O by Jonathan Margolis

Author:Jonathan Margolis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2004-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

10

Faith, Hope and Chastity:

Orgasm in the Early

Christian World

‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’

St Augustine of Hippo

At the same time as Vatsyayana was busy denying himself by the Ganges to clear his head for writing the Kamasutra, St John the Divine was on the island of Patmos working on the Book of Revelations. The chasm between the two works’ aims, preconceptions and their view on the desirability of sexual pleasure could not have been wider. After the decadent sexual free-for-all of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, India and China, the Christian church had spent the three centuries since Christ’s death taking the Jewish codes and making them trebly harsh, with sex and orgasmic pleasure in particular always among the primary targets of the grave, new morally ‘cleansed’ world.

The Christians did this in the name of modernity, setting in train a kind of perpetual revolution in sexual mores that intensified through the centuries. Jesus Christ himself seemed to have no views one way or the other on sexual pleasure. When he entered the temple looking for sins that would damn the soul of man, sex was not among them. According to Mark, he spoke out against adultery and condemned divorce, characterising both it and remarriage as licentious actions. But this was virtually all. Yet after His early death, His followers tried to extrapolate what their master’s thoughts might have been on the matter. Hedging their bets and possibly acting in error of Jesus’s real beliefs, they led a large proportion of humanity forward into a brave new world of sexual repression, hypocrisy and guilt.

Nobody can say how sincere the new morality’s originators were. St Paul, as an ethnic Jew of the sexually enthusiastic Hebraic tradition, may well privately have had a soft spot for sexual pleasure. But he made sure to develop, or at least to profess, a thoroughly modern fondness for celibacy. ‘To the unmarried and the widows,’ he wrote in Corinthians, ‘I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.’ Tertullian (second century) went a step further, calling sex shameful, while for Arnobius (third century) it was filthy and degrading, for St Jerome (fourth) unclean (he likened the human body to a darkened forest filled with roaring beasts only controllable by diet and avoidance of sexual attraction), St Ambrose (fourth) a defilement (he thought sexuality an ugly scar on the human condition), and St Methodius (nineth) unseemly.

So in the early Christendom after Jesus of Nazareth’s execution, sexual abstinence for both men and women was conceptually anchored to God; sexual indulgence to sin. In the same way as prudishness would one day be the Victorian equivalent of political correctness, abstemiousness was the modernity of the new, post-classical era following the Crucifixion. Successive standard bearers of the modernistic Jesus cult would duly clamour to out-do one another in proclaiming the virulence of their distaste for

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