Virgin: The Untouched History (18 page)

This is why, when it came to sexuality, Paul did not simply write "Flee fornication" (i Cor. 6:18) and leave it at that. A totally celibate community would have been in keeping with his feelings on sex and with the goals of his Christianity, but it would not have been sustainable. Inevitably, individuals would be unable to toe the line, and would either leave, be punished, or, worst of all from the perspective of developing a completely undivided heart, lie. Nor would universal celibacy have helped to keep the community stable. The Corinthians had always lived in a world of married households. Life without marriage and households would have felt anarchic and confusing to the Christians and their pagan neighbors alike. Insisting on universal celibacy would have been a horrendous tactical error.

Thus the fateful words of i Corinthians 7:9, "But if they do not have self-control, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn." The burning to which Paul referred was not, as is occasionally suggested, a burning in the fires of Hell, but rather the burning of sexual desire. In essence, what Paul was saying was that not every person will be able to resist sexual impulses, and if one cannot, it is better to give in lawfully than to be constantly tormented and distracted by it. Extant Jewish law provided for the establishment of sanctified households through marriage, and while Paul made it clear that this was definitely second best, he was equally clear (as was Jesus) about stating that not everyone had been granted the knack of sexual continence. This being so, marriage was the preferred, and religiously kosher, alternative: "he who gives in marriage does well, he who does not does better" (1 Cor. 7:38).

Such a moderating strategy is emblematic of Paul. We can see the direction in which the Christian dogma of sexuality and human relationships would soon take off, and at the same time we can see how vital the married household remained. The critical change, in Paul, is that the body is no longer something which can be treated, as it was in classical Judaism and throughout the ancient world, with a combination of indulgence and discipline. In the penultimate chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul makes explicit the fact that all flesh is always already corrupt: "And I say this, brothers, that flesh and blood is not able to inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption" (1 Cor. 15:50).

In a single intellectual move, one that Paul made many times and in various contexts, we see what H. D. Betz and Peter Brown characterize as "a particularly fateful 'theological abbreviation.'" Flesh is equated with corruption. For Christianity and Western culture generally, there was no turning back. Thus it is ultimately unsurprising that Paul says virtually nothing about virginity in i Corinthians. He doesn't have to. Even allowing for the fact that, as Paul admits, Jesus gave no specific instructions in regard to virgins, the course that virginity would take within the developing church was already evident, for, as Paul put it, "he who does not does better."

Boycotting the Womb, Emulating Eden

As Paul's example demonstrates, Christianity's early philosophers and theologians had their work cut out for them. Justifying, explaining, and expanding the teachings of Jesus was only part of the job. The growing Church had needs of its own. The presence of an increasingly large and varied flock meant that, among other things, there was an immediate need for doctrine regarding the physical body, including the arena of sex.

It should be stressed that the generalized misogyny of early Christianity is only coincidentally Christian. From our twenty-first-century vantage point, seeing how the treatises and diatribes of the church Fathers mounted up, we may get the impression of a deeply misogynist Christian conspiracy. This is only partly true. Early Christianity's attitudes toward sex and women were indeed deeply misogynist, but they were neither new nor a conspiracy. What we often perceive as being all of a single monolithic piece, driven by a single overt agenda, was a much more gradual and far less uniform accretion of ideological sediment. While Christian misogyny did develop its own specific tendencies, in its association of the female body and female sexuality with sin and Satan, that kind of thinking in relation to women would have seemed only slightly unusual to any first- or second-century Greek, Roman, Syrian, or Jew.

One of the thick early layers in the bedrock of Christian virginity was a philosophy known as encratism, from the Greek
enkrateia,
or continence. Heavily influenced by the
Diatessaron,
the first version of the Gospels that combined the four canonical Gospels into a single text, encratism explored the question of the appropriate place of sex in the lives of Christians from the perspective of the promised second coming of Jesus. Tatian, the
Diatessaron
's compiler, and the anonymous author (s) of the apocryphal
Acts of Judas Thomas
felt that there was no place for sin among the people of God as they waited for the end of life as they knew it.

Christians wanted fervently to live out their principles as the second coming drew nigh. For several reasons, renouncing sexuality was part of that. It was considered advantageous not to have a human relationship that might interfere with the relationship between the individual and the Divine. Additionally, the Christian had the challenge of making one's human self as close to the angels as possible. It was believed that the
vita angelica,
the angelic life, was one of
apatheia,
a Greek Stoic concept meaning passionlessness or desirelessness. The ideal life was the life of the spirit, the life promised to believers by the doctrine of the second coming and the "world to come" in which communion with God was constant. The physical body, on the other hand, served only to anchor humans to the cycle of birth, death, and decay, the daily demands of keeping the body alive and perpetuating the species serving only to further distance them from their destiny with God.

The most ethical and productive thing to do, as a Christian, was literally to go on strike. The phrase "boycotting the womb" has often been applied to this sit-down strike against human biological imperative, and it is apt. "The works of women," namely birth and its inevitable result, death, were on the short list for elimination, since they had no place in the "world to come." This meant celibacy.

Ghosts in the Machine: Clement and Origen

In the era of Clement of Alexandria (late second century and early third) just as in Paul's day, however, celibacy just wasn't that simple. Not everyone could sustain celibacy, and it was a troublesome truth that fervent insistence upon celibacy tended to reduce the numbers of well-off householders likely to participate at high levels in the Church. For a church that had traditionally drawn many of its most effective clergy from the ranks of married male heads of household, this inevitably caused friction. Besides, as Clement pointed out, grumbling that the encratites "set their hopes on their private parts," there was more to being a Christian than just being celibate.

