It was, I thought, rather clever. It played with the perception that a Christian boyfriend or girlfriend is unlikely to sleep with you, let alone be any good in the sack once you get there. Now, clearly this advertising campaign wasn’t claiming that your average Christian is one of those people who prides themselves on being good at sex, the way someone might be good at maths, Tennis or indoor plumbing. But nor was it saying that the sex lives of Christians are lacking.
The point was that the person who has all the experience, the moves, and the techniques might be a rather disappointing lover - because technique alone is very limiting. Either you’re not really present to such a person, or you’re only present to them as a role within their fantasy narrative. The Christian lover, the ad campaign implied, has more depth and more presence than the one night stander.
In The Four Loves CS Lewis, begins his discussion of Eros by defining the relations between Eros and what he calls Venus. Eros is, he says, ‘that state which we call ‘being in love’ or if you prefer that love which lovers are ‘in’’. By Venus he means ‘the carnal or animally sexual element within Eros’. He sums up the relationship between Venus and Eros by taking issue with the description of ‘a lustful man prowling the streets’ as ‘wanting a woman.’ On the contrary, he objects ‘Strictly speaking,a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus.’
He goes on to say ‘Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but a particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.’ It’s easy to laugh at his language but he writes movingly about all four loves: affection, friendship, eros and charity. And when it comes to eros and venus he captures the sense of what later generations would refer to as ‘being used’, or of an unpleasant past lover as being ‘a user’. This Christian conception of how lovers should be to each other does not exclude sexuality, far from it. But it insists that your lover’s sexuality should not be abstracted from their full personality, character and humanity.
This all sounds very fine, but it doesn’t sit easily with what we know of Christianity, because Christian sexual ethics have long been associated with a hatred of sex and of the body. The blame for this is often laid at the door of the Apostle Paul, who said it was best not to marry, but that if you were not cut out for celibacy, as he was, that it was ‘better to marry than to burn with passion.’
Paul is so often the whipping boy for all that we find unacceptable in Christianity, but in this instance he has been falsely blamed for the self-loathing, pleasure hating sexual puritanism that the church has passed down through the generations. The ridiculous idea that sex is a barely necessary evil owes more to Augustine than it does to Paul.
Paul’s advice to the Corinthian Church, to avoid marriage if possible, was entirely appropriate given the context in which these words were written. The early church was undergoing horrific persecution, grisly martyrdoms were commonplace, and Paul, along with the rest of the church, expected Jesus to return at some point during the intense tribulation they were living through. Advising people to stay single is logical when your people are being slaughtered and you expect the world to come to a violent end any day soon.
Never forget that Christianity emerged from the Jewish world but within a hundred years had moved lock, stock and barrel into the Greco-Roman World. Judaism was then, and is now entirely positive about the body, sex and marraige, but in keeping with all the world religions, in its historic form, has always insisted that sex be confined to marriage. This is the attitude that Jesus, the disciples, Paul and the other apostles would have grown up with.
The idea that the body and its pleasures are shameful was certainly present in the early Church, but it came from Pagan, Neoplatonic, Manichean and Gnostic influences. New and Old Testament authors may have seen sex as private and confined to marriage, but the idea of sex and the body as intrinsicsally sinful or evil was entirely foreign to them. It was Augustine, the former Manichean, who, in the fourth century, interpreted the New Testament according to his own tortured sexual history and psychology. He was a theologian of such influence that we have been paying for his errors and hang ups ever since.
Paul wrote so movingly about marriage, indeed his ‘Love is…’ musings in the first letter to the Corinthians have such beauty and insight that they are still regularly read at weddings, even when the bride and groom are not religious.
And in his first letter to the Corinthians he also says that the remedy for temptations to infidelity is for husbands and wives to satisfy each other sexually.
The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
Many people are unaware of this side of Paul, but it’s not surprising since it seems to have passed Augustine himself by, and he is, in a sense, the lens through which the Church has always read the Bible.
Context always affects sexual ethics and we have seen this in living memory. The advent of the contraceptive pill, the availability of economic and social security for women outside marriage, new understandings of gender and sexual orientation, and the emergence of AIDS, all gave rise to new formulations of ethical sexual behaviour. It should not surprise us then, that Paul departed from his Jewish norms in response to the unique extremity they were living through.
The circumstances that dictated Paul’s sexual ethics didn’t last long. By the fourth century the persecution was over, the church was in league with the Empire, and it no longer taught that Jesus was returning any time soon. And yet the church preserved Paul’s advice about the superiority of singleness and celibacy, making it normative for the next 16 centuries.
It has been gradually understood by the church that it didn’t have to be this way. What is also recognised by Christians is that their tradition is not unique in advocating a form of romantic love that loves the whole person. It’s not true that Christians make better lovers, because so do Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Humanists. Anyone whose worldview prompts them to love the whole person is a better lover than someone who cannot see the fully beauty of the one that they love.
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Always simply annoys me that churches fail to update in the light of later knowledge. It makes them guaranteed to be out of touch with the general public. In no other area of life is new knowledge so constantly rejected. If this were medicine we would all be suffering horrid old practices.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very good way of putting it, Peter. Thanks for the comment.
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