the sensation of desire for a person of the opposite sex even when unconsummated. Since the love of a man for a woman was held to be simply desire, this led to the incontrovertible proposition that no man should love his wife. In fact Peter Lombard maintained, in his apologetic De excusatione coitus, that for a man to love his wife to ardently is a sin worse than adultery - "Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est."

It was about the eighth century that the Church began to develop the enormously strict system which ruled in the Middle Ages. A series of "penitential books" began to appear which explored the subject of sex in all its details; every misdeed was described and elaborated at length, and penalties were prescribed for each.

This code comprised three main propositions. First all, who could were urged to attempt the ideal of complete celibacy while for those with priestly functions it was obligatory. In this direction the mediaeval Church could scarcely go further than had the early fathers. Jovinian had been excommunicated for daring to deny, what St. Augustine had asserted, that virginity was a better state than marriage. St. Jerome tolerated marriage simply because it provided the world with potential virgins. But by an extraordinary twist of the imagination, the idea evolved that virgins were the brides of Christ. Hence it followed that anyone who seduced a virgin was not commiting fornication but the more serious crime of adultery, and what is more, adultery at the expense of Christ. The outraged deity was therefore entitled to the revenge which tradition always accorded to a husband in such a position. How literally this fantastic doctrine was held can be shown by a quotation from Cyprian: "If a husband come and see his wife lying with another man, is he not indignant and maddened ? . . . How indignant and angered then must Christ our Lord and Judge be, when He sees a virgin, dedicated to Himself, and consecrated to His holiness, lying with a man.... she who has been guilty of this crime is an adulteress, not against a husband, but Christ." Evidently the saint saw nothing ludicrous in the premise that the son of God would feel exactly the emotions of outraged property sense which would be felt by the most boorish of human beings.

Once given that virginity was a good, the principle was, as usual, extended far beyond the sexual act, as we see, for instance, in the case of the virgin Gorgonia, who "with all her body and members there of. . . bruised and broken most grievouslie" yet refused the attentions of a doctor because her modesty forbade her to be seen or touched by a man; and was rewarded by God with a miraculous cure.

Since virginity was a good, it was good for wives to deny themselves to their husbands, and since doubtless many of them were suffering from the shock of a painful initiation as well as the conflicts of conscience, many of them did so. Whether this increased the sum total of chastity seems doubtful, since many husbands were driven to vice in consequence, to the point where the Church felt obliged to intervene.

The second step was to place an absolute ban on all forms of sexual activity other than intercourse between married persons, carried out with the object of procreating. In some penitentials fornication was declared a worse sin than murder. In the penitentials of Theodore and Bede the penance imposed for simple fornication was one year, but the penalty was increased according to the frequency of the act and the age and discretion of the parties. Adultery was more serious than fornication with an unmarried person, and sexual connection with a monk or a nun more serious still, while if a member of the clergy fornicated with a monk or nun, Dunstan`s penalty was ten years fast, with perpetual lamentation and abstention from meat. Later, the seducer of a nun was denied burial in consecrated ground. But it was not the sexual act alone which was tabooed. Attempting to fornicate, kissing, even thinking of fornication were forbidden and called for penalties: in the last case, the penance was forty days. Nor was it the intention alone which made the crime. Involuntary nocturnal pollutions were a sin the offender must rise at once and sing seven penitential psalms, with a further thirty in the morning. If the pollution occurred when he had fallen asleep in church, he must sing the whole psalter.

The penitentials also devoted a disproportionately large amount of their space to prescribing penalties for homosexuality and for bestiality, but the sin upon which the greatest stress of all was laid was masturbation. In the five comparatively short mediaeval penitential codes, there are twenty-two paragraphs dealing with various degrees of sodomy and bestiality, and no fewer than twenty-five dealing with masturbation on the part of laymen, to say nothing of others dealing separately with masturbation on the part of the clergy. According to Aquinas, it was a greater sin than fornication. This is particularly significant, for we now know that the belief that sexual pleasure is wicked springs primarily from parental taboos on infantile masturbation; the fact that the punishment is given when the child is too young to under stand its significance, and when masturbation is the only means by which he can afford himself pleasure by his own unaided efforts, results in a fear of pleasure becoming embedded in the unconscious, and being generalized until it becomes a fear of pleasure in all its forms. No doubt the Church realized, even if unconsciously, that the maintenance of its system of repression was ultimately founded on the willingness of parents to frown on infantile masturbation, and, therefore, concentrated a great deal of attention on the matter.

