You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (22 page)

As with other early civilizations, the Romans were open about sex. The penis image was a symbol of fertility and prosperity that protected against evil spirits.
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Penises appeared everywhere.
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Jewelry, armor, and homes all had phallic symbols. Breads, cookies, and cakes were often made in the shape of penises and vaginas. Penis sculptures were put in gardens to help them grow.

During rural celebrations of the Liberalia, a mid-May festival in honor of the god of fertility, a gigantic phallus was carted around the countryside to bless the people and the land with fertility. This parade culminated with an honored matron putting a wreath on the phallus. These festivals were famous for their licentiousness, complete with public nudity and orgies. The Liberalia was likely the precursor of May Day, with the May Pole replacing the phallus.
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Children were not shielded from this sexuality and wore penis amulets as good-luck charms. Minors grew up around off-color jokes and saucy songs and adults thought it funny when children joined in the merriment. Children also saw their father’s concubines (mistresses) and pet young men around the home.
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Childhood was over for a female at menses. The line was not so clear for boys. A father or tutor judged when a boy was ready to don the adult garb, usually when they started trimming their mustaches. Once deemed an official adult, Roman male youth immediately used a servant’s sexual services or rushed down to Suburra to engage a prostitute.
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Roman weddings were raunchy, with guests praising the bride and groom in
explicitly sexual terms. On the wedding night it was custom that the man would not deflower his bride out of respect for her timidity; instead he would enter her anally.
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Wedding guests would stand outside the marriage chamber after the ceremony and await the emergence of the groom to announce he had sealed the deal.

Yet in this sexually free environment, a new attitude budded. The stoic school of philosophy in Rome devised that for physical health purposes,
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not
moral, all pleasure should be moderated.
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As a pleasure, sex was to be limited, and for the sake of Rome’s survival the best place to limit it to was the marital bed. For perhaps the first time in Western history, a society valued premarital virginity for males. Even masturbation was thought unhealthy for young men, for it was believed that it made boys mature too quickly, producing an imperfect adult.

This restrictive view of sex was supported by other philosophies of the time. These philosophies were heavily influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato was a dualist: he believed that there was a physical world and a world of ideas. Our souls were trapped in our bodies and yearned to get back to the world of ideas. The physical body would die and decay but the soul was immortal. This exultation of the mind debased the body and everything associated with it, such as excrement and sex.
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Another philosophical innovation of the first century A.D. was companionate marriage. In a companionate marriage the partners are close friends. No longer were women to be head servants with whom the husband occasionally had intercourse for the sole purpose of producing legitimate heirs. This concept of marriage being built on affection is still with us today, and it was arrived at by faulty logic.

The Stoics believed firmly that there was a reason for everything. In evaluating the institution of marriage they tried to discern why marriage was a lifetime commitment when producing children did not require that amount of time. They came to the conclusion that if reasonable beings live together all their lives, it must be a type of lasting friendship.
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The Stoics were wrong. Lifelong marriage had not developed based on friendship. They made the common mistake of justifying an institution by finding or creating a current function. Roman wives in the times of the Stoics were denied any meaningful work, but lifelong marriage developed when the distant hunter/gatherer ancestors settled into rural communities, like early Rome. In that context,
two people were required to manage all of the necessary duties on a farm.
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Marriages were originally for life because men were allowed to acquire other wives, so there was no need to end a relationship with a wife who was a useful servant.

This new Stoic concept of companionate marriage took place between the first and second century B.C., and two things should be noted. First, just because affection was not in the old concept of marriage does not mean it never occurred. Since the origin of marriage there were undoubtedly times when the man and woman created a strong emotional bond, however, when this happened it usually came after the wedding, not before.

Second, the new concept made it admirable to like your wife. This was quite different from romantically loving your wife. This was also quite different from what actually occurred. One historian believes that the only practical consequences of this new philosophy were that husbands spoke about their wives differently in front of other men and addressed their wives differently in public.
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Although in the early second century the Romans began requiring a woman’s permission for marriage,
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money, status, and political maneuvering would still play an important role, as they arguably still do.

Although it is a popular belief in the West that Christianity changed the Roman Empire’s values, the reverse is true. The Roman Empire, specifically Emperor Constantine,
literally
defined Christianity. Constantine gathered and presided over the first ecumenical council (a gathering of bishops to determine Christian doctrine) in 325 A.D. Constantine assured unanimity by banishing all the bishops who would not accept the finished product—the Roman Catholic Church.
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Christianity in the first centuries A.D. was a diverse group of countless sects
and cults. The varying interpretations of Jesus’ life were even more numerous—as late as 450 A.D. there were at least two hundred different gospel versions circulating in just one jurisdiction.
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The Christianity that was accepted by Emperor Constantine was a hierarchical and authoritarian version that ruled through fear and force.

Emperor Constantine was not interested in the variants of Christianity that stressed love, pacifism, forgiveness, tolerance, and openness—features that were more in tune with Jesus’ message. Constantine, who had his wife boiled alive and his son executed, was looking for a religion to unite his armies and the faltering empire.
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By conforming their religion to meet his needs, Catholic Church leaders were rewarded greatly.
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In little more than a hundred years, the Roman Empire went from killing Christians to killing non-Christians.

