Christian Sexual Morality: A House of Cards Built on Stoic Philosophies?

Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D.

The story of Christianity's development has been painfully marked by a growing chasm separating body from soul. This story is one of the most significant and fateful developments in the history of the West. An anthropological tilt has resulted in Christianity's evolution into a 'sex negative' religion. For the past 2,000 years, male religious leaders adopted, elaborated and promoted an erotophobic, misogynistic Stoic/Platonic sexual ethic. Because so many Christians have suffered crippling anxieties and guilt from this devastating, inhumane, and anti-Christian poisoning of Eros, a RADICAL renewal of the union between Sexuality and Spirituality is absolutely essential for our human health.

The move to a male dominant culture

As the Last Great Ice Age faded, between 12,000 and 6000 years ago, Cro-Magnon humans lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer, gender equal clans of twenty to thirty members. The development of agriculture, domestication of animals and the invention of wheels were key factors that shifted the balance in power to males. In this pivotal period, coin money and written records facilitated trade, the emerging sciences of metallurgy, mathematics, and astronomy developed and urban, patriarchal, hierarchical cultures emerged. [Details and full references for this seriously condensed history can be found in my analysis of "Sex Codes" (in Encyclopedia of the Future, Kurian & Molitor, eds. 1996) and "The Religious Repression of Eros" (in The Erotic Impulse, David Sterinberg 1992)] 

The pace of radical social changes accelerated on a global scale in the twentieth century and the human race edged into a second pivotal period. As women are gaining control over procreative biology, they are redefining both sexual satisfaction and the morality of sexual intimacies. No longer can men continue to define sexual satisfaction in terms of "putting it in and coming." No longer can males define marital fidelity with a double moral standard. No longer can the morality of monogamy be based on women defined as "male property."
 
Women theologians of many faiths are redefining the morality of sexual intimacy in terms of the quality of a sexual friendship, separate from marriage and procreation. Sexual intimacy is more than reproduction.

Christianity's predecessors were not as sex negative

Among the patriarchal cultures of the ancient world, some of the Hebrew sects were unique in their positive valuation of sexuality, erotic love and women. Jesus embraced their sex-positive, woman-positive anthropology/cosmology and pushed it further. He challenged the current Hebrew monogamy, advocated gender equality and ignored many of the social taboos of male/female associations, e.g., the woman at the well, the woman who washed and anointed his feet, the announcement of his resurrection to Mary (Raymond Lawrence. Poisoning of Eros. 1989:43, 67, 86). 

But early on, it became evident that the future of Christianity would depend not on converting the Jewish patriarchy, but on converting the Greeks and Romans. In order to win converts and avoid criticism from the strong Greco-Roman social system, the early Christians gradually adopted much of the sexual value system of the Stoics, Platonists/NeoPlatonists and Gnostics. Despite the fact that this value system totally contradicted the more sex-positive beliefs of the Hebrews and Jesus, "the Christian morality" became totally erotophobic and misogynistic, petrified by the mere thought of sexual pleasure and terrified of women (unless they were virgins). From the second century on, theologians counseled husbands and wives of the danger of committing a serious sin if they engaged in sexual relations too often or took any pleasure in "the act".

The loveliest of Songs

The history of Jewish and Christian responses to the Song of Songs is a microcosm of the evolution of Western cultures from a sex-affirming Hebraic anthropology to a sex-negative Christian anthropology, ill at ease with women, erotic sensuality, passion, play, and pleasure.

Hebrew tradition has consistently celebrated human sexual intimacy and its pleasures. In this tradition, sexual asceticism, celibacy, and the single life have no religious value. Sexual intercourse establishes a marriage and is a mitzvah, a religious duty and blessing, a meritorious, charitable and humanitarian act. "In Jewish history coitus has been consistently and unambiguously valued for the sheer joy and pleasure of it, even where procreation was obviously impossible" (Lawrence 1989:17).

In the Epistle of Holiness of Nahmanides, Jews are advised to prefer the Sabbath for sexual intercourse because it is "holy unto the Lord." Herman Wouk, a contemporary Jewish writer, sums up the Hebraic view when he notes: "What in other cultures has been a deed of shame, or of comedy, or of orgy, or of physical necessity, or of high romance, has been in Judaism one of the main things God wants man to do. If it turns out to be the keenest pleasure in life, that is no surprise to a people eternally sure God is good." The biblical Hebraic view of heaven was and is: Sabbath, Sunshine and Sex. 