This interpretation would not hold water if it could be shown that the Church, while condemning sexual pleasure welcomed alternative forms of physical enjoyment. But it is easy to show that this is not the case. Porphyry, as early as the third century set the tone by condemning pleasure in all its forms. "Horse racing, the theatre, dancing, marriage and mutton chops were equally accursed; those who indulged in them were servants not of God but of the Devil.`` Augustine called him the most learned of all the philosophers and established this doctrine upon a formal basis.

Of the existence of such prohibitions, most people have some dim appreciation, since they are still maintained, if with diminished strength, in many quarters today. What is less generally realized is the extensive nature of the attempt which was made to limit and control the sexual act when performed within the marital relationship. Thus the sexual act must be performed in only one position, and numerous penalties were prescribed for using variants, the approach "more canino" - which was held to afford the most pleasure being regarded with especial horror and calling for seven years of penance. Confessors were required to ask specifically about these and every other possibility, and the manuals with which they were later supplied contain questions concerning every imaginable variant of the sexual act: in the present condition of the laws against obscenity it would be inadvisable to quote them here.

Not content with this, the Church proceeded to cut down the number of days per annum upon which even married couples might legitimately perform the sexual act. First, it was made illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which effectively removed the equivalent of five months in the year. Then it was made illegal for forty days before Easter and forty days before Christmas, and for three days before attending communion (and there were regulations requiring frequent attendance at communion). It was also forbidden from the time of conception to forty days after parturition. It was, of course forbidden during any penance.

Such were the ideas from which European sexual ideals have been principally derived. As we shall see, both the general conception of sex as sinful, and many specific prohibitions and enactments, survived almost unmutilated until modern times and still affect our conduct today. Nevertheless it would be giving a false impression to suggest that the Church prepared these codes with the businesslike and ruthless detachment of a Russian commissary. Rather is it the case they were thrown together in a passion of despairing guilt . The picture we get is of a number of individual figures, like Augustine or Aquinas, Damiani or Bernard, tormented by the virtual certainty of damnation for all who so much thought of sexual pleasure, desperately striving to build dam against the rising tides of sensuality, in a frantic attempt to save people from the results of their own folly. Never mind the justifications, never mind the cruelty and injustice, if only this frightful disaster can be prevented.

Only real desperation is enough to explain the ruthlessness with which the Church repeatedly distorted and even falsified the Biblical record in order to produce justification for its laws. For such extreme asceticism is not enjoined by the Bible, and certainly not by the New Testament. As Lecky shows, "The Fathers laid down as a distinct proposition that pious frauds were justifiable and even laudable", and he adds, "immediately, all ecclesiastical literature became tainted with a spirit of the most unblushing mendacity."

The Church claimed that this stringent taboo on sex had been proclaimed by St. Paul, but in point of fact, although Paul had gone much further than anyone before him in the direction of discountenancing sexual activity, he did not get nearly as far as this. In view of the vast edifice of repressive legislation erected on this tiny base, it is worth giving Paul`s actual words, well known as the quotation is:

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. For I would that all men were even as myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment. If thou marry thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry she hath not sinned...
In this passage we can see the expression of a belief in the general desirability of sexual continence, but also the quite distinct recognition that continence is a "gift of God" which many do not have, and a specific assertion that it is not sinful to marry, and that the purpose of marriage is to avoid fornication; this can only mean that it is to provide a legal alternative. Nowadays the Pauline view is expressed by saying that the purpose of marriage is "the relief of concupiscence" while the extreme mediaeval view is expressed by saying that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation.
Paul also made it clear that he was not propounding the official teaching of Christ, but was simply giving his personal opinion in reply to a number of questions which had been put to him by the Church at Corinth.