The Roman Catholic Church proved to be a great authoritarian structure, so great that as the Roman Empire crumbled—because of a shrinking ruling class mentally diminished from lead poisoning, a collapsing economy, overextended resources, invading Germanic tribes from the north, and the bubonic plague in the east
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—the Church became its European successor.

Whereas the Roman Empire largely left its conquered people free to continue their own cultural traditions and to think independently, the Roman Catholic Church did not. It told people what to think. What it wanted people to think was called morality. Anything it did not want people to think was called heresy and was punishable by death.

In the Greek and Roman Empires, the educated upper classes, who could read and write freely, participated in intellectual life. Under the Catholic Church, education and literacy were restricted to clergy who could read and write only Christian literature. Ancient academies were closed, great libraries were burned, and scientific understanding in some areas was set back millennia.
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This era has aptly been called the Dark Ages.

This intellectual monopoly had huge ramifications for sexuality in the Western world, and influences us to this day. Powerful men in the church articulated the Western view of sex in the name of Jesus Christ, who despite criticizing adulterers (as then defined),
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never criticized sex directly.
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Being a Jew, it was likely that he shared their values of that period.
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These were that premarital sex was not forbidden, sex was not evil, and celibacy was not favored.
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However, drawing on sexual theories already popular with the Roman Neo-Platonists and Stoics,
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the following men falsely encoded in Christ’s name the enduring concept that sex is evil:

St. Paul (3 A.D.–67 A.D.)
— Paul never met Jesus, but when he was around thirty years old he converted to Christianity from Judaism and became a missionary. Paul’s writings have become Christian scripture and are a part of the New Testament. His immense contributions to the spread of Christianity have led some to call him its second founder.
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However, when it comes to Christianity’s view of sex, Paul could be considered its first founder. Paul, like Jesus, was never married. Perhaps because of this bias, Paul wrote to early Christians that celibacy was better than sex, even marital sex, as it allowed one to focus on holy matters.
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Paul openly admitted that this was his opinion, and that he did not know if Christ spoke on the matter.
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He also made it clear that he based this advice on his belief that Jesus’ second return would happen shortly.
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After two millennia it is apparent that living as if Jesus’ return is months away is impractical. Considering how Christians have wielded Paul’s passage, it is acutely ironic that he wrote that it was not meant to limit people’s freedom.

Tertullian (circa 150 A.D.–240 A.D.)
— Tertullian was the son of a Roman military officer in Africa. He converted to Christianity in his late forties and made many contributions to Christian theology. Building on Paul’s questionable logic,
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Tertullian argued that marriage was permissible but that God preferred that men and women practice celibacy.

He blamed women for original sin, calling them the devil’s gateway.
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Attractive women threatened males’ salvation. Cosmetics were tools of lust and natural beauty should instead be obliterated by concealment and neglect. He advised his wife that when they would meet in heaven there would be no sex, “There will at that day be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us. No such frivolities, no such impurities, does God promise to His servants.”
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St. Augustine
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(354 A.D.–430 A.D.)
— Augustine grew up in North Africa with a macho, unfaithful, pagan father and a meek, virtuous, Christian mother. His
mother, Monica, was determined to make him a Christian. At the age of twenty-nine he was still torn between pursuing the sexual bravado of his father or the piety of his mother. He decided to escape his mother by moving to Rome. She tearfully pleaded for him to stay or to take her with him, so he lied to her about the departure date and left her praying in a dockside chapel as his boat left.

She found him two years later and moved in with him. At her bidding, he finally got rid of the concubine to whom he had been faithful for fifteen years and with whom he had a son. Instead, he became engaged to a twelve-year-old girl. Not able to wait the two years for his fiancé to be of marriageable age, he took up with another concubine. At this point he uttered his famous prayer, “Give me chastity— but not yet.”
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At the age of thirty-two, to his mother’s delight, Augustine converted to Christianity after reading St. Paul’s words urging Christians not to party but to focus on Jesus Christ.
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Augustine abandoned his concubine and his fiancé, and returned to Africa to found a monastery of celibate men. Through the voluminous writings that followed, Augustine had an enormous influence on Christian theology, particularly regarding sexual ethics.

Augustine believed that no one could control an aroused sex drive and that if it was not for the restraint of Christian marriage, “people would have intercourse indiscriminately, like dogs.”
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“This diabolical excitement of the genitals” could paralyze rational thought.
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Proof of its power was his inability to control his erections and his inability to give up his first concubine.
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Augustine theorized that the unruly sex drive, like death, was caused by original sin. If Adam and Eve had not eaten the forbidden fruit, sex would have been as God intended it—mechanical and without passion. He compared the sexual body control of people in paradise to people in this world that can wiggle their ears one at a time or who can continuously fart musical notes at will. Because original sin is transferred with semen during the sex act, all people are born sinners.

Augustine believed that to merit God’s salvation and be returned to paradise, one must resist the depraved sexual craving. He wrote that although God prefers virgins, for those not up to the task the only acceptable time to have intercourse is when one is explicitly trying to have a child with one’s spouse. The sooner a married couple refrained from having this acceptable type of sex, the more approval they
would receive from God. Augustine cemented the theological wall between personal affection and sexual expression.