Some 2500 years ago, after the Jewish people returned home from the Babylonian Exile, an unknown and inspired romantic wove together a series of poems that celebrate erotic, sensuous love. During a debate over whether to include the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, Rabbi Akiba Ben Joseph declared it to be the holiest part of scripture, despite a hint that two unmarried lovers might have composed these songs. (Song of Songs Chapter 5: Verse 7 Lawrence 1989, p. 29).

This collection of sensuous verses, titled Shir ha-Shirim "the loveliest of songs," was dedicated to King Solomon, the legendary lover of 300 wives and 600 concubines. This song of hungry passion and erotic desire has long embarrassed Christians. Theologians warned it was dangerous, even wicked to take the Song of Songs literally. Bizarre metaphors were created to convert the Song's erotic passion into an asexual spiritualized, cerebral love of God -the lovers twin breasts became the Old and New Testament. St. Jerome decided it was a poem praising virgins who mortify their flesh. Origen, who castrated himself to become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, warned Christians:  "Everyone who is not yet rid of the vexations of flesh and blood and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature should refrain completely from reading this book" (Phipps, Recovering Biblical Sensuousness, 1975, pp. 44-66.). While rabbinical interpretations sometimes gave the Song symbolic meanings, relating it to the gift of the Torah and the building of the Temple, they never replaced the Song's literal message of human love and passion with metaphor.
 
The Stoics believe in long-suffering and non-emotional acceptance

For the early Stoics, sexual intercourse was dangerous and shameful and should only be engaged in for procreation. The Stoics vehemently and consistently condemned sexual pleasure, and warned men about the dangers women posed to their spiritual and rational lives.

At the time of Jesus, Seneca the Younger, the leading Stoic philosopher of imperial Rome and tutor to the emperors, said: "It is shameful for a man to love his own wife immoderately. Nothing is more depraved than for a man to love his spouse as if she were an adulteress."

Jerome (340-420 CE), who translated the Bible into Latin, also warned Christians that "Anyone who is too passionate a lover of his wife is an adulterer." He traced this teaching back to Jesus through Sixtus II, martyr, pope and saint. However this saying did not originate with Jesus or his disciples but with the Stoic philosopher Sextus. According to Jerome's condemnation of the heretic Jovinian, "All sex is sinful." (Omnia coitus immundus).

Augustine (354-430 CE), who never overcame his Manichean disgust with and fear of sex, embellished this poisonous teaching from the Stoics when he wrote: "Nothing so casts down the manly mind from its [rational, spiritual] heights as the fondling of women, and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state." (Quoted by Aquinas in Summa II/II q.151 a.3 ad 2;)

Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274) paraphrased Augustine, Jerome, Sextus, and Seneca when he taught, "Because marriage is designed for procreation, a man who loves his wife too passionately is an adulterer." Aquinas also warned husbands that a wife's touches give her dominion over her husband's body and drag him into "a slavery more bitter than any other" (Summa Theological II/II g.54 a.8).

Peter Lombard (1100-1164?), Bishop of Paris and a leading theologian at the University of Paris, told Christians that the Holy Spirit leaves the room when a married couple has sex, even if they do it without passion to make new virgins for the kingdom of heaven (Lawrence 1989:30).

These erotophobic, anti-sexual, anti-woman statements by leading Christian spokespersons are typical of thousands that can be found in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, theologians and Popes from the second century to the present. The misogynistic beliefs one finds in Christian literature until recently are irrefutable. In his classic study of The Poisoning of Eros: Sexual Values in Conflict, Raymond Lawrence, Episcopalian theologian, cites Nietzsche who wrote, "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn't die but degenerated into vice." (An insight worth considering in the current sexual abuse scandal.) Only recently do we find a few male Christian theologian that celebrate women, erotic passion, play and pleasure.

Paradigms shift as change finally, slowly begins

In Europe and North America, the second half of the twentieth century has proven to be a time of radical, unprecedented social change. The advent of hormonal contraception; the economic and psychological liberation of women; the Second Vatican Council and similar developments in Protestantism; economic pressures favoring smaller families; and the popularization by the mass media of premarital sex and alternative lifestyles have challenged traditional interpretations of "infidelity" and "promiscuity." These same changes have prompted some pioneering Christian ethicists to challenge that a truly Christian sexual ethic should focus on the quality of the interpersonal relationship and the friendship of individuals -- not on the nature of sexual acts. (See box above for a few brief examples of these challenges.)

