What constitutes Christian love amid the sweaty delights of sex? Organized religion always takes an interest in sex, usually so it can tidy people's sexual lives into some easily-managed pattern. The Vatican's traditional emphasis is that God commands humans to procreate. Good sex has the potential to produce children; bad sex is everything else. Bad sex includes heterosexual acts involving contraceptives; masturbation; gay sex acts of all sorts. The equation of sex and procreation remained convincing for centuries because contraceptive devices were expensive, unreliable and even more comic in appearance than they are now. Now, however, readily available contraception has transformed the way in which human beings use and experience sex. Sex has always been fun: contraception has shown that the fun can be detached from the possibility of having children. The Christian tradition is now faced with the reality that pleasure and procreation are two separate purposes of sexuality, and many parts of the Christian Church, especially the Vatican, are baffled and angry.
MacCulloch's words are amusing, but quite true. He continues, opening a window into the manner in which the church came to its stance on human sexuality. Once again, Greek ideas creep in to contaminate the Jewish heritage of Christianity.
Christian theologians in late second-century Egypt took up the theme: 'to have sex for any purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature', said Clement of Alexandria. It does not inspire confidence in Alexandrian judgment on matters sexual that Clement's successor, Origen, is said to have castrated himself because he regarded his sexual organs as a source of moral danger. However, these views on sex were so influential in the Church that we can call the equation of sex and procreative potential the Alexandrian rule. The rule was repeated with enthusiasm by Thomas Aquinas, who did so much to make the Church of Rome see the world through Aristotle's eyes. And so matters in the Vatican rest from the 13th to the 21st century, although its celibate theologians apparently do not now adopt Origen's desperate measures.
All right, now I'm rolling on the floor, but please read the entire essay, for MacCulloch turns quite serious:
Christianity, whether or not you think it's true, is a love-poem. It should not be afraid of love, even when the love seems dangerous and unfamiliar. Christianity has danger built into it.
Yes. Read the rest.
Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote the masterful The Reformation, which I read a few years ago. His newest book, which is sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read, is Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. MacCulloch is nothing if not ambitious in undertaking to write on huge swaths of history. If his latest is half as good the previous work, it will be good, indeed.
H/T to Nicholas Knisely at The Lead
UPDATE: MacCulloch was interviewed on NPR this morning.
Great comments, very witty, and quite serious. He is writing of important matters and offering a remedy for the horrid theology that has attached itself to human sexuality - most of it pure twaddle. We need more earthy divines to articulate a way back to our senses (and incarnate sensuality).
ReplyDeleteI think those who want to re-assert (go back to) the old teachings on sexuality are hoping the toothpaste will go back into the tube. It won't happen. The Pill and contraception changed the world as profoundly as the automobile and electricity.
ReplyDeletePeople will no more go back to the world before contraception than they will go back to horse-drawn coaches.
Paul, MacCulloch was once a candidate for the priesthood in England, but he's gay, and he could not live with the subterfuge of hiding his sexuality, so he dropped out of seminary. He is no longer a believer, but he tells us how it is in our faith.
ReplyDeletePassion is, I think, what we are called to accept about God's love and Incarnation -- sex with my love is where I experience something that approaches that.
ReplyDeleteMacCulloch was interviewed on NPR this morning.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Lapin. I added an update with a link to the program.
ReplyDeleteI think that Catholic teaching on sexuality is wrong and dangerous.
ReplyDeleteThe inspiring of sinful guilt in those who try to live by it, but who perhaps necessarily use contraception for medical reasons is cruel and in error.
If human sexuality had been given just to procreate children, it would have been a purely mechanical process, driven by the need for survival.
Sexual activity is given for both procreation and for pleasure - I have also read of contraception (or the avoidance of pregnancy) has been around, albeit in primitive ways for thousands of years - most certainly in the time of Jesus - I don't see it banned in the Gospels or even in Paul's teaching, who was notoriously 'by the book'.
This is a remarkable performance, indeed.
ReplyDeleteI think this Oxford professor undoubtedly knows that the connection of marital sexuality with procreation was hardly original with Clement. I'm not a professor of anything, but, IIRC, it was a fairly ubiquitous notion, found earler than Clement in Polycarp and Athenagorus. So why in the world does Professor MacCulloch say that, "we can call the equation of sex and procreative potential the Alexandrian rule"? Because, of course, that way he can tie it to Origen--and falsely imply that Origen's act of self-mutilation was admired rather than abhorred, both in his own lifetime and thereafter.
Or take the matter of putting Thomas Aquinas' discussions of sexual love in dependence on Aristotelian theories of generation. It's very neat, but it ignores the fact that in the discussion of the "vice of lust" in the Summa, there is no mention of any such thing. Does it appear elsewhere? I don't know. I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of St. Thomas' writings. I would hope that a distinguished scholar might at least give us some clue; but he doesn't.