A moderate man, Clement's notion of the ideal relationship of the Christian to his penis was essentially Greek. The body need not be entirely renounced, he believed, if one could retain a conscious, rational control of it.
Orexis,
the biological urges that were the unavoidable "ghosts in the machine" of a physical body, were untidy and annoying, but not overpowering. There was a place for sex in Clement's Christianity, but such carefully passionless sex proved even more difficult than encratism.

We find some echoes of this rationalist, Greek approach to sex much later, in the works of another African, Augustine of Hippo. But in the hundred-odd years between Clement's era and Augustine's lay a figure whose approach to virginity, sexuality, and the body was so dramatic, drastic, and, in its vivid misanthropy, so popular that Clement's moderation didn't stand a chance.

This celebrity extremist was Origen, son of a martyred Alexandrian Christian. The body, for third-century Origen, was worth nothing unless it was used as a tool for spiritual transformation. It is accepted as being probably true, for example, that Origen had himself castrated in the name of his faith. The body, he believed, was what the spirit had fallen into when it lost its unity with God. The distance between the body and the spirit constituted an unbridgeable and tragic gap that only widened as the body succumbed to the proddings of its
logismoi.

Like Clement's
orexis',
Origen's
logismoi
were the various appetites of the flesh; unlike Clement's version, they were not essentially benign. Coupled with an ardent belief that Adam did not "know" Eve in the Garden of Eden, and thus human origins could confidently be said not to include sex of any kind, Origen felt quite sanguine about presenting virginity as the fitting ornament of a disciplined, earnest, and above all successful Christianity.
Adunado
in action, virginity was simultaneously a sign of moving toward oneness with God and a principled resistance to the temptations of the flesh. When Origen beckoned "I beseech you, therefore, be transformed. Resolve to know that in you there is a capacity to be transformed," it was a literal and fundamental transformation of human instinct and social reality that he had in mind, and nothing short of entirely abolishing the libido would do.

Never Satisfied: Jerome

Despite his immense learning, erudite and prolific writings, and immaculate intellectual and spiritual heritage—he was fluent in several languages including Greek, had traveled widely, spent two years living the hermit life in the desert at Chalcis, studied at the knee of Gregory Nazianzen, and, among other things, produced the first Latin version of the Bible—Jerome never did learn to play by the unwritten rules of what was fast becoming the old boys' club of the Church. A man of spectacularly irritable temper and infinitesimally small tolerance for deviation from what he perceived as being the right way to do things, Jerome's enormous influence on the Church was achieved partly in spite of himself. He was a harsh and constant critic of what he saw as inappropriate actions on the part of the Church and its clergy, and was literally run out of town (in this case Rome) after his protector, Pope Damasus I, died in 384. Despite the efforts of some of his friends to save Jerome from his own caustic extremism, Jerome managed in the space of a scant three years to alienate the Roman clergy to the point that he was compelled to live out the rest of his life in exile in Bethlehem.

Unwelcome among his fellow clerics, whom Jerome frequently castigated in classic do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do fashion for practices including the maintenance of intimate spiritual friendships with monied Christian matrons, Jerome himself spent the bulk of his adult life supported and surrounded by rich Roman women. Marcella, his patron in Rome, was a chaste widow of many decades' standing. Paula, who became his patron and established him in his own Bethlehem monastery after his exile (she herself maintained a parallel convent of sorts for expatriate Christian women), was a thirty-something widow recently devastated by the loss of her husband and raising a daughter, Eustochium, who had been consecrated as a Christian virgin. Jerome would have been horrified to think of himself as a family man, but it would not be entirely incorrect to say that, in some respects at least, he was. A part of Paula's extended household until his death, and a friend and confidant to Paula herself, he was also in a way a paternal figure to the young Eustochium.

Deeply influenced by Origen, Jerome felt the heavy weight of the flesh as a very real and evidently terrible insult. Writing of his experiences of the solitary renunciate's life in the desert, he described the horrifying discovery that no matter how he fasted and deprived himself, he still felt the bonfire of lust within. The metaphor served him well: if lust could survive the snuffing-out of other material yearnings (represented by the emaciated, nearly dead flesh of the desert hermit), then sexuality truly represented the most intractable aspect of the human animal.

This disgust of the body, and particularly to any feminine or erotic aspects of it, appears throughout Jerome's writing, but nowhere quite so vividly as in his letters to Eustochium. He encouraged her to fast and to shun the lushness of her own nubile body, saying "the one who mortifies her bodily members . . . is not afraid to say, 'I have become like a wineskin in the frost, whatever moisture there was in me has been dried up." He advised that Eustochium's "hot little body" should be secluded from the world and from all manner of potential excesses, including wine and heavy foods, clothes that were either too stylish or too deliberately slovenly, and affected speech. It was all part and parcel of preventing the onslaught of desire, whether Eustochium's own or that of those with whom she might come into contact. For, as Jerome warned her, "if those whose bodies are eroded can still be assailed by such thoughts, what must a girl endure, who is exposed to the thrills of easy living?"

The text of Jerome's controversial
Adversus Jovinianum
(Against Jovinian) makes Jerome's black-and-white views on virginity even clearer. Virginity, he stated, should be a priority not only for the individual but for the whole of the Church. For Jerome, marriage was barely acceptable (he told Eustochium that he could only praise it because it produced virgins), despite the fact that the Church officially embraced it. Second marriages for widows or widowers, in their transparent pursuit of the carnal, were to Jerome scarcely distinguishable from whoredom. Further, Jerome felt the clergy should be made up solely of virgins. Married clergy, who at that time were in the vast majority, were to be regarded as only temporary substitutes until such time as the requisite number of virgin clergy, their Christianity tempered in the forge of sexual asceticism, could come forward to take over the Church.