Even an infallible pope can be confused and contradict himself. On October 1, 1980, John Paul II seemed to "get the message" when he declared that a husband cannot be guilty of "lust in his heart" for his wife. However, within a week the infallible pope realized his mistake. In a general audience for married couples gathered to hear the true teaching of Jesus regarding marriage, Pope John Paul II ignored the biblical and Hebraic celebration of human sexual love and repeated once again the Stoic warning that: "Husbands who lust too passionately for their wives are adulterers." (Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. 1990:11-13, 62) 

At last, the dominant male-defined system of traditional Christian sexual values, based on a fixed worldview, is in serious risk of collapsing. Two key factors leading to this collapse are the social revolution that followed a generation of women who have gained control over their reproductive capability, and the clergy sexual abuse crisis of 2002. Both factors challenge the closed Vatican hierarchy, the world's oldest, celibate, patriarchal religious institution..
 
Today's Christian leaders must break the strangle hold that Greco-Roman, Stoic, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Gnostic philosophy has exercised for 1,800 years. We must revive and up-date the sex-positive worldview and morality of our biblical and Hebraic heritage. The sexual value system that is emerging from recent critical reinterpretations of biblical texts is a hopeful sign. Social and philosophical influences on the theology of human sexuality values derived from those texts can be summed up in a paradigm shift... from a fixed, patriarchal, act-oriented, marital possession, procreative anthropology of sex and women... to a process, gender equal, friendship, pleasure, inclusive love worldview

Sexual Values in a fixed, patriarchal, marital, and procreative worldview

In the Fixed World cosmologies, males defined the purpose and morality of human sexuality as heterosexual, vaginal penetrative, marital and procreative. The nature, purpose and morality of human sexuality, sexual relationships, and sexual satisfaction have been traditionally defined, measured and controlled by males for their benefit, in terms of male ownership of females as procreative property and/or "get it off release."

In this system, the focus is on specific actions and interactions of the genitals, and on what is NATURAL or UNNATURAL, and what is LICIT or ILLICIT.

Sexual Values in a process, gender equal, friendship and pleasure/love worldview.

This emerging new system is one of DIVERSITY in friendship, relationships, and in sexual expressions, with the focus on the QUALITY and CONSEQUENCES of the friendship. This is not a permissive, promiscuous, anything goes value system. It is in fact a very demanding, mature system of morality.

Those of you reading this are a part of this shifting paradigm. Your own healing and growth processes are instrumental and have more significance than ever before. Participation in this discussion will help bring forth the new worldview many of us already envision.

A New Sexual Morality

Three examples of criteria for a new sexual morality based on friendship instead of on procreation within marriage.

Between 1970 and 1990, an Episcopalian, a Roman Catholic and two Presbyterian taskforces identified these eight moral values for a new sexual morality:

- Self-Liberating - a means of personal growth toward maturity
- Other-Enriching - actively concerned with the needs of the other person(s)
- Honest - but total candor and honest is not always the wisest choice
- Faithful - to the commitment a couple make with each other, continually renegotiated
- Responsible - serving the best interests of the couple, family, and society
- Life-serving - building the human community, not necessarily procreative
- Joyful - playful, nurturing, creative, celebrating the delights of erotic pleasures
- Transcendent - spiritual, leading individuals beyond their own physical limits to join in communion with others, the earth (our nurturing womb), and God.

A Moral Sexual Relationship

Debra Haffner, M. Div., director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing (2002); author of Beyond the Big Talk (2001); former director of the Sex Education and Information Council of the U.S. (SIECUS):

Consensual, Non-exploitive, Honest, Mutually pleasurable, Protected against disease and pregnancy

Daphne Rose Kingma, relationship counselor and author of  The Future of Love: The Power of the Soul in Intimate Relationships (Doubleday, 1998)

A quote from The Future of Love:

"It is the movement to greater love that is changing the forms of our relationships, and not, as we have imagined, some failure on our part. The soul is saying that the old forms don't fit, and that through the changing of the forms of our relationships themselves, we will be shown the future.

Although we have experienced great psychological changes and healing within the traditional forms, we now need new forms. The old forms have done as much as they could to teach us about love.  And now the new forms in and of themselves are communicating to us the magnitude of the love that our souls are really seeking."

Robert Francoeur was a member of the Advisory Board of the Spirituality&Sexuality journal. He has been a professor of Human Sexuality at Fairleigh Dickinson University for thirty years and has the distinction of being a married Roman Catholic Priest. This article was orginally published in Spirituality&Sexuality Issue ii, Fall 2002

Francoeur's latest project,The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality  (Continuum International, 2004) has some unique, informative and sometimes shocking insights into the impact of religion on basic cultural premises in 60 countries, and on sexual attitudes and behaviors in these quite different countries, written by over 200 experts.

Comments and requests for additional, more recent information are welcome. Ccontact Dr. Francoeur (Bob) at: RTFrancoeu@aol.com