Even stranger overall is the impression left that ancient Christian sexual ethics were somehow simply adopted from the Greeks--as if there was not rabbinic halakha concerning marital procreation, as if the early Christian disapproval of homoeroticism were not rooted firmly in Jewish ethics rather than Hellentistic ones, as if the origin of an admiration of celibacy need have any other source than a desire to emulate the "lifestyles" of Jesus and St. Paul.
This strikes me as a hatchet job, pure and simple, published in the firm confidence that not one in a thousand readers will care enough to look at the sources themselves.
I have his "Thomas Cranmer" on my shelf. It's slow going, but good reading. Heard a bit of his interview on NPR as I was driving yesterday. Fascinating stuff. The fact that he goes back to the thousand years before Jesus is important to his development of the rest of the book.
ReplyDeleteThis strikes me as a hatchet job, pure and simple, published in the firm confidence that not one in a thousand readers will care enough to look at the sources themselves.
ReplyDeleteOh, the poor, persecuted pope! Rick, I don't know enough to answer each particular objection you make to the essay, but MacCulloch's Cranmer and his Reformation are well-respected by scholars for diligent research and by ordinary folks for readability. I'll simply say that I'd believe him over you.
I just wonder how far your personal loyalty to the pope extends and to what lengths you would go to defend what I think of as the indefensible teachings and actions in your church.
I feel no compulsion to defend my church when I see that it moves away from the Gospel. And make no mistake, I see Jesus' teachings in the Gospel as the heart of Christianity.
Not a few of the RCC's attitudes toward sexuality are sick. For instance, telling teenage boys with hormones raging that masturbation is sinful and that they must never do it, seems crazy to me. Talk about against nature! Do you defend the church's teaching on masturbation?
"Oh, the poor, persecuted pope!"
ReplyDeleteMimi, I didn't mention the pope, and I'm not interested in defending anything other than some elementary respect for historical fact.
"I'd believe him over you."
I don't ask that you believe me over anybody; I certainly have no credentials. I would encourage anyone with any interest to check the facts themselves. They're not hard to find.
In an atmosphere of polemics I do think a little critical caution is in order, especially when these little broadsides are launched.
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ReplyDeleteGreek ideas about sexulaity appear to have influenced some of the more puritanical Protestants during the Reformation and have resurfaced in our own time among the neo-Puritans of the Anglican Communion.
ReplyDeleteRick, you can believe this or not, but I was headed back here to retract my comments about the pope before I read your new comment, because neither MacCulloch nor you mentioned the pope. It was a knee-jerk reaction on my part because I've heard so much commentary from within the RCC about persecution of the pope. No excuse, of course.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to hear your views on the RCC teachings about sexuality, especially the instructions on masturbation. Basically, all sex is wrong, unless it includes the possibility of procreation, except if you're infertile or old, you can still have sex with your lawfully married spouse, just so the spouse is of the opposite sex.
Do you agree across the board with all the teachings, Rick?
I think Diarmaid MacCulloch is right that the anti sex teachings originate in the Alexandrian interpretations of Heathen Greek and Indian teachings.
ReplyDeleteNOT from the Bible or the Halakkas!
Göran, thank you. Your comment is much appreciated. I know that you have done the research to back up your words.
ReplyDeleteUKViewer, I agree. Cruel is a good word for such teachings. I have my story to tell about my struggle to come to the decision to use contraception after 3 babies in 4 years and post-partum depression after the third child. There was no good reason for the church to lay the guilt of mortal sin on me for for using contraception. I blame myself, too, for swallowing the church's wrong-headed teaching and putting myself through such an agonizing struggle. I was gullible and stupid at the time.
Amelia, I like that MacCulloch covers the thousand years before Jesus, too.
Ormonde, exactly.
Grandmere, I comment only to say that my Maundy Thursday meditation began with the following assertion:
ReplyDelete"The more I read scripture, the more I read the gospels, the more I am convinced that the whole thing, from start to finish, is a love story. The love affair of God with humanity has its beginnings in the poetry of Genesis, a God who creates, not because of a deficit or loneliness or neediness within God (and, let’s be frank, that’s how many of our own love stories seem to begin), but because God is love, and God contains an excess of love and a longing to lavish it on someone, something. And that someone, something, has its beginning as a mud pie, and then has life breathed into it, and then turns out to be you, and me. And so it begins: God loves us; we are loved."
Thanks for posting a link to this wonderful article!
Cecilia, thank you! From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is the love story of God and God's people. The love story, or love-poem if you will, is the rock upon which both Judaism and Christianity are built.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to say to you, Cecilia, how much I admire the brave and unequivocal stand for justice and equality recently taken by the ELCA. You must be proud. I'm proud to be in communion with a church that is an example to all churches in living the Gospel of inclusion.
"Do you agree across the board with all the teachings, Rick?"
ReplyDeleteIt's not a question whether I agree with them, but whether I recognize them as genuine teaching.
Suppose we put aside what we undoubtedly would not agree on and look at the direct teachings of Jesus in this area. Whoever sets aside his wife and marries another commits adultery. Whoever even looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart.
