"Lord, grant me chastity and continence — but not yet!" — St. Augustine
In case you haven't noticed, it's an election year, and, this being America, morality has taken center stage. The candidates are exhibiting watertight visages of Rockwellian family unity, while John Edwards is dealing with the fallout from having been caught (by the Enquirer!) diddling his campaign videographer. On the ever-squeaky-clean Republican side of the aisle, Larry Craig and Richard Curtis were busted while trolling for man-on-congressman action, and Staten Island representative Vito Fossella bore a child with his mistress. Why — unlike the French — do Americans demand the appearance of moral antisepsis from their public figures?
Religion has a lot to do with it. Establishment Clause of the Constitution aside, America is a de facto Christian country. The Catholic Church is still upholding Paul VI's 1968 encyclical against birth control and encouraging believers to vote anti-choice. American evangelical Protestant groups like Focus on the Family pour money into any candidate who says he'll be for abstinence education and against gay marriage. Religion often seems out of step with modernity — the standard life plan of the modern middle class often involves putting off children (and usually marriage) until they've got that mortgage in the 'burbs, which means they're either going to fornicate or spend a lot of time locked in the bathroom. But the narrative we tell ourselves and what we actually do are two totally different things.
Let's rewind the tape back to where it all began. Early Christians were in a pickle. Jews were not down on sex. Rather, Judaism took (and still takes) quite literally God's proclamation in Genesis 1:18, "lo tov heyot ha-adam levado" — that is, "it is not good that the man [Adam] be alone."
However, by the time Jesus lived and taught, the Jews had been strongly influenced by foreign ideas. One of these was hostility to sex, an idea rooted in the deep pessimism that followed the decline of the Hellenistic world. The things of this changeable, imperfect mortal realm, the disillusioned philosophers began to argue, could never be as good as the divine world of ideas.
The importance of celibacy increased after Jesus's death and the separation of the Christian sect from Judaism. Particularly instrumental in this change was the missionary work of Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. St. Paul. Known in the New Testament as the thirteenth Apostle, Paul took it as his mission to spread the Christian message to the goyim. This message — that the world is sinful; purity, self-discipline and charity are necessary; and the imminent coming of a messiah will offer salvation to the faithful — was recognized as self-evident by his audience.
Though Paul considered marriage necessary to prevent immorality, celibacy was seen as a preferable alternative. ("For I would that all men were even as I myself. . . . But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn," he coached the Corinthians.) Other early Christian leaders also show a marked philosophical disdain for sex, preferring to focus their energies on "the things that belong to the Lord." One, Origen of Alexandria, reportedly castrated himself to escape temptation as he taught young women their catechism.
Pledging celibacy was never a practical option for the vast majority of believers, but those men who did were seen as particularly holy, models of the right way to live. Their rejection of sexuality and, indeed, all worldly things — and their reported struggles against the devils who appeared as nubile young women to tempt them in their desert strongholds — marked them as superior. They were spiritual superheroes. They'd forsaken the comforts and pleasures of human society in order to move closer to God. An example is St. Simon the Stylite, a shepherd from northern Syria who fled from temptation by sitting on a pillar for thirty-six years — and revealing, by his choice of seating, that reparative therapy didn't work any better then than it does now. Still, the question remained amongst the majority of Christian believers: Was salvation possible for those who wouldn't, or couldn't, give up sex?
The man who would attempt to reconcile the two camps — and who had the greatest effect on the official Church position on sex — was not a monk who rejected the world, but a man who wholeheartedly embraced it. Augustine of Hippo was born in Roman North Africa to a Christian mother and pagan father in 354, forty-one years after the emperor Constantine condoned Christianity for the Mediterranean world. He became a Church leader at a time when the institution was struggling to balance the demands of faith and the realities of survival as Roman power was being challenged by migrating tribes from the north. Augustine's writings on everything from politics to metaphysics helped shape the Church's future direction. For this reason, he's remembered as the last Christian thinker of antiquity, and the first of the Middle Ages.
