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"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.
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Origen of Alexandria reportedly castrated himself to escape temptation as he taught young women their catechism.
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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.
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