What man can fail to transgress the latter saying? But what do we do with it? Say we don't "agree" with it? But surely it matters little whether I agree with what Jesus says. It is a norm, a standard for life that he has put before us. And the sexual norms are not any more strenuous, in that respect, from the others. Who can put out the raging avarice in his heart enough to give all to the needy? Who can tame his anger, his pleasure in retribution, the exercise of dominion over another? Are these things really easier than the continence that we are called to?
So part of my answer is, yes, these various things we are called to, they are hard, semingly impossible, and the fact that we for all intents and purposes give up on them does not mean that we no longer "agree" with them, but we recognize our need for God's mercy in all things.
The alternative, seems to me, is to simply tame the demands, make the cost of discipleship into a set of bourgeois duties that pretty much anyone can feel comfortable achieving. I don't see that that's what we're called to.
Does the Church have the competence to more definitely define the meaning of chastity, continence, the evangelical counsels? Here we come to a sort of Protestant/Catholic divide, that I don't want to get into. But, yes, for me, the Holy Spirit speaks in the Church, and the fact that the precepts of the Church seem as demanding as those which the gospels put in Jesus' mouth does not therefor cause me to dismiss them.
We aim high. We fall short. We fall back on the mercy of God. Our vices, even our lusts, which so many of the saints loved so dearly, will be purged away, now or later. But that we do not live in the completed beatific vision now does not mean that we lack that aspiration.
It's not a question whether I agree with them, but whether I recognize them as genuine teaching.
ReplyDeleteI gather, then, that you do accept the church's teachings as valid and to be adhered to by all its members.
The only two of the forbidden practices that Jesus himself addresses are divorce and lust in the heart. Jesus allows for one exception in divorce, immorality, which I assume means infidelity. The RCC permits the equivalent of divorce, which it calls by the name of annulment, which in certain cases may be a fair judgment of a situation, but in most cases is pure hypocrisy, as I see it, and you know what Jesus says about hypocrisy.
As for lust in the heart, most of us fail to follow Jesus' words, which, I agree, does not mean that we may dismiss them. Jesus never mentions the other practices.
I agree that the Holy Spirit speaks through the church, but I also believe that we hear the voice of the Spirit through the whole Body of Christ, whereas the RCC believes that it alone hears the voice of the Spirit accurately.
I really like the way Diarmaid MacCulloch writes. I wasn't aware he was no longer a believer. I will read the rest of his article with huge interest (keeping my eye out for historical inaccuracies, of course).
ReplyDeleteMimi, do you ask all staunch defenders of Catholicism point blank whether they defend the church's teaching on masturbation? I was just wondering if that was your default opening line.
Cathy, I'm trying to remember where I read the information about MacCulloch, but I cannot.
ReplyDeleteRick and I are old friends and adversaries. We go back years. He's my more-Catholic-than-the-pope friend. No hard feelings on my side, and, I hope, none on his.
"Mimi, do you ask all staunch defenders of Catholicism point blank whether they defend the church's teaching on masturbation? I was just wondering if that was your default opening line."
ReplyDeleteIs it just being naughty/snarky of me to say, "perhaps it should be"?
Paul, perhaps it should be. It's one of the more ridiculous strictures.
ReplyDeleteMy children attended public schools. I don't know what they were taught in their RC CCD classes. I rather doubt that masturbation was mentioned, but you can be sure that their mama set them straight on the matter, just in case.
Is it just being naughty/snarky of me to say, "perhaps it should be"?
ReplyDeleteWell, I certainly think it should be.
A quote by MacCulloch from Wiki:
ReplyDelete"I was ordained Deacon. But, being a gay man, it was just impossible to proceed further, within the conditions of the Anglican set-up, because I was determined that I would make no bones about who I was; I was brought up to be truthful, and truth has always mattered to me. The Church couldn't cope and so we parted company. It was a miserable experience."
I have the same feelings about rick, though not the same history.
ReplyDeleteWe agree on very little, but I always enjoy reading his comments and I take them quite seriously.
"No hard feelings on my side, and, I hope, none on his."
ReplyDeleteNever on this side.
I think it is good to have a sort of forum where hard questions can be asked among friends. There's a risk, on the web, of allowing the lack of accountability to lead to attacks and verbal abuse and hard feelings. God knows there are pleny of websites that have long crossed the line into a consistent hatefulness, along the whole spectrum of opinion. But I try to avoid those.
By a strange coincidence, last Sunday afternoon I stopped by and saw a friend, a retired Episcopal priest, who lives in Los Ranchos, and he had just participated in the election of the new Rio Grande bishop. So we talked a little about that, not much, and of many other things, but never in the rather stark and direct manner of internet discussions.
Rick, it would be lovely if we met one day, having exchanged so many words online. I believe you would find that I'm fairly stark and direct face to face. Whether that's a vice or a virtue, or something in between, it's not for me to say.
ReplyDelete