Friday, May 2, 2025
D+177/103
1929 Billie Holiday (14) and her mother were arrested for prostitution following a raid on a brothel in Harlem, New York City
1938 Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize "Our Town
1949 Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman"
1978 Sharon Celek Kevil was born
In bed at 9:30, up at 4:20. 43°, high of 52°.
Prednisone, day 353; 2 mg., day 15/21; Kevzara, day 4/14; CGM, day 15/15; Trulicity, skipped because of pending cataract surgery. Prednisone at 5:40 a.m. Other meds at 11:15 a.m.
The image is El Greco's St. Jerome at the Frick between Holbein's Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.
As far as we know, Jesus never said anything about gay sex. He did, however, take a stand on family life: he was opposed. Those who are worthy of Heaven, he says, in Luke 20:35, need not bother with marriage; in fact, per Luke 14:26, the true disciple must “hate” the family he already has. “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake,” he declares, in the Gospel of Matthew, “will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” Christianity’s earliest missionaries were also chilly on pair-bonding, in part because they believed that at any moment Jesus would return to whisk his followers off to a heavenly reward many times better than sex. With the rapture so near, who had time for a wife and kids?
Jesus’ failure to return in the first century—what the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch calls “the first Great Disappointment of many in Christian history”—did not silence the anti-family tendency in Christian thought. As MacCulloch argues in his thrilling and comprehensive new book, “Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity” (Viking), marriage and family have in historical terms come only lately into fashion among Christians. “It is better to marry than to burn,” the apostle Paul famously wrote, but even better was to douse the flames of lust with an analogous but more elevated communion with God, to partake in what MacCulloch calls the “substitute families” of a celibate religious life. Divorce, though generally forbidden, was allowed if a husband wanted to leave marriage for monkhood. In Western Europe, clergy did not regularly perform weddings until the twelfth century, and, as late as the sixteenth century in England, such ceremonies were deemed too lowly to take place in a church’s inner sanctum; they might instead be held outside on the porch, after which newlyweds could enter the church to attend Mass. MacCulloch points out that this approach is much like the compromise that some churches, including the Anglican and Catholic ones, have struck with gay couples today.
For much of Christian history, MacCulloch suggests, all sex was sinful—even the marital and procreative, even the unconscious. (As the Anglican theologian Adrian Thatcher writes in “Vile Bodies: The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice,” “It is difficult to believe the agony and consternation caused to perfection-seeking monks by wet dreams over the centuries.”) Religious leaders specified days on which, for medical or liturgical reasons, married couples were not to copulate—one Irish rule book from the early seventh century excluded a good two-thirds of the year. Russian Orthodox guides for confessors grouped excessive marital sex with sins such as anal intercourse or prostitution. St. Jerome, a tremendously influential fourth-century commentator known for his Latin translation of the Bible, liked to remind people that “every man who is sexually unrestrained in his interaction with his wife commits adultery with her.” Some Christians, including several notable saints, sought to escape sin entirely through celibate marriages, which, per MacCulloch, “were esteemed and practiced for more than a millennium.”
These early Christians’ opposition to procreation—their nose-thumbing at what has always been the easiest way of spreading a religion—is without question a revolutionary and anti-materialistic stance, and yet it is a good example that what is revolutionary and anti-materialistic is not necessarily conducive to human happiness. If you were a Christian and your spouse died young, as people often did in the fourth century, you might be forbidden sex or parenthood for the rest of your life. The controversy around a widow’s remarriage stemmed partly from a theological analogy in which a woman was meant to serve one husband as the church served one God; under such logic, a second marriage seemed almost polytheistic. But another factor was simply a visceral disgust of sex and family life. MacCulloch quotes a letter from the same Jerome in which he urges a young widow in his circle not to remarry:
You’ve already learned the miseries of marriage. . . . It’s like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again, ‘like a dog to its vomit’? . . . Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out, and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth.
MacCulloch is particularly engaging in his discussion of how baffling the early Christian mortification of the flesh would have seemed to contemporaries. Greco-Roman tradition had long idealized the vigorous, penetrating patriarch, and Jewish custom celebrated those men who had large families and multiple wives. Reversing this hierarchy, Christians held that status among men increased with greater remove from sex. The laity were to be monogamous, the holy men celibate, and the actually divine would not even feel lust. In the Bible, angels had been portrayed as the seducers of mortal women, much like Greek gods. Once Heaven was seen as a place without sex, they were deemed too lofty for such concerns. St. Augustine argued that Jesus did not have erections.