Attaching, as it did, such importance to preventing masturbation, the Church sought a Biblical justification, and had no hesitation in twisting the facts to its purpose. Genesis xxxviii refers to Onan`s seed falling upon the ground and his subsequently being put to death. The idea was established - and is still widely believed - that this passage refers to masturbation, and the word onanism has come to be used as a synonym for it. Actually, it refers to the practice of `coitus interruptus`; and the reason why Onan was put to death was that he had violated the law of the levirate, by which a man must provide his deceased brother`s wife with offspring.128 Even the Catholic writer Canon A. de Smet, in his book Betrothment and Marriage, admits this:

"From the text and context, however, it would seem that the blame of the sacred writer applies directly to the wrongful frustration of the law of the levitate, intended by Onan, rather than the spilling of the seed."
It was as part of its comprehensive attempt to make the sexual act as difficult as possible that the Church devised laws against the practice of abortion. Neither Romans, Jews nod Greeks had opposed abortion, but Tertullian, following an inaccurate translation of Exodus xxi. 22, which refers to punishing a man who injures a pregnant woman, but which appeared to prescribe punishment for injuring the foetus, gave currency to the idea that the Bible held abortion to be a crime. He devoted much ingenuity to determining when the foetus became animate, and decided that it was after forty days in the case of males, eighty in the case of females. (Modern English law is even more absurd, for it does not stay the execution of pregnant women until the fourth month of pregnancy, yet may prosecute for abortion before that time.) Jerome, though knew Latin, perpetuated the error. Though the error has long since been exposed, the Church still maintains this position, and it has become incorporated in the law of the state which beautifully demonstrates that moral laws are not really derived from Biblical authority, but that Biblical authority is sought to justify regulations which, because of unconscious prejudices, seem `natural` and right.

Still more drastically, the Church revamped the story of the Fall to support its general position on sex. The doctrine was gradually propagated that the reason for Adam`s expulsion from the garden of Eden was that he had performed the sexual act, or at least had acquired sexual knowledge. The temptation with the apple became the symbol of a sexual temptation, and Eve, the temptress, was specifically a sexual temptress. As at embroidery on this it was asserted (and is still widely remembered) that menstruation represented a curse imposed on women in punishment for Eve`s part in this seduction. But a single reading of the Book of Genesis is enough to show that this is not what was asserted. It contains, as a matter of fact, two versions of the Fall. In the first (Genesis III), Adam eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it is for acquiring this knowledge that he is expelled. In the second (Genesis VI), certain angels have intercourse with humans, teach them the arts and sciences, and are expelled from heaven. This is the story of which Milton made use: and it is the version to which Christ makes a passing reference. Both stories concern the acquisition of knowledge by men and are versions of the Prometheus myth - Lucifer, the light-bringer, is an exact analogue of Prometheus who steals fire from the Gods.

That the Church`s fear of sex was exaggerated and obsessive will already be clear: but, more than this, it was fundamentally superstitious. It preserved the primitive magical belief in the power of sex to contaminate. It was for this reason that married couples must not only abstain from intercourse for three nights after their marriage - the so-called Tobias nights - but having once performed the sexual act, must not enter a church for thirty days after, and then only on condition of doing forty days penance and bringing an offering. Some of the magical precautions taken at and after the wedding, including the blessing of the bride bed, have already been described. Theodore further extended this principle of contamination when he ruled (what had been previously denied) that it was a sin for a menstruating woman to enter a church, and imposed a penance for infraction of this rule. For the same reason, a woman who had borne a baby had to be ceremonially purified before she could be re-admitted to communion. These primitive superstitions derived from pre-Christian Jewry. There can hardly be any better example of the extraordinary persistence of the past than the fact that to this very day the Church maintains in its rites this pagan purification ceremony, under the name of the Churching of Women. Indeed, it carried such ideas much further than had the Jews, as we shall shortly see.