But before he could become the great theologian he's known as today, Augustine faced an internal struggle of his own. Despite the not-inconsiderable influence of Monica, his overbearing mother, Augustine had all his life been a spiritual nomad, joining first one sect, then becoming jaded and joining another. At the age of thirty-three, he was living in Milan, teaching at the local university, while Monica, who had followed him from North Africa, continued to use every available opportunity to harangue her son about his lifestyle. Augustine had been living for some time with a female companion, whose name he never bothered to record, but who had given him his only child, a son. Try as he might, though, Augustine could not bring himself to do as Monica recommended — that is, either send away his concubine, marry a suitable woman and pursue a secular career, or else swear himself to celibacy. (To give some idea of the times, the bishop of Milan declared an adulterer any man who made love to his wife with excessive passion, and that God could do anything except restore a fallen virgin.) After all, as everyone in the ancient world knew, true spiritual seekers have no use for women, other, apparently, than to have their mothers run their lives for them.
As he describes it in his Confessions, Augustine was in a garden in Milan, wrestling with his psychic demons, when he heard a child's voice chanting, "tolle, lege" — "pick up and read." He opened a convenient Bible to Romans 13:13 and read, "Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying." It was a life-changing moment of ecstatic revelation. To his mother's great delight, Augustine accepted the chaste Christian lifestyle.
To our current mores, this seems an irrational and possibly unhealthy rejection of human nature, coupled with the cold-hearted spurning of a woman who had followed him across two continents and borne him a son. To Augustine, though, it was a decisive victory in the struggle for his very soul, on top of which, we can surmise, was added a dose of worldly ambition, for he went on to become the bishop of the city of Hippo, as well as one of the most influential Christian writers of all time.
For Augustine, sex was identified with original sin. Before the apple incident, Adam and Eve were fruitful and multiplied without passion, their bodies presumably performing the deed like clockwork while they discussed whether to name that striped horse-like creature a "zebra" or a "wombat." With the expulsion from Eden, though, came the discovery of lust. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Augustine believed that because sex was created by God, it couldn't be inherently evil. It could, however, be perverted from its intended function.
It was the fact that lust is not subject to the will that particularly bothered Augustine. He observed that, just as Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the sex drive refuses our conscious control. No matter how strongly one resists, the mind inevitably returns to lustful thoughts, distracting the true believer from seeking God. And, as any teenage boy can testify, certain body parts take on a life of their own, frequently at the worst possible moments. Furthermore, original sin, like a hereditary disease, is spread from parent to child, so that no person ever born is without it. Sexual sin is a fact of our fallen state, and only divine grace can save us from our corrupt natures.
For the benefit of those who couldn't quite bring themselves to give up sex, Augustine's solution was that celibacy, or total renunciation of sex, was only to be the rule for some, but that chastity, or the control of sexual desires, would be the law for all. Chaste Christians limit themselves to sleeping with their husband or wife, for marriage is a God-given institution created to control this aspect of human existence. Even sex within marriage is, according to Augustine, only permissible for purposes of having children, never for enjoyment. And, since it is supposed to be for reproductive purposes only, sleeping with people of the same sex, or any method of birth control or abortion, are obviously against God's will.
Augustine had resolved the question of whether good Christians could have sex, but this identifying the mating urge with sin, guilt and corruption has persisted. Christianity's ambiguous relationship with sex means that on the one hand, it's recognized as a God-given necessity for perpetuating the species, but on the other, spiritual "authenticity" — how the virtuous are distinguished from the poseurs — has been based on sexual self-denial. We've been trained to associate the public appearance of continence with virtue.
Thus, the untenable situation of John Edwards, Larry Craig, Vito Fossella and our other fall guys who have been forced to live a lie to further their political ambitions. If you want to appeal to the family-values crowd, you'd better get married. On the other hand, those of us who see the inherent hypocrisy of the situation figure it's better to burn. n°