CHAPTER ONE: How some eminent early Church Fathers set the stage for the removal of sexuality from God
In the book Early Christian Fathers, edited by Cyril C. Richardson may be seen Justin Martyr’s attitude toward the place of sexuality within the Christian faith This commentary was written around the middle of the second century A.D., about a half century after the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation. In it, Justin clearly expressed his view of the importance of sexual circumspection:
“About continence [Jesus] said this: ‘Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart before God.’ And: ‘If your right eye offends you, cut it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of Heaven with one eye than with two to be sent into eternal fire.’ And: ‘Whoever marries a woman who has been put away from another man commits adultery.’ And: ‘There are some who were made eunuchs by men, and some who were born eunuchs, and some who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake; only not all [are able to] receive this.
“And so those who make second marriages according to human law are sinners in the sight of our Teacher, and those who look on a woman to lust after her. For he condemns not only the man who commits the act of adultery, but the man who desires to commit adultery, since not only our actions but our thoughts are manifest to God. Many men and women now in their sixties and seventies who have been disciples of Christ from childhood have preserved their purity; and I am proud that I could point to such people in every nation. . . But to begin with, we do not marry except in order to bring up children, or else, renouncing marriage, we live in perfect continence. To show you that promiscuous intercourse is not among our mysteries – just recently one of us submitted a petition to the Prefect Felix in Alexandria, asking that a physician be allowed to make him a eunuch, for the physicians there said they were not allowed to do this without the permission of the Prefect. When Felix would by no means agree to endorse [the petition], the young man remained single, satisfied with [the approval of] his own conscience and that of his fellow believers.”
In writing about the sexual purity of Christians, Justin intended to contrast this behavior with that associated with the false gods and the rampant and often cruel immorality that not only was involved in the worship of them, but which had infected secular life as well:
“Far be it from every sound mind to entertain such a concept of deities as that Zeus, whom they call the ruler and begetter of all, should have been a parricide (killer of a relative) and the son of a parricide, and that moved by desire of evil and shameful pleasures he descended on Ganymede and the many women whom he seduced, and that his sons after him were guilty of similar actions. But, as we said before, it was the wicked demons who did these things. We have been taught that only those who live close to God in holiness and virtue attain to immortality, and we believe that those who live unjustly and do not reform will be punished in eternal fire.”
“Secondly, out of every race of men we who once worshiped Dionysus the son of Semele and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their passion for men did things which it is disgraceful even to speak of, or who worshiped Persephone and Aphrodite, who were driven made by [love of] Adonis and whose mysteries you celebrate, or Asclepius or some other of those who are called gods, now through Jesus Christ despise them, even at the cost of death, and have dedicated ourselves to the unbegotten and impassible God. We do not believe that he ever descended in mad passion on Antiope or others, nor on Ganymede, nor was he, receiving help through Thetis, delivered by that hundred-handed monster, nor was he, because of this anxious that Thetis’ son Achilles should destroy so many Greeks for the sake of his concubine Briseis. We pity those who believe [such stories], for which we know that the demons are responsible.”
“That we may avoid all injustice and impiety, we have been taught that to expose the newly born is the work of wicked men – first of all because we observe that almost all [foundlings], boys as well as girls, are brought up for prostitution. As the ancients are said to have raised herds of oxen or goats or sheep or horses in their pastures, so now [you raise children] just for shameful purposes, and so in every nation a crowd of females and hermaphrodites and doers of unspeakable deeds are exposed as public prostitutes. You even collect pay and levies and taxes from these, whom you ought to exterminate from your civilized world. And anyone who makes use of them may in addition to [the guilt of] godless, impious, and intemperate intercourse, by chance be consorting with his own child or relative or brother. Some even prostitute their own children or wives, and others are admittedly mutilated for purposes of sodomy, and treat this as part of the mysteries of the mother of the gods – while beside each of those whom think of as gods a serpent is depicted as a great symbol and mystery. You charge against us the actions that you commit openly and treat with honor, as if the divine light were overthrown and withdrawn – which of course does no harm to us, who refuse to do any of these things, but rather injures those who do them and then bring false witness [against us].”
Two and a half centuries later Augustine experienced much the same revulsion as Justin did over the moral tawdriness of the Roman society in which he lived. Having become a Christian thirty two years after his birth in 354 A.D., Augustine had spent much of his dissolute pre-Christian years in the enjoyment of the depravity of the society in which he lived. The shame and regret of these early years served to drive Augustine into a passionate rejection of loose morality and unbridled lust. The strength of his feelings in that regard are demonstrated throughout his book City of God, an example of which is given in Chapters 4 and 5 of Book II:
“When I was a young man I used to go to sacrilegious shows and entertainments. I watched the antics of madmen; I listened to singing boys; I thoroughly enjoyed the most degrading spectacles put on in honour of gods and goddesses – in honour of the Heavenly Virgin, of of Berecynthia, mother of all. On the yearly festival of Berecynthia’s purification the lowest kind of actors sang, in front of her litter, songs unfit for the ears of even the mother of one of those mountebanks, to say nothing of the mother of any decent citizen, or of a senator; while as for the Mother of the Gods – ! For there is something in the natural respect we have towards our parents that the extreme of infamy cannot wholly destroy; and certainly those very mountebanks would be ashamed to give a rehearsal performance in their homes, before their mothers, of those disgusting verbal and acted obscenities. Yet they performed them in the presence of the Mother of the Gods before an immense audience of spectators of both sexes. If those spectators were enticed by curiosity to gather in profusion, they ought at least to have dispersed in confusion at the insults to their modesty.