It was, of course, because of the magical character of the sex act that it automatically converted spousals to marriage, and this was why marriages of children could be declared void if copulation had not taken place. Furthermore, if two person within the prohibited degrees married each other, copulation turned this into a marriage which, though illegal, was valid and which the Church then had formally to annul. The modern practice of treating such a marriage as automatically void dates only from the reign of William IV.

Still more eloquent of the superstitious nature of the Church approach to sex are its regulations concerning incestuous marriage. Many peoples, though by no means all, have regarded it as incestuous to marry a parent or a sibling. The Christian Saxons had regarded it as incestuous to marry first cousin, arguing that since marriage makes man and wife "one flesh" to marry a deceased husband`s cousin is incestuous. But in the eleventh century the Church became increasing obsessed with incest fears and extended the ban to second and finally to third cousins. (It was later reduced.) But this was not all. So strongly was the principle of sympathetic contagion embedded, so intense were the fears of incest, that godfather and godmothers were included in the ban; next, even the relations of the priests who had baptized or confirmed a person finally, even two persons who had stood sponsor to the same child might not marry each other!

No doubt, in some small villages, these regulations must sometimes have eliminated every available candidate and condemned people to celibacy in just the same way as do the complicated exogamic regulations of the Australian black-fellow.

In addition, no Christian could validly marry a Jew or the follower of any other religion. Indeed, copulation with a Jew was regarded as a form of bestiality, and incurred the same penances. In this there is a certain irony, since it was from the Jews that the Christians derived their laws against bestiality. Marriage with a heretic, however, though illicit, was not invalid until the Council of Trent tightened up ecclesiastical laws in the Counter-Reformation.

It might be thought that this lengthy catalogue of prohibitions would have exhausted the list of attempts which zealots made to complicate and hinder the performance of the sexual act, but there is yet one more to record. They argued that no one might marry for a second time, even if the first partner had died, a doctrine which was alleged to be supported by the Pauline text saying that a man who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery; though Paul had made it clear that this referred to putting away a living wife. It was also as part of this programme, and not from ethical considerations, that the mediaeval Church set its face against polygamy. The Jews, of course, had been polygamous, and the early Christian fathers - unlike the Greeks and Romans - did not object to it. Even the strict Augustine thought it was permissible to take a second wife if the first were barren, and many early English and Irish kings lived in open polygamy.

The proposition that the sexual act had power to contaminate was difficult to reconcile with the fact the Christ, who had been born of a woman, was without sin. To claim descent from the union between a woman and a god was a standard way of claiming semi-divine status in the classical world, and it was in accordance with this principle that the Jewish Messiah was expected to be born of such a union. The Christians adapted this to their ends by claiming that He had been born of a "virgin", that is, without performance of the contaminating sexual act, though in classical myth, of course, there was no such reservation. But even this degree of antisepsis was insufficient and the further idea was propagated that Christ had been born without contact with "the parts of shame" (as the Germans still call them) by emerging through the breast or navel. So widely was this believed that Ratramnus wrote a long, controversial book to prove that He had been born through the sexual organs in the normal way. (A pendant issue was the question whether Christ was divine from the moment of conception or only from some later point in intra-uterine life: this, too, persisted to modern times, and was only settled in 1856.) Others, who found it difficult to believe that even God could impregnate the Blessed Mary without her losing her virginity developed the idea that she was impregnated through the ear, by the Archangel Gabriel, or by God Himself. An Arab physician declares, "Nafkhae is the name of that particular form of air or vapour which the angel Gabriel is said to have blown or caused to pass from his coat sleeve into the windpipe of Mary, the mother of Jesus, for the purpose of impregnation." In some early paintings the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, is seen descending at great speed with the divine sperm in its bill; in others the seminal words are seen passing through a lily, on their way from Gabriel`s mouth to Mary`s ear, in order to remove any impurities; in one early carving, they came direct from God`s mouth through a tube which led under her skirts.

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