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Question I
Why has Christianity rejected many expressions of sexuality as antithetical to spirituality while various
Eastern traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism — have been more accepting of sexuality, have
even embraced sex as a vehicle for spiritual transcendence? What do you think about the connection, if any,
between sexuality and spirituality? In the Christian view, is Shakespeare's mortal coil, Milton's perfidious
bark, just a weight holding us down, preventing us from achieving greater divinity, or is the body, as Blake
explains, a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses?
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Christianity
certainly has rejected many expressions of sexuality. Early traditions suggest that Jesus was
unmarried and indifferent to issues of procreation, held a sharply negative view of divorce and urged
people to give up everything — especially money, property and family — for the sake of the coming
"Kingdom of God." Paul, too, expressed mainly negative views of marriage (odd, for a student of rabbis)
and sexuality — and the kind of hostility toward the "immorality" of homosexual activity, intercourse
between unmarried people, abortion and prostitution, that we see among other religious Jews toward
practices widespread and often accepted (and legal) in the Greco–Roman world.
When I began to realize how pervasive these attitudes actually were in the early Christian
movement, I was amazed, and wondered, How could a movement this ascetic become so popular? (I spent
a long time on that question, and wrote a book called Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.)
But are Hinduism and Buddhism "accepting of sexuality"? Certainly not always — maybe not
even often. Tantric Buddhism, of course, sees sexual activity as a "vehicle for spiritual transcendence," but
it often requires withholding ejaculation, to take only one example of a rather reined-in approach to
sexuality!
Personally, I like Blake's wild and embracing vision — but, then, he was a heretic (I have often
been accused, and often rightly, of liking heresy).
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