“If these were sacred rites, what is meant by sacrilege? If this is purification, what is meant by pollution? And the name of the ceremony is ‘the fercula’, which might suggest the giving of a dinner-party where the unclean demons could enjoy a feast to their liking. Who could fail to realize what kind of spirits they are which could enjoy such obscenities? Only a man who refused to recognize even the existence of any unclean spirits who deceive men under the title of gods, or one whose life was such that he hoped for the favour and feared the anger of such gods, rather than that of the true God.
Augustine went on to lament, as he called them, the obscenities performed in the worship of the “Mother of the Gods”:
“The last people I should choose to decide on this matter are those who are more eager to revel in the obscene practices of this depraved cult than to resist them. I should prefer the decision of Scipio Nasica, the very man whom the Senate chose as their best man, whose hands received this devil’s image and brought it to Rome. Let him tell us whether he would wish his mother to have deserved so well of her country that she should be accorded divine honours. For it is well known that the Greeks and the Romans, and other peoples, have decreed such honours to those whose public services they valued highly, and that such people were believed to have been made immortal and to have been received among the number of the gods. No doubt he would desire such felicity for his mother, if it were possible. But let me go on to ask him whether he would like such disgusting rites as those to be included among the divine honours paid to her? Would he not cry out that he would prefer his mother to be dead, and beyond all experience, than that she should live as a goddess, to take pleasure in hearing such celebrations? It is unthinkable that a senator of Rome, of such high principles that he forbade the erection of a theatre in a city of heroes, should want his mother to be honoured as a goddess by such propitiatory rites as would have scandalized her as a Roman matron. He would surely have thought it quite impossible for a respectable woman to have her modesty so corrupted by the assumption of divinity that her worshipers should call upon her with ritual invocations of this sort. These invocations contained expressions of such a kind that had they been hurled at any antagonist in a quarrel, during her life on earth, then if she had not stopped her ears and withdrawn from the company, her friends, her husband and her children would have blushed for her. In fact the ‘Mother of the Gods’ was such a character as even the worst of men would be ashamed to have for his mother. And when she came to take possession of the minds of the Romans she looked for the best man of the country, not so as to support him by counsel and help, but to cheat and deceive him, like the woman of whom the Bible says, ‘she ensnares the precious souls of men’. Her purpose was that a mind of great endowments should be puffed up by this supposedly divine testimony and should think itself truly exceptional, and therefore should cease to follow the true religion and piety – without which every national ability, however remarkable, disappears in the ruin which follows on pride. And thus that goddess should seek the support of the best men only by trickery, seeing that she requires in her worship the kind of behaviour which decent men shrink from even in their convivial moments.”
Augustine was enormously influential to the Christian Church at a time when Church doctrine was still being formulated and heresies were still emerging, to be debated upon and rejected. In his wake, the Church charted a course that polarized itself away from any hint of the depravities associated with the corrupt gods and goddesses of the world about her. This extremity of purification, for which purity was equated with chastity, cleansed the Judeo-Christian God of any taint of sexuality.
This view of sexuality as representing a taint frowned upon by God raises an issue that was brought up at the end of the Introduction: is the view Scriptural?
According to Genesis, it is not. Right at the beginning of Genesis, the creation epic describes the reproductive process extending even into the domain of plant life, wherein the fruit of the tree yields trees of its kind. Moreover, God saw this as good. Reproduction becomes more overtly sexual in the created animal life, wherein this life bore young after its kind. God also saw this as good. In the creation of man as described in Genesis 1:26 and 27, their gender differentiation now extends beyond mankind himself to hint of a like feature within the Godhead, here specifically described as plural:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
In blessing Adam and Eve, He specifically told them to multiply.
This time God saw His creative act as not only good, but very good.
Many theologians down through the centuries have attempted to separate the gender differentiation of Genesis 1:26 and 27 from the creation in God’s image. All such discourses, at least the ones of which I am aware, are logically weak and based on the unbiblical presupposition that God is “above that kind of thing”. The passage says what it says, and does so without ambiguity. Moreover, if this gender differentiation is not to represent the image of God, then the feminine half of the human race would have no representation in God. Some religions take that notion to its logical extreme, its male members treating women as animals.
[to be continued]
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