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Was Jesus a 30-year-old Jewish male virgin? Was he truly a lifelong celibate bachelor? Says who? If so, how did that go over in the society in which he lived and in the religion he practiced? God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it . . . Or was Jesus married before he started his 'public ministry? Did he 'put his wife aside'? Or, did she die in childbirth, perhaps leading him to his 40 days in the desert? Who knows? Was he gay? What was his relationship with 'the disciple whom he loved'? (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20) What was his relationship with Mary Magdalene? Was his mother a "perpetual virgin"? What about those brothers of his mentioned in the Bible? (Matthew 12:46-50, 13:55-56; Mark 3:31, 6:3; Luke 8:19; John 2:12, 7:3; Acts 1:14; 1 Corinthians 9:5; Galatians 1:19). What do we really know about the real Jesus and from what sources? What do we really know about his disciples and the apostles? The answer, of course, is: very little. These were people who lived 2,000 years ago. There are hardly any records of their lives other than those written by people who were already True Believers. They had, if not dogmas and doctrines to uphold, but wishes, traditions, gossips, 'facts' that would make the 'good news' more cogent, more memorable, more seductive, and the purpose of the writing itself was evangelical, designed to attract converts and reinforce the faith of those already converted. The writings were tendentious, though for what the writer believed was a good cause.
What were these early believers like? More specifically, what were their views about sex and about family life? It seems to me that they were deeply troubled, like many (certainly not all) True Believers today. I suspect they were deeply troubled by sex and the idea that it is bad. That's why the 'holiest' persons were ascetic, unmarried, often living apart, undefiled by fucking (to use a pejorative approprite to the subject.) The denigration of sex and subordination of married life to celibate life has been with us through the Roman Catholic Church ab initio and is still with us. I really enjoyed the reference by the author of the above book review to the early Christians' baffling "nose-thumbing at what has always been the easiest way of spreading a religion," i.e., having children born into it.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them... Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I was tattooed in my cradle with Irish Roman Catholicism, and one of the strongest beliefs of that tribe was that SEX IS BAD. From my memoir:
“Sex is bad” is another way of saying to boys that girls are bad and to girls that boys are bad. Lest there be any doubt that, all of its statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the official Church’s position was indeed that sex is bad and women are occasions of sin, here is an illustration of the real attitude about sexuality and women: “With women of whatever station in life, even if they are related to me or are holy women, I will be particularly cautious, avoiding their familiarity, company or conversation, especially if they are young women. Nor will I ever fix my eyes on their faces, mindful of what the Holy Spirit teaches us: ‘Do not look intently at a virgin, lest you stumble and incur penalties for her.’ Eccl. 9:5. So I will never confide in them in any way, but when I have to speak with them I will see that my speech is ‘dry, brief, prudent and correct.” This is an entry in the journal written during his seminary days by Angelo Roncalli, later John XXIII.
In June of 1950, as I approached my 9th birthday and entering 4th grade, Pius XII canonized the Church’s youngest ‘saint and martyr,’ St. Maria Goretti. Maria was stabbed to death in 1902 at age 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days, by Alessandro Serenelli, a 20 year old neighbor who attempted to rape her. She resisted at the cost of her life. This terrible crime was a cause celèbre in Italy and was picked up by some Church people as evidence of what was wrong with Modernism and Worldliness (Alessandro) and of the value and the primacy of Purity (Maria.) Maria’s canonization was more significant than most because she was made not only an official saint, but also an official martyr. “Martyrs” were traditionally those who were killed “for the Faith.” They were the Christians in the Coliseum, the Vietnamese martyrs, and the like. Alessandro killed Maria not because she was a Catholic or a Christian, but because she refused his sexual advances. Designating this young victim of murder and attempted rape a martyr carried the message not that sexual assault was evil, a given, but that sex was evil. It was better for Maria to suffer the fatal penetration of 14 stab wounds than to suffer the unwanted but nonlethal sexual penetration. Maintenance of virginity was exalted over maintenance of life. The ‘sex is bad’ message was not lost on those of us growing up in the American, which is to say Irish, Catholic Church. Pictures of St. Maria Goretti joined pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who entered the convent at age 14 and died of tuberculosis, a virgin, at age 24, on the walls of St. Leo Grammar School and countless other Catholic schools around the world.I cannot write of Maria Goretti and Alessandro Serenelli without thinking of my mother and James Hartmann. My mother suffered slashes rather than deep punctures and Hartmann, unlike Serenelli, had his way with her. If she had resisted unto death and he had killed her with his knife, as he did with Graclyn Bush, would she have become St. Mary Clausen? The answer clearly is ‘no,’ because Mary, unlike Maria, was not a virgin. Mary Clausen, unlike her namesake the BVM, was not a virgin. Mary Clausen, unlike the primitive church “virgin martyrs,” was not a virgin. She was 25, married with two children, and living in the world when she was assaulted, not a child like Maria when she was killed or an adolescent like Therese when she entered the convent. So my mother, as a woman living in a dangerous and complicated and inhospitable world was hardly a candidate for sainthood in the Church, even if she had died fighting James Hartmann and his knife. The Church prefers virgins and celibates for sainthood, not moms